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Saturday, March 31, 2007
What I Learned as a New Mother
Today I am honoured to have figur8, my BFF, marathon runner, marketing whiz, prolific writer, and a wonderful mother whom I admire and respect very much, write a guest blog entry for Strange Machines. figur8 is Mom to a bouncy baby boy Gavin who is now 2 months old.
Mephala has asked me to write on her blog about my experience of being a new Mum. I’m very honoured by this request because as a new Mum, I’m seldom asked to share my experience. In fact, most of the time everyone is too busy telling me how I should be looking after my baby and all the things I'm doing wrong to even listen to a word I have to say.
So here's what I've learned as a New Mum:
1. Every Tom, Dick, or Harry and their dogs know more than I do about how to look after my baby and what's best for him (even if some of them have never looked after a baby let alone had one).
2. Every little mark on the baby from rashes to a scratch is my fault (never mind the fact that it is common for babies to have skin problems especially during their first few months after birth and the babies with flawless skin that we see in magazines are all wearing make-up).
3. When I've got the baby blues, the hubby thinks I'm no longer capable of making rationale decisions because I cry all the time (even though I can still think clearly despite being in tears).
4. If I thought looking after a baby was hard, it was because I hadn't yet had the experience of looking after a sick baby. Nothing is more heartbreaking than when my baby is sick.
5. The "no milk" syndrome is a misconception created in the minds of my relatives. They believe that having sufficient milk to feed a baby is something that some women are blessed with and others are just unlucky that they need to use formula. They also believe that you have to eat certain foods to ensure a good supply of milk. Well, these are all untrue. The fastest way to kill my milk supply is to get stressed and reduce the number of times my baby goes on the breast.
6. They've also told me that if I don't eat specific things, the quality of my milk will be deficient in some way. This is also untrue. The only way my milk supply can be affected is for me to be severely malnourished, which is hardly possible when I live where food is just a stone's throw away.
7. Babies need water even if they are breastfeeding. This is another fallacy because breast milk is divided into two types - the foremilk (which is mostly water and the means by which the baby stays hydrated) and the hindmilk (the fatty part which helps to fill baby up when he's hungry). Additionally, contrary to popular belief, you don't need to give babies water when they hiccup.
8. You've got to switch to formula or supplement with formula as the baby gets older. (I can't even fathom why anyone would want to switch from a superior feed to a lesser one if they could still choose to give the better choice).
9. Baby poop should thicken after a while. If it remains runny, it means baby is upset by the food Mummy ate. (The person who told me this seems to forget that she supplemented her babies with formula which would naturally cause the baby's poop to be thicker than a fully breastfed baby).
10. If I carry my baby too much, I will spoil him (even though he's only a month old).
11. Sleep becomes a precious commodity and to get even four hours straight is nothing short of a miracle.
12. Parenting is tougher than any race, hike, or climb I have ever participated in.
13. Spare clothes are essential wherever I go with baby, and I don't mean just for baby. Mummy needs spare clothes, too, unless she wants to walk around with baby's milk all over her.
14. Babies are one mean eating, sleeping, pooing machine. I never thought someone so little could excrete so much poo!
15. The smartest purchase we have made is the Baby Bjorn carrier. Baby falls asleep in it so quickly and easily and it gives me the opportunity to go shopping without abandon.
16. These books have been my bibles and quick guides to parenting:
18. Most of all, I have learned that life is never ever the same again, and the most precious feeling I have ever experienced is when I am carrying my son against my chest. People may tell me not to carry my son too much or I'll suffer the consequences, but heck! He's just a baby. When he's all grown up, he will no longer want me to carry him this way again so I sure as heck am going to enjoy carrying him as much as I can while he still wants me to.
I have also learned that better than anyone else's advice is what rings true with my heart and my own instincts. I am a mother now and it has changed me for the better in more ways than I could ever have imagined.
It was my last day of work today and it was a bittersweet one. I will miss all those whom I work with terribly. Still, a new adventure awaits. Full-time, really full-time motherhood looms, and with that, during the times Jack naps or is preoccupied, I will write.
It is time to reconnect with my old friends in the speculative poetry industry and rev up the creative juices for non-commercial (well...) reasons again. Last night, a poem about teeth came to me while I was nursing Jack but by the time I reached my computer, it was all but gone.
An email arrived early yesterday from the editor of Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine I sold a poem to eons ago. Portal was published in Issue #2, and they're now on #31. ASIM wants to include it in their inaugural ASIM Best Of Anthology and I am very honoured they chose to include it.
Then today, award-winning illustrator Frank Wu, an old collaborator and friend, emailed me about an anthology due out with my poem Exquisite Corpuscle. It was lovely hearing from him and about the update on the antho which hopefully will be out soon.
I felt it was odd that these are coming in at a time when I am prepping to write poetry and fiction again. Although I am not one to adhere to fate or the strange ways of the Universe, I must admit this is what you would call fortuitous.
Jack is very confident getting down the bed now and he speeds up the stairs like a dust buster. His father commented that he expected his child to be more compliant, to sit when told, for example. I stifled a giggle.
After all, we're talking about the offspring of a woman who as a child physically broke out of two cribs and a man who was the ringleader of his own "gang" (sister, brother, cousins) at 5 years old. Naughtiness has been proven to be genetic...
There are two ways of search engine marketing: the natural way where content producers include keywords in their content and sponsored listings where advertisers pay to list their content in various websites to improve their rankings.
It has been found that as little as 30% of all search engine users click on sponsored listings, meaning two out of every three people prefer to click on natural keywords of interest.
Many companies now offer a service to advertisers where they can pay a fee to have content producers include their keywords and urls within their content and in a relevant context.
It makes good business sense to both advertisers and content producers as the advertiser has at least one guaranteed eyeball: the content producer.
Home insurance is one of the few insurances you should buy. After all if the roof above your head is not secure, what is? Particularly in places where you might experience natural disasters (and correspondingly pay more), you must buy home insurance to cover any damage or loss of your home.
On that note, pay that couple of thousand for mortgage insurance, which is a sort of term insurance but at a lower rate, to cover your entire home loan in the event the person(s) paying for it expires. This covers the bank and yourself and everyone sleeps better at night.
I love gift baskets. Every year during Christmas and Chinese New Year, my parents receive a whole bunch of them from their business partners. When I was a child, I would admire them for a long while and then gently unwrap them. They were always works of art.
And unwrapped, it was like Santa just visited. Oodles of food! Cookies, biscuits, drinks, and sometimes if I was lucky, stuffed animals and fresh fruit. Mom would grab any flowers that arrived and put them in a vase. She loves flowers and my Dad often buys them for her.
Truly, you shouldn't have to wait for Christmas or New Year to send me a gift basket, I'll happily accept any Holiday Gift Baskets any time. The baby gift baskets for Jack are especially welcome. :)
For a moment I thought it read Jean-Claude Van Damme but my eyes deceived me. It was something even cooler. But first, let me say that I play chess better than backgammon and that is an issue of temperament. I would still like Jack to learn all sorts of intellectual board games and enjoy them.
Hence using Jean-Claude, the animated tiger is a brilliant way to bring backgammon to the masses, particularly children, who will love this 4 part interactive animated series titled “Life According to Jean-Claude”.
In the series, Jean-Claude is a street smart tiger dressed 70s-style in bell-bottoms and cream-coloured shoes with a buttoned-up dice print shirt and dollar sign chain around his neck and who manages a used car junk lot. That is a place where dreams are made.
He learns to succeed in everything including backgammon, chopping onions, and in fulfilling one's dreams and making important choices in life.
As the #1 Player at BackgammonMasters, Jean-Claude is a brilliant and innovative way of promoting and establishing this game software by BackgammonMasters.com. Click here to view Jean-Claude's remarkable and clever video.
For an all inclusive mexico vacation, head over to Vacations.net where their beautifully redesigned site offers not just nectar for the eyes but also tremendous savings of up to 50% off their regular rates.
It will be the perfect vacation to travel to the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Mexico. We can go snorkelling, diving, lounge in the sun (with layers of sun block slathered on my skin of course) sipping magaritas (one is fine), read the latest Repairman Jack novel, and watch Jack's eyes light up when he takes to the sea.
It's all at Vacations.net. Go check them out for your next beach vacation.
Since I was a child, I have always been intrigued by the natural world. Although we lived in the city, we had a garden from which I spent many hours, sitting on my swing, watching the butterflies flitter about, ladybugs nesting on leaves, and the leaves sway in tandem with the breeze.
Perhaps my calling as a scientist was lost somewhere in the school system. We were streamed in a rather cruel practice, placing the academically superior children in the science stream while others, the ones slower to bloom, were placed in the arts stream at the wee age of 14.
But I never let go of my passion. I picked up general science books written for the layperson like those by Paul Davies and John Gribbin. I thought long and hard about the nature of things.
When I returned to college at the age of 21, I struggled with Physics, Chemistry, and Mathematics but managed a sufficient grade to enter the Astrophysics program in the University of Toronto.
But something in those first 2 weeks in Physics 100 and Calculus 100 struck fear in me and I changed my enrollment to an Arts degree in Philosophy majoring in Logic instead.
Sometimes I wonder where I would have been if I have remained in the program.
Still, I read extensively. I studied the Philosophy of Science. I turned to Carl Sagan to teach me about astronomy and Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker to teach me about life sciences. And I discovered the wonderful world of speculative poetry.
There I sung the joys of science in prose and rhyme and for a time, I revelled in it. But real life caught up and I put on hold my passion to earn my living.
As a mother now, I seek to bring the same love of science to my young son. I hope that even if he does not become a scientist than he will share the same passion for the natural world as I do.
"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness." -- Bertrand Russell
"Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."
-- Thomas Edison (Harper's Magazine, 1890)
A woman's romance with motherhood, green living, finance, and this heady thing called life.
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