a is for…
alya.
the other kid A. :)
father figure
well, this should be my maiden posting in my wife’s unnamed blog. she’s been egging me to post something in here, ages ago, since with the added motivation factor, i figure out, why not?
anyway, i was really thrilled to learn that my very good friend, has finally become a father!. yep, it didn’t really sink in when his wife was pregnant. he was still the same guy i knew back then during my pre-u days. i still remember the first time when he approach me. “Kau melayu, ke cina?” he questioned. “Me? chinese? alamak brother, trying to be funny iszit??”, or something in those lines i replied.
we really hit it off straight away, joking about everything under the sun, with raunchy jokes like what mark hoppus, tom delonge and travis barker might spew out from their mouths. hehe…
and i still can’t believe it, both of us got married. we were single back then, with no prospect. sometimes it feels really surreal. both of us, husbands and he now a father, me later in december, still talking and behaving like we are still in school. even our dressings, berms, tees and slippers, so unabang-abanglike my wife would say. but for us, some things just don’t change.
we know of our fellow school mates, who changed totally after marriage, pakai macam abang-abang lo… hehe. opps, i digressing here. ok, back to my point.
perhaps the experience of holding your own child in your arms, would finally sway us to the realms of fatherhood which he is experiencing it right now. me? in december, insya’allah.
zaragirl
we might have overdone it a bit while picking out gifts for baby alya…
we hope her parents will dress her up the way we would. :D
uncle izad and aunty hana so generous, hor.
tip of the iceberg
i learn something new almost every day.
today, while chatting with my ex-colleague (who’s having her second child – she’s having a girl!) she gave me some vair useful tips and plans of action.
#1. don’t make it a habit to allow baby to sleep in your bed from the beginning. (she did with her son, and suffering for it now. ironically, their sex life was apparently still active, having managed to make baby number two, heh.) so my plan of action will be: place peanut in cot next to our bed for three months, then push cot to our adjoining room in the fourth month. he won’t remember much up to three months. i think.
#2: the child-in-your-bed thing is a habit that developed from the mother nodding off to sleep whilst breastfeeding, which causes sore, cracked nipples with pus! so plan of action: i shall try my darndest to keep awake for half an hour during feeding or put an alarm, then nudge izad – REALLY HARD – to wake up and put baby back in cot. well. it’s a plan. :S
#3: she uses a support pillow and “its works!”. well, a support pillow for breastfeeding, that is, coz she had terrible backaches otherwise. it’s horse-shoe shaped which you ‘wear’ around your waist and won’t slip out, unlike our normal pillows. around 50bux at kiddy palace. ack! at this rate we spend, peanut will turn out to be a million-dollar baby, literally.
#4: she says graco strollers are light, portable and sturdy (and, i found out, american-made, heee). and half the price of maclaren. we haven’t seen any gracos, so, it’s back to the drawing board.
#5: since she found out she’s preggers again, her gynae advised her to stop breastfeeding her 19-mth-old child, coz everytime you breastfeed, your uterus contracts, and that’s not good for the new baby inside. and the thing is, her nausea almost completely disappeared as soon as she weaned him off. magic!
see, always good to take down notes from experienced mothers.
***
by the way, i still burp like a fucken cow every fucken day. no useful tips for that.
***
OUH! and speaking of tips, i figured out how to wear my old clothes, ie. my much-missed tops and bottoms pre-pregnancy.
the keyword is: layer, layer, layer.
#1: stretchy tops! i’ve got quite a collection, thankfully, and since shoulders don’t, er, grow, i can still fit into them. they may be shorter now and can’t cover the tummy completely, so what i do is wear a stretchy tube top over my tummy. yes, just the tummy, doesn’t even have to cover your boobies. tube tops are cheap, and black or white goes with anything! stretchy spaghetti tops are also vair useful, so find longer ones that can cover your tummy, which you can use underneath your normal tops.
#2: tube tops are also vair useful to cover that unsightly pants or skirt zipper that you can no longer zip up! whatever i can squeeze at least my butt into, i will zip halfway – in some cases, thirdway – below my tummy, and i will cover the unzipped part with the stretchy tube top. it also prevents pants/skirt from slipping since it grips the hips.
#3: accessorise like mad! people will notice your tummy less with all that distraction. hee. plus, it’s fun to mix and match now that your clothes selection is more limited.
#4: if you already have old skirts or pants with waistbands, use them! below your tum-tum.
unfortunately, i’m unable to fit into any of my denim jeans. ahh, i miss them.
***
ok, peanut is kicking like crazy now. better feed him something.
buggy business
he bought this for me, for my night-time reading…
it describes and explains everything in easy-to-read pages, from pre-pregnancy to weekly stages of pregnancy, all the way till baby turns into a toddler aged 36 months. (thanks for the recommendation, su, it’s very useful!)
and then he bought this for himself from mothercare, for peanut when he’s in babycolt…
he found it most amusing for some reason.
***
after lazing in bed the whole of sunday morning, we decided to drag our butts out for a bit more major window-shopping.
so we headed to kaki bukit, where the famed Baby’s Hyperstore and Baby’s Kingdom were located. we had to get ourselves quickly acquainted with the various prams/strollers out there.
our heads spun with the array of quinnys, maxi-cosis, lucky babys, peg-peregos, combis and other strange-sounding brands. we were initially interested in the three-wheel kind, very cool lah, we thought. but turns out those things are damn bulky when folded, and may not fit in babycolt after all.
then… we were shown… the maclaren global buggy.
so, so comfy, i wanna snuggle-wuggle in it meself and be pushed around in contentment. izad likes it much too. chic yet manly enough for him, he reckons. hee.
trekked the net a bit about it and found that it was even seen on ’sex and the city’, hokay. lol!
it’s suitable for newborns to 4-yr-olds. and we figure, hey it could last till our next child. and any car seats can fit into it as well. btw, car seat will be handed-down by my brother, so phew.
of course, the downside is the oh-so-hefty price, which we’d haggled down to 500 buckeroos. no, we didn’t buy one yet. we’ll wait it out, see if we decide on a less costly investment later upon reassessing our financial status in december. or… if someone offers to buy one for us instead. :D
the other important item we had in mind is the cot. we knew what we wanted: it’s gotta be white, to match our bed. yes yes, we’re very aesthetic ok.
and voila! we found The One. white wood cot, converts to playpen, junior bed, and three other configurations i don’t know of. it’s got roller wheels so we can move it to another room when peanut’s bigger. free mattress and bedding, delivery and assembly, all for a grand total of 299 bux. made in new zealand, aunty said. entah betol ke tak. whatever it is, it’ll come in end october. it’d better! my nesting instinct will be in full force by then, methinks.
speaking of nesting, rin has been appointed the Baby Room Designer/Decorator. izad and i are a little reluctant to convert the entertainment room into a baby room, but seeing how little entertainment we do in that room as it is, we’ll have to give it up for peanut’s comfort.
ikea for ideas, anybody?
place for the placenta
after weeks of waiting for her to emerge from her mama’s womb (and us bugging them when when whennn), her daddy finally sms-ed that she’s ready, after the waterbag burst…
fifteen hours it took for her to come out. epidural after the tenth hour, at 3cm dilation!
baby alya looking oh-so-calm after her most traumatic experience ever – birth.
her parents and us had holidayed in bangkok just last december, when she was only a few weeks old and her mum, zur, wasn’t even sure if she existed or not at that point. but we had an inkling she did, and it’s a wonder zur could do all that crazy walking in chatuchak and sukhomvit without fainting! :D
also, they were kinda the catalyst for peanut’s beginnings… :)
anyway, back to baby alya!
she is such a cutie, weighing in at a slight 2.3kg. when she was rolled back in the room after a jab at the nursery, her tongue started darting out in search of something she knew she should be getting but doesn’t know what. i watched as zur attempted her first time at breastfeeding. very exciting ok. alya whined a bit when a nipple was shoved into her tiny mouth, but it didn’t take long before she was contentedly sucking on it. hurrah!
her two grandmothers were so cute, as soon as the nurse left, they promptly plucked her off zur’s left breast and placed her on the right one. hehe.
grand/mothers are so full of wisdom and nonchalance in the face of childbirth and post-natal care, doncha think? they have all kinds of do’s and don’ts which fascinated me even though some made little sense.
zur’s mum opened a can of soda and made zur drink up. something about breaking down and releasing the gases in her stomach. and the most interesting lesson of the evening was when she opened up a plastic bag which contained zur’s placenta and cord. macam beli daging dari pasar!
it was the first time i (and zur’s sis-in-law, sharinna) saw a live placenta and cord, which, merely a few hours ago, were in someone’s womb. amazing! the placenta looked like raw meat, or as the oldies say, “macam limpa” (erm, gizzard in english?) and the umbilical cord attached to it is long and slimy, with intermittent clots of what looked like blood all along it.
zur’s mum simply picked them up with her bare hands for a mini show-and-tell session, even though plastic gloves were included in the bag. she looked at the clots in the umbilical cord and found it strange that the clots were longish instead of roundish. she pointed out a twin clot and said there was a twin that could have been, but “tak menjadi”. i’m not sure what she meant, but suddenly the clots looked to me like eggs from the womb that kept ovulating throughout the nine months but never got to where it’s supposed to go. :)
it’s a practice for hospitals to return the placenta and cord to muslim families for a proper burial, and zur’s mum has been the appointed placenta cleaner, after which it’ll be buried at saiful’s parents’ backyard. later that night, we met with my makngah, who’d buried five placentas in her backyard (her four grandchildren’s and daughter-in-law’s niece’s), and she said there’s still space, so we “booked” ours too, heh.
makngah recalled how she was advised by my mak ilah, who also had twins, to separate the placenta after the twins’ (faris & faiz) birth. twins come out with one placenta and two cords attached, and according to mak ilah, you have to cut the placenta in two and bury them separately so that they will not fall sick at the same time. makngah thinks there’s something to it, because so far when one twin falls sick, the other falls sick only later.
nenek also advised makngah to bury the hair from the “cukur rambut” ceremony, and they’re somewhere in the backyard too, underneath a cool shady tree, as directed by nenek. we all have no idea why…
ok, back to baby alya again. her mum drank only soya milk during pregnancy coz she doesn’t like the smell of milk, so there ya go, soya milk = fair baby! :D
zur was happy with the services at raffles hospital, so we’re glad and assured that we’ll be happy there too.
FOUR MORE MONTHS TO GO, BAYBEH!
poke n prod
peanut is EXTREMELY active these days. but it is most awake and tumbling about inside me at night like the laundry in my dryer, from 11pm till i sleep. which can go up to 1am or more.
i think it’s as nocturnal as me.
my tummy’s like a mini earthquake. i’d say, a richter scale of 4 so far. it quivers and shakes quite independently. my new hobby is to watch my tummy move. it’s as entertaining as watching the latest series of america’s top model.
i have no idea what it’s doing, but it makes my stomach churn (literally). what are you high on in there, lil one??
who’s your mama?
another trip to dr a/z/i/z on friday, and once again we got to see peanut. he’s 550 grams now, which was about a hundred more than the last time we saw him a week ago during the detailed scan.
as for his mummy, she tips the scale at 47.8kg now. that’s, erm, almost a 5kg gain. which is about right, huh, one kg per month? :S
anyway, the doc explained to us further what all the fuzzy things you see in the xray film of the detailed scan meant, and i got lost, again, at the lip measurement part. he tried to demonstrate to us using his own tilted face and even drew it out for us. erm, okaaaaay… nevermind! as long as there’s no black gap there, i’m fine. (a black gap would indicate a cleft palate, and that would require surgery. brrrr…)
from the latest profile scan we got, i reckon peanut’s got a mancung nose! but, by the time he squeezes out of my vagina, it’ll probably go all pesek. hee.
can you see him?? clutching his hands together, macam nak diving.
ikut muka siapaaaa, agaknya.
*****
it’s the first wedding since the bump started to show, and in a sudden flash of inspiration, i dug out a REAAALLLY old kebaya from hari raya back in my JC days which i thought i could somehow squeeze in…
not bad! baju sepuluh tahun pun masih boleh muat jugak. :D
the golden ticket
ok, so we’re not exactly the same. but she’s my role model you know. lol!
her boobs seem bigger than her tummy and she was six months preggy here. she’s having a girl boy.
my boobs, err, are still mosquito bites compared to hers and i’m five months plus preggy here.
and by the way, no, i did NOT put an arrow on my actual shirt (this here’s just photoshopped). that would be a copyright infringement, no? lol!
great balls of fire
he calls me michelin man now. sniff.
now let’s see what’s going on in that tum-tum, shall we?
we had that detailed foetal scan at eastshore on thursday, to make sure that all of peanut’s body parts, you know, limbs and organs are, er, there, and normal, and also to measure them. it’s pretty much like the usual ultrasound scan dr aziz does every month, but much longer this time, around half an hour or so. and this time, the scanning is done without the husband’s presence for some reason, but he gets to come in and see after everything’s done.
the radiologist who did the scanning wasn’t too chatty, but i was amazed at what she was doing nonetheless, chasing the lil one around my womb with her magic scanner and lotsa gel. i could even tell most of what she was measuring (except the lips, i have no idea how she could tell). if you look at the partial shot of the xray film above, you can see:
the spine; the trunk; the nasal bone;
the cranium; some bone (thigh?)
the umbilical cord from two angles; the cerebellum and orbits;
the arm; the hand (tiny bony fingers!); the foot; and the leg.
ouh, the face. hey, i promise peanut won’t come out looking like this, ok! peanut’s got a few more months to grow, you know. :D
now let me tell you about those hands hovering there – those are the hands that keep poking me on my right abdomen with greater frequency each day. during the scan, it kept moving about, especially those hands, poke poke poke. i don’t think babies like ultrasounds very much, coz well, the sounds coming from the scanner must be ultra irritating to them. its probably sending out a morse code: “hey, you out there, stop it already!”
now, from the side, peanut looks kinda like this…
i hope peanut’s a chubby wubby wittle thing when it comes out.
the radiologist took a 3D scan as well, but for some reason or other i didn’t get a print of it. it took her THREE times, and i had to hold my breath each time. but peanut couldn’t keep still, so first we got a hazy screenshot of its hands covering the face, then a blurry one we couldn’t make much of, and lastly, a partial face, its eyes closed, looking all squashed up. heh. don’t ask me who it looks like, i have NO idea, except it looks all wrinkly and old!
and now, the thing that’s driving ALL of us crazy: XX or XY chromosomes?
all i can say is, great balls of fire! LOL!
