Baby: May 2005 Archives

This can only come from a photographer turned father.

Faith and I are going to a wedding tomorrow, where I’ve been asked to help take photographs. As it is a full day affair, Faith will, at some point, have to express her breast milk or there’ll be terrible repercussions involving painfully clogged ducts and all.

We also recently purchased a more portable battery-operated pump.

Her: Can I use any of your spare batteries?

Me: You better buy a set of your own batteries. I don’t want to have to choose between their memories and your mammaries.

I just spent the last few hours with Anne lying on my tummy. All the cushions in the house were employed to help me maintain the physiologically impossible positions I had to contort into so she’d sleep better. So the morning passes, with the first episode of the Transformers, countless episodes of Gilmore Girls, a very hardworking DVD-player and a beautiful girl draping her arms around me.

A little more than a month ago, I wrote about “How to survive day three”. To be honest, during those weeks I had to feign a weak smile everytime someone came up to me and told me about the joys of parenting. I read Kin Mun’s “Reading on a Friday Night” with scepticism, in absolute doubt about whether I would find such parenting nirvana. I wasn’t sure I was cut out for this parenting business; the price of screwing up someone elses’ life scared me.

I remember when Anne was two weeks old. She was in one of her crying fits - the kind that wouldn’t stop accusing you of some apparent mistreatment. It was the dead of night, and the crying wouldn’t stop. I had carried her and paced back and forth for what seemed like an eternity. Then she stopped crying. I put her to bed.

Almost immediately the piercing cries started again. And I spanked her. The sound of my hand hitting her diaper sounded like a gunshot, and she stopped crying for that split second, stunned. The shock of the moment got to me.

I hit a two-week old child. I deserved to be with other low-life scum that shot kittens with steel arrows or those that hunted baby seals. I made up my mind never to ever, ever do that again, but my true colours were made known to me that instant. Hence the doubts of me ever being able to be a good father. Or that the greatest enjoyment I could ever attain from parenthood would be knowing I didn’t screw up.

The best and worst attributes of humankind are both attributed to children. We say a person is childish when every small thing seems to affect them; and at the same time we say a person is childlike when nothing rattles them.

It was barely a few minutes after my violent outburst when Anne looked at me with no recollection whatsoever of the damage I had done to her bottom or the anger I had allowed to act on my behalf. In fact, a few days ago she started smiling. She smiled and she smiled and she smiled. At me. The father who spanked her when she had neither the means to communicate what was wrong nor the ability to help herself.

So lying there this morning with her arms around and her face pressed tightly against me I realised that maybe there is more than just the dread of middle of the night feeds. Maybe the others were right when they coined the term “the joys of parenting”. It doesn’t seem so improbable to me now that people would actually want to have another kid, having already experienced / endured their first.

Anne reminds me to live in the present. Not to hold grudges. To sleep when I need, to eat when I’m hungry. That childlike innocence is the greatest protection one can have against a rather cruel world.

ps. The tissue paper on the right of my chest is not an attempt to imitate old Peranakan women. Anne puked there.

Faith and I are convinced our baby got swapped with a baby hippopotamus last night. They look and feel the same, but Anne has been feeding every half-hour for the past six hours. That’s a lot of milk.

I know breast milk is easy to digest and all, but at the rate she’s going, I’m half tempted to mix the milk with little pebbles and pieces of tree bark. I’m afraid at the prospect of seeing our refrigerated cache of milk decimated and Faith reduced to a dried raisiny husk in order to satiate this bottomless pit of a baby. I swear she’s developing a fourth chin as we speak.

We’re planning to bring Anne to church in a few hours. She’s been well-behaved so far tonight, but acting up a little now.

I’ve never been a parent before, but I can tell you there’s a bit of pressure presenting the now one-month-old kiddo to the world. It’s typical Asian fashion for everyone to throw in their two-cents worth of parenting skill.

If I had to use IRC-talk to predict some of the things I’ll be hearing, there’ll probably be a lot of “OMG!!! YOU GUYS HAVE HER ON THE PACIFIER!!!” or in hushed tones, “anne’s gas release is pretty strident. didn’t you use to have gas problems as a kid?”

I guess I’m being overly prepared when I make a mental list of the “you shouldn’t have”s I’m going to have to hear. We’ve crossed many lines we originally didn’t intend you. As an observer the lines seemed pretty solid. At 3am and your eyeballs bloodshot from not having slept for the last 72 hours, it’s “lines, what lines?”.

Anne’s lying on my lap right now (OMG YOU PUT HER IN FRONT OF THE COMPUTER MONITOR!!!) and I’m inclined to do the Chinese parent thing and tell her not to embarass me and pretend to be supercute baby for a few hours. You know what Anne? To heck with it. Be yourself. It’s the best time in your life to. Fart as loud as you want, bawl if you wish. The world will just have to deal with your arrival.

I deal with it every night. And there are moments I see with perfect clarity how great of a blessing you are in my life.

Exactly 30 days ago, Faith’s water broke and we came home with Anne. After numerous feeds and diaper change, we’re proud to present…

I’m in charge of the night shift. That means that for the past month I’ve been sleeping at 8 in the morning, waking up for breakfast at lunch, and so on. I’ve always been a night person, and a morning person. Basically I’ve always prided myself in needing very little sleep to survive.

But staying awake because you’re doing stuff you want to do and being kept awake are two very different things. Taking care of Anne at night means that sometimes I get to do a little work, or put together a butt-ugly redesign while she’s asleep. And sometimes the whole night is spent trying to get her to that point. Either way, my job is to make sure Faith gets her rest. Rest = breast milk. Breast milk = satisfied baby. And satisfied baby = quality of life.

So here I sit in my underwear. My external clothes were casualties in a poop explosion a few moments ago.

Anne’s a smallish kid. But she really knows how to let one rip. Sometimes it sounds like a tractor driving through our living room, and other times it sounds like a geiger counter moseying towards Chernobyl. There was this one time during a routine diaper change, she squirted poop two and a half body lengths away. It almost made it out the door of our bedroom.

Tonight I was bottle-feeding her, her bottom placed firmly on my lap. She lets one rip.

You have to understand that with babies there’s no such thing as a dry fart. They’re all wet. It also means that there’s no way of telling whether it’s a fart or poop till it’s too late.

It’s a long one. Followed by another. And another. Man, this girl was on a roll. Two-and-a-half body lengths of atmospheric pressure pressed against my lap, fired again and again. Something had to give. The seam of her diaper blew and poop flew all over the place. All over my lap, my t-shirt. Mustard. Warm mustard.

Ok, so it wasn’t a fart.

It’s odd how babies teach you that time is relative. The five minutes it takes to warm up their milk while they’re screaming their lungs out is the longest five minutes in the world. Longer than the last five-minutes of a marathon.

It was a long test of patience till the bubble burst. Now Anne’s sleeping and oddly enough I hear myself think: oh it wasn’t that bad.