oops, did i do thaaaat?
the first thing we do when we get home is usually to put the little one in his cot while we settle down, change clothes, have a pee, etc.
and we’d leave him for barely sixty seconds when he’d have wiggled his way into… uncompromising positions.
this was NOT the first time we caught him in the act of trying to ‘hide’ under the cot bumper.
“darn, i must try to do this faster next time.”
he’d see us come into the room, stop, and give a mischievous grin.
thumbs up
let this be a warning to all babies.
that’s dadam’s wriggling thumb, swollen and peeling caused by habitual thumbsucking.
this despite, or perhaps due to the adults who keep telling him not to do so.
in baby terms, “no, don’t, cannot” means “yes, do, can”, after all.
the little one looks set to follow suit with this thumbsucking business, but it’s hard to say at this point how long he’ll keep at it, coz right now the fist/fingers/thumbs-sucking is only part of his self-exploration.
i wonder if thumbsucking is genetically inherited. i sure don’t remember sucking my thumb.
but i was a bottle-sucker till i was a good five years old. does that count? :p
circus act
ke kanan.. pusing!
ke kiri… pusing!
his daddy reckons we should give him fishy treats like they do with performing seals.
ye-ye-orh
now that he’s learnt to flip himself over, there’s no stopping him. everytime we put him on his tummy to sleep, he’d do a push-up and roll on to his back on auto-pilot mode. so, gasak lah, sleep any way you want then.
he seems to prefer us to put him down before sleeping, so he could rub his face against the bedsheet, roll here, roll there, and maybe add a dash of i-want-to-sleep-but-can’t cry, before stuffing his fist into his mouth and falling asleep.
he’s been on a roll these days, learning more things to do with his body.
he’s started grabbing at things in front of him that seems remotely interesting (rattles, plastic bags, my hair) and pulling them tentatively towards his mouth. yum.
mum is seen below cackling in delight at him grabbing her fingers and pulling himself up to sitting position in one swift motion. (the whiny voice in the background is dadam trying to get our attention.)
when we put him on our laps, he’d puuuuush his upper body forward to sit upright by himself, his neck sticking out in front of him like a turtle.
and he gets restless when he’s sitting on our laps, so he’d aaaaarch his back and stiffen his legs, in order for us to prop him up on his feet.
we say this to him a lot: ”macam ye-ye-orh dah besar gitu.”
hello mister, very tiring leh. for us ah, not you.
and i know what everyone’s thinking. ”WAIT TILL HE STARTS WALKING/RUNNING!”
gah!
sunshine
good morning!
our favourite time of the day.
stick wit u
since izad is using dad’s under-utilised car to work, i now have the freedom to gallivant during the day with the little one in babycolt. i love having babycolt to myself. the bus and the mrt, as wonderful an experience as they are (haha), are just too much of a hassle, not to mention time-consuming. (hey, i only have so much of maternity leave left, you know. chop chop.)
yesterday was spent with O doing lunch, groceries and errands. today was spent with D doing lunch and toy shopping. both are mothers whom i call ‘Fast-Gamers’, having their second babies very soon after their first ones. something i so cannot imagine doing. seriously. i’d have very little hair and sanity left.
both are avid b/feeding moms.
O spent a few minutes lingering in aisle 8 of tampines mall’s ntuc, emergency b/feeding her baby while facing cereal boxes. luckily, no paparazzis living in the east were doing their groceries too, or they’d have spotted her and took pictures of her to be sold to manja magazine. lol!
D shared how when she was sick, she sent her daughter maryam, who was then still a baby, to her sister, who’d then just given birth to a 2-mth old premmie, to be breastfed. it was a win-win situation, coz maryam was a guzzler, and she helped up her aunty’s milk supply. i thought this very interesting, coz your sister can be your child’s ‘ibu susuan’ without the implication of your children marrying each other in future (that would be eww wrong). and wouldn’t it be nice if i had a sister too, so i can pass the baby to her when i feel like giving my boobies a break.
i can count the number of times and hours i’ve parted with the baby (aniq, not colt). i’m almost with him 24/7, probably smothering him with my omnipresence. but that’s coz i take my maternity leave very seriously. it is after all three months that my employers are paying me to be with my child, so i try not to cheat them (very much). and the extra two unpaid months that i’m voluntarily taking to be with him will be even more precious to me. hey, what’s two months of being poorer with money but richer with love? (bleagh, so much for trying to be poetic.)
so yes, i expect the boy to be attached to me, his mommy. (heck, he’s already showing the SIGNS as it is.) there are people who may go “oh dear, he’s going to be so attached to you, how are you going to go back to work?” and these people say this in a negative tone, like having your child attached to you is a BAD thing. what a bad mother one is for making one’s child attached to her. tsk.
perhaps they’d rather the child be attached to the toaster oven, or the neighbour’s pet cat (both, incidentally, not required to go to work).
of course it’ll be hard for both of us when i go back to work, duh, but i’ll be concerned if he doesn’t cry or miss me when i do. if he does, well, it means he has successfully developed a healthy emotional relationship with me, no?
but you know what? i REALLY don’t wanna think of that now.
for now… gallivant with the baby i must!
twelve
i was thinking… technically, the boy is one year old, if you count from the date of his conception. march 05, that’s when i think he happened.
nine months inside + three months outside = twelve months of life.
so yey, happy one year of existence, you!
roll with it
he was sleeping on his tummy as usual and i’d just had my morning bath when i heard a loud rustling noise emitting from the baby monitor. that sounds strange, i thought.
so i popped into his room to find a surprise.
i was pretty sure there was no one else in the house, not even little elves, so my conclusion was: he’d rolled over from his front to his back by himself! (and kicked the monitor with his feet in the process.)
later over at dian’s house, three other witnesses watched him perform his new trick, and the appreciative audience gave a rapturous round of applause each time (until he got tired).
if i’d gone back to work, it would have been this week. and i’m glad i didn’t, coz i wouldn’t have been the first to discover a First Time milestone.
but once i get back to work, i’m gonna miss a lot of his other First Times.
my separation anxiety is already getting to me.
the milky way
i love to look at the back of his head. it makes me chuckle every time.
it reminds me of the swirling, spiralling Milky Way.
they say a navel in the centre of the head means he’ll love both parents equally.
i hope that’s true.
i wouldn’t want a mama’s boy.
body parts
after weeks of discovering his fingers (and incessantly sucking on them), he’s discovered his feet.
while being burped, he is seen staring and frowning at his colorful bootied / stockinged feet while wiggling and touching them.
he’d also discovered his ears for some time now, scratching and tearing at them till they turn red and dry.
they say he’ll discover his wee-wee one day soon, and will keep touching it too.
eeeks.
