Musings

…standing on the promises of God my Saviour…” this song was reverberating in my head during one of our play times together.

I was deliberating whether to buy a play yard (see example) for Hannah so that she could play in a safe, enclosed area on the floor while I attend to other chores in the house. The only nagging thought I had was whether Hannah would want to play in it. What if it lasts only a day? Sell as a preloved item lor. Hmmm….?

Hannah has been exploring the things around her in the little space I created in front of our TV console. I thought this was great as she was learning more about the actual settings of her home. The only downside to this type of ‘play zone’ is that someone must keep a close watch on her at all times. She could scratch or bang herself against sharp objects.

May be I’d just give the play yard a shot. In any case, here’s a little video of Hannah doing her latest feat, i.e. standing up using supporting structures around her. :)

It has been two months since Hannah started her weekday morning infant care at Punggol. She has adapted extremely well to the environment  and is familiar with all her care-givers. However, she always cry when she sees me at the usual 2.30pm pick-up time. She will only stop when I carry her.

For the record, she came down with a mild flu and diarrhea throughout the period of infant care. So far so good I’d say. I was informed by her principal that she’ll be promoted to the mobile group next week as she has been crawling quite well. This means that she will have more space to roam and roll and interact with other mobile babies. I just hope that she won’t hit other babies or ‘fight’ for toys.

Last Friday was the first time I had to stay back in school to finish setting two test papers. So it was the first time Hannah was left at her infant care center for the whole day. Yang could synchronize his timing with ours and hence he picked both of us up. Yay. He took a few photos of Hannah at the center with his D300 as well. :)

1:25 pm update: Matt’s coming earlier – Yay! He managed to bring his flight forward by 5 days, so he’ll be arriving on Tuesday early morning now.:)

Step aside Newater, gold is the in thing now.

I was reading this interesting article about many (and wild) possibilities of making sewage useful. The world’s population produces around 1.2 billion tonnes of faeces and 15 hundred billion of urine per year. Somebody discovered that there’s similar gold content in sewage when compared to mining from geological ore deposits. In fact, certain cities and towns in the world produce higher amounts of gold in their sewage.

According to the article, one of the main sources of gold is human excrements. Our diet contains gold in trace amounts. And our faeces have significantly higher gold contents than chicken, cow or kangaroo droppings.  Other sources of gold compounds come from medicine ingested, abrasion of gold jewellery during washing and industrial effluents coming from dental practices, electronics industries and jewellery manufacturers.

There are also other useful substances such as other metals, vitamins, proteins, fats, carbohydrates and mineral oil in sewage waiting to be tapped upon.

Well, here we have another valuable renewable resource as long as we live :)

Just when I was marvelling at Yang’s dad for having his ex-students paying him visits year after year during the Chinese New Year season, I got one tonight too.

Name is Jinju. I taught her biology and was also her choir teacher almost 10 years ago. She’s now doing her final year for her TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) degree in Beijing.

I was glad to learn that she was offered a scholarship and a job placement as a Chinese physician once she has completed her programme. She belongs to the first batch of TCM degree holders in Singapore. How cool is that? :D

Jinju bought lotsa Chinese kiddy books and wall charts for Hannah! Now mommy has no excuse not to read to Hannah in Chinese. Oh ya, there were also kiddy socks…will keep them until it’s time for Hannah to wear shoes to go ‘gai gai’. :)

Thanks, Jinju, for your presence and love tonight. :)

First Month: She smiled.

Second Month: Started to mimick sounds of words, e.g. ‘er le’, ‘ok lah’. Slept through the night. Started to gain better support of her head.

Third Month: Started to giggle. Mumbled what sounded like ‘mommy’. Stuck out her hand to do the superman pose. Responded to mobile by tracking its movements with her eyes.

Fourth Month: Turning over to her belly and vice versa. Able to nap longer. Shed a lot of her baby hair; almost went bald! Took a dip at our baby pool. Started to splash water in her bath tub.

Fifth Month: Started to support her body on all fours. Able to pull up her legs and suck her toes.

Sixth Month: Started on solid foods, mainly vegetables. Able to play by herself in her playpen for as long as 2 hours! Had her first Christmas.

Seventh Month: Adapted well to Infant Care Centre. Able to sit up unsupported. Started to crawl, eh with 2 hands and 1 foot and 1 kneecap. Called ‘daddy’ clearly. Started to eat fish. Overcome a flu infection.

Eight Month: Able to pull herself up to standing position using surrounding physical support. Said ‘bath’. Raised her arms to be carried. Allowed mommy to trim her nails without much fidgeting. Started to eat chicken. Used crying method to get mommy’s and daddy’s attention (she had her own ‘wailing wall’ in her cot). Had diarrhoea and recovered. Had her first CNY celebration.

Here’s a video below of Hannah in her usual happy self taken yesterday afternoon. She can stand on her own in her cot now.

Just when she was about to recover from a mild flu, Hannah came down with diarrhoea.

Her pediatrician said the disease was gastroenteritis. Besides diarrhoea, other symptoms include nausea, vomiting and cramping. Well, Hannah had diarrhoea only but it was very acidic and this gave her very bad diaper rashes no matter how quick I detected her soiled diaper each time. Her genital area was inflammed and some rashes were so raw that she refused to let me clean them. She would squirm and yell during every diaper change. Yang had to help hold her still while I clean her up. She could have diarrhoea up to 8 times a day. It was really tiring to clean and cream up an uncooperative baby.

Initially I applied an ordinary diaper rash cream on the diaper rash but I found it to be ineffective. I switched to Desitin Creamy and it helped a bit. The doctor prescribed a Zaricort cream (anti-bacterial and fungal properties) to be applied before putting on the Desitin Creamy. This combination worked. Hannah also had some anti-diarrhoea syrup (has constipative effects) and probiotic pills. We were instructed to leave out veggies and fruits in her diet. Just plain porridge with meats such as fish for the time being. Soy formula milk was recommended too.

It has been almost a week now and her condition has somewhat improved albeit quite slowly. I also fed her yoghurt to help introduce some more friendly bacteria into her gut flora. Hoping that she will recover soon so that she can continue the fun of trying out new foods :)

The main reason behind introducing veggies before fruits for infants is to avoid the rejection of the greens later in life. Since fruits tends to be sweeter than veggies, the assumption is that babies will accept them easily. Right? Nah…

From my experience with Hannah, it wasn’t smooth sailing when I started her on fruits. She ate all her veggies, including plain spinach puree. But I had no success with fruits. I started on apples with her – she didn’t like the home-made apple sauce nor scraped raw apple. Bleh. Okay, banana should be a winner…fed her with mashed banana…*Eeeee* was Hannah’s reaction. That was really discouraging. I went on to learn that some babies were like Hannah too. My guess was that she was not used to the acidity in sweet apples or probably the latex taste in bananas.

I was not about to give up even though the first few attempts were so dampening. Fruits are good stuff and Hannah should love them! I fed her banana again after 1-day break. But this time, instead of mashing the whole fruit up (and actually it oxidises pretty bad), I broke the fruit into halves, used my clean index finger and thumb to mash up a bit of the flesh, and fed her by placing some on her tongue with my index finger. I’d say ‘Ah’ and Hannah would open her mouth for food. She did her usual ‘dab dab’ around the new food with her tongue and swallowed it. Yay! And she took the second serving, and the third….can check banana on my baby’s food list liao! My hunch to the solution was to serve the fruit in its freshest form on my finger. No more mashing, pureeing or cooking (in the case of apples).

Apples are not exactly soft fruits and so a little preparation work before actual feeding is required. Firstly, I’d cut out a portion of its white flesh and slice it thinly. Secondly, when feeding Hannah the thin slices, I would soften them by pressing using my index finger and thumb before placing a small slice on her tongue. She’s still not big on apples but she eats them now. I find organic Red Delicious best in terms of sweetness and fragrance. Will be trying out the organic braeburn apples next. Hannah started with Royal Gala and USA Fuji but these were not accepted readily. Will revisit them on her again.

Mango was welcomed readily after my successful attempts with apples and bananas. May be it was also due to its sweetness and aroma. I used honey mangoes. I also mixed it into plain yoghurt to ease the acceptance of the latter. :)

I had been wanting to introduce pears but organic ones are hard to come by at the nearby supermarkets. See first lah. I might try out other new veggies such as eggplant and capsicum next. :P

Hannah came down with a mild viral infection recently. Her symptoms were blocked, stuffy nose and sporadic cough. I discovered her illness on Monday morning and so called my workplace to apply for childcare leave.

Hannah has been seeing the same doctor, i.e. her pediatrician, since the day she was born. She was referred by my gyn/obn. I like this doctor as she is good with children and is patient to answer all my queries on baby-related issues. She’ll even return my call if I have more questions to ask.

However, her queue is very long. I’d normally go down to her clinic to take queue no. early in the morning and return home to wait for the clinic receptionist to call me to go back for consultation. The wait is about 5 hours. Thank God that the clinic is nearby.

Here’s a photo of Hannah and her doctor. :)

Ya. And I had this beautiful mental picture of Hannah hugging mommy dearly when I picked her up after work on the first day…

It was time for me to start adjunct teaching this week and so our dear girl had to be sent to an infant care centre. I brought her there the week before to get familiarised with the new environment and care-givers. She adapted to the change very quickly on her first day; didn’t cry for mommy, drank all her milk, slept on her own and played with whatever toys given. When I went to pick her up, she was so engrossed in her own little fun that she ‘bo hew’ (ignored) me even after I called her name a few times. (Confession: I was so immersed in my new work environment that I didn’t even miss my darling girl on the first day too! Hee hee :)) Oh well.

Here’s a video clip of her at the infant care centre taken on day three. The two other babies staring at my video-cam were so cute lah. :)

I mentioned earlier that I was not a fan of avocados. Well, I’m a convert now! :D

I had this $1.75 organic avocado bought from NTUC just before it was time to start Hannah on solid food. It was green and hard (i.e. unripe) then and I simply just left it in the refrigerator. Over time I forgot all about that little fruit sitting in the far corner of my refrigerator and it started to ripen, very slowly though.

Since I wasn’t big on avocado then, I gave myself excuses that I didn’t know how best to treat the fruit. And it was turning brown anyway, so it might be spoiled. Still, it was tucked away in the refrigerator after all the procrastination.

One day, I read up on avocado ripening and how to tell it. So I went to press the poor, neglected fruit in my refrigerator to check whether it was ripe for consumption. It gave way slightly to touch and I could sense that it was ready to be eaten. Still, I wasn’t ready to make the move. So it continued its cold abandonment.

Just yesterday, I decided that it was about time to discard the over-ripe fruit. It has been kept for about a month now. Surely it couldn’t be consumed anymore right? But I looked at the brown fruit and thought to myself why not just cut it open to take a peek? Instead of cutting it lengthwise, I did it breadth-wise. Don’t ask me why. Hey, it looked pretty edible. I reached for a spoon to scoop out some of its pale yellow flesh to savour it. Oh, it tasted so heavenly! So creamy and nutty! So satisfying! Hannah must try this delicious thing! :P

So I ended up buying more organic avocados from NTUC…this time they were on discount…$2.45 for 2. I bought 4 in total…yay. I hope that Hannah will enjoy this fruit too. :) BTW, it is packed with plenty of nutrients good for babies.