Archive for April, 2008so you have been waiting for THE name. well, it took us a while to come out the perfect name for our little girl. it sounds good with aniq and the meaning really describes how she is – ever so gentle. dengan sukacita saya mengumumkan nama anakanda kami yang kedua……
sekian terima kasih, dan majulah sukan YOG 2010 untuk negara
the first thing he did when he arrived at the hospital to visit me was to go to the nursery with his daddy, where he helped to wheel the baby into the room. told him that the baby’s out of mummy’s stomach, and officially introduced them. then we presented him with the gift “from the baby”, which he’d been anticipating for some time (he knew it was a “robot”). but little did he know how absolutely THRILLED he’d be when he actually received it – he was practically beaming from ear to ear! in return, the baby got a germ-full of kiss from her brother. :p the family dropped by…
the kecoh aunties dropped by…
and all the while, she was oblivious to the attention…
before we knew it, it was time to go home!
i chose not to stay an extra day at the hospital this time round, since it was the weekend and i didn’t want to mess up the toddler’s schedule too much. he’d stayed at his oma’s house the first night, along with his cousin adam for company. the second evening he came by, i was already missing him, and felt a little sad as he left with his daddy. he’d helped to wheel the baby back to the nursery, waved at me from afar with his usual high-spirited “bye mimmy!!”, then as an afterthought, ran back to give me a big kiss again before running back to his daddy. like he knew i’d be alone for the night and wanted to reassure me it’d be ok. that, i think, is one of the most memorable mommy-moment for me to date. he hasn’t shown signs of jealousy thus far, as you would have predicted from a firstborn. we sort of guessed that he’d be ok with the new addition to the family and the changes that was to take place in the household. perhaps it’s simply his personality. and perhaps he’d picked up the ‘normalcy’ of having a baby from watching adam, who coos and sings to his baby brother. aniq even cooed at his sister – “aidinnn!” – which is the name of adam’s brother, hehe. but don’t worry, we’re working on ‘re-programming’ him. :p he shows concern when the baby cries, tells me she wants “tetek”, pats and kisses her… and here, he asks her to “please don’t cry baby, pleeeease?” he pretty much doesn’t mind her around, really. maybe because all she does right now is sleep, cry and drink, so we can still give him almost the same amount of attention, especially since he IS something of a joker who entertains us with his antics and myriad of expressions he picked up from who-knows-where (his new thing right now is exclaiming “oh my gawd!”). of course his mischievous-monkey behaviour still stands, but all that needs is a ROARING-LIONESS to keep him in check, hehe. so it began in the wee hours of 23 april, after midnight. that familiar feeling. not those braxton-hicks kind of contractions which i’d been getting for what seems like forever, but sharper. i was prettifying another diaper cake while watching tv while everyone was asleep, and kept watch on the clock at the same time. it’s begun, i thought – ten minutes apart. i was still up around three, finished up, and decided to sleep till it was time for aniq to go to his oma’s house at seven in the morning. in the shower, there it was, the sign i’d been praying for – the bloody show! the mucus plug came out and there was no doubt that THIS was The Day. i guess the body, and the baby, knew i was given a deadline – the doctor had given me till the next day to have me induced! so i called the doc, told him about my contractions and the bloody show, and he said he’d meet me at the hospital shortly. it was around eight by the time we got ready, and managed to drink the last of the akar fatimah water and a mug of milo. mum had dropped by, feeling jittery on my behalf as usual, tsk-tsked me who couldn’t help take the opportunity of sunlight to snap pictures of the diaper cake i’d completed while waiting for izad, and off we went! thankfully, it was still early so no traffic on the ECP. registered and was led to the delivery suite by 8.45am.
how familiar. like the last time, i was given a squirt of enema, something i’d looked forward to ha ha, no thanks to all that constipation during the last part of my pregnancy. took the minyak makan too, and recited some prayers. the doc came in around 9+, just as i was having one of my contractions. he and the nurse placed their hands on my stomach, “good contraction,” he said, whatever that meant, then checked for dilation (4.5 to 5cm). while singing along to michael buble’s ’sway’ which was emanating from his phone, he discreetly burst my waterbag. swoosh! “by lunchtime you’ll be giving birth,” he declared. and he left for his clinic – all the way in kembangan ha ha. and so i watched this machine as the minutes passed. izad even went down for breakfast.
i’d refused any of that gas rubbish, coz the last time it made me giddy. but this machine, kept me focused WAY, WAY better than any gas could! i watched the number rising as i felt my contractions – it made me anticipate them, so i was prepared to grip myself and BREATHE. after the contractions peaked, the number went down, and i could relax again. this went on for a while, till around 10+, when it happened – the MOST intense contraction had begun, out of the blue. i watched the monitor again and the number had shot up much higher than before. the nurse called the doctor, a manager came in, both assuring us that they were trained to deliver – not that i cared! i’d watched enough of channel 70 to know that ANYONE can deliver babies, even 10-year-olds! :p very soon after, The Urge became so strong that at the peak of my contraction, i simply had to grit my teeth and PUSHHHHH. it may be my second time doing this, but i was still naive enough not to realise that this was what all the “push! push!” fuss i’d seen on tv and movies was about – NOBODY had ever told me to push at this point, it’d always been my own doing. coz the doctor was not around – again, LOL! but this time i KNEW that the baby was going to come out, doctor or no doctor, so i told them this was it, and they turned me supine (i was controlling my contractions and the pushing on my side all the while) – and then the final contraction:
SHE WAS OUT! just like her brother – she just… tumbled right out, all at one go. kinda slid out, actually. yeah, i sat up to see it happen too. hehe. the husband didn’t even have the time to take a video or whatever – he was just as taken aback at the sheer rapidness of it all. all he knew was, her head appeared, and then her entire body. the doc only came by about ten minutes later or so, to deliver the placenta and stitch me up. i *think* there were two stitches involved. i’ll ask him when i see him again next week.
i’d never imagined she’d be so… big. well, big is relative, of course, but i *am* kind of on the small side. the wonders of the womb, to have withstood the weight and tenacity of this baby.
and well… that’s that. she came at her own time, just as i KNEW she would. it was about 10 months ago that we were deciding whether aniq should have another sibling. we were having so much fun with aniq with the growing up, the laughters, the tantrums. the thought of having another little aniq has always crossed our mind but perhaps we were concerned if we could give the same undivided love and attention that we have showered aniq but the thought disappeared immediately when i looked at her for the first time.
more photos in my flickr here! thanks for all your prayers and well-wishes. my daughter was safely delivered this morning, 23 April 2008, at 10:39am, weighing at a healthy 3.45kg and 51cm. syukur alhamdulilah, the delivery was smooth sailing. we reached raffles at around 08:45am, the gyne came and broke her waterbag at 09:30am, by 10am, she was getting her contractions which came fast and furious. and at 10:39am, A Haniz bte Muhamad Rohaizad
“just diapers will do! i leave it to you guys!” okay lah, ni best punye customer! it’s bad enough waiting for the waterbag to burst and the “excruciating pains” (as described by those women who ended up giving birth in their cars on Channel 70’s “Human Stories”) to happen, so i’m glad to have this as a distraction. i was thinking back to my first visit to the doc, and re-counted the months, you know, since the last cycle and all (not that hard to keep track back then coz i’d just gotten it back after a year hiatus)… and i think that first visit when he gave the EDD as May was probably more accurate than the subsequent ones. i think it’s *supposed* to be a May baby. hmm. now excuse me while i ponder this further over a pint. (yes, i’ve forsaken ben&jerry’s for a more, err, classic taste for this pregnancy. heh.)
aniq loves his spidey suit and decided to do a little bit of patrolling in the neighbourhood. let’s start off with something cheerful – like this red, black & white number we did on thursday night. we’d been dying to crack open this ribbon for quite some time! yes, you know we have a ribbon fetish, the W&F partner and i. it’d been a somewhat depressing day for me yesterday, though. i know i’ve said i’d stop mentioning any Chap II matters, but… i guess it’s not over, is it? to induce or not to induce, that was the question. it was a moment of indecision and doubt and guilt and everything overwhelming rolled into one morning at the doctor’s. i simply didn’t know what to do. in any case, he saw all that going on in my face, and since the unborn one is still less than 3.5kg, and i am perfectly fine health-wise, he okay-ed me to wait another week. in any case, i *was* already having contractions, albeit mild and irregular ones. in any case, the cervix has dilated 1.5cm. in any case, i could always call him if i changed my mind. but as they say, mother knows best (her, and God), and i don’t know… despite all the yappings that flew at me from those people playing the devil’s advocate, reciting incidents of sudden births by the side of the road and babies eating their own meconium and that the doc would be out of town the next two days if anything happened, my gut tells me to wait. coz clearly, *we* – she and i – weren’t ready. call me stubborn, or crazy, or whatever. you can also call me selfish, especially with regards to the husband and the mother who are on perpetual ’standby’ and i think, dying to get this whole labour limbo over and done with so they can move on with their lives and schedules. i can’t help feeling like it’s ALL MY FAULT. so yeah. depressing day. had a nap to chase it away, and then went shopping. which helped, a bit. we ended up buying stuff for the little guy, all the way at AMK, of all places! (why we ended up there, that’s another story.) it helped a lot when we got home and we gave the little one his loot – a pair of crocs, some ben 10 and transformers knock-off tshirts, and this, which his daddy INSISTED on getting him. against my better judgement of course! wahlao, cheesy, can?
but alamak, cute jugak. especially when he started trying to climb the walls, hehe. ok, not cute – silly. but funny. well, what can i say, it made him really happy. so i can’t dress him up in cute fairy wings and tights and fluffy hairbands (like sharleez, ARGGHH!). this, at $7.90, is much more, err, economical! (ok, NOT those crocs though, they cost a bomb.)
and when he’s happy, he’s a cooperative lil fella. kisses from knock-off spideyboy were amply dispensed upon request. and that made emotional-roller-coaster mommy happy. ok, this one is not so much abang-abang, but more like monkey-gets-out-of-cage-and-meets-fellow-monkeys…
in the form of his little boy cousins, that is! we were visiting izad’s cousin who had just given birth to YET another boy (her third, *gasp*), and the irony is, she was SUPPOSED to be due like a few weeks AFTER me. looks like she crossed the finishing line before me! can i say, “ARGH!”? anyway, this was another ‘labour’ of love since aunty hana obviously had no other kinds of labour going on the night before. something for the new baby from all the other cousins as well.
lions, giraffes, crocs… but no monkeys in the savanna – we have enough in the family! our gel-haired, adidas-shoed, PSP-toting ‘teenager’. lol!
sometimes we forget he’s just turned two barely four months ago. the way he holds ‘conversations’ and his beyond-two-year-old actions and behaviour tickle us so. i think i learned quite a bit these days being home, seeing first-hand his interactions with adam. now i know how he got to be so… ‘abang-abang’. too funny! maybe i’ll go video them later. (not like i have anything better to do like giving birth or anything aaaanyway.) so i’ll cut the story short. saturday’s visit to the clinic. it was harder to scan the baby’s head coz it’s already very low – but STILL not engaged yet. which means, yup, it’s not ready to come out, boys and girls. a quick ‘manual’ check (and LOTS of jelly) confirmed that the head was indeed not engaged and, in the doc’s words, “still floating”. was she enjoying her swim downstream in a leisurely, dreamy state or something? freaky. a rough estimate of the current weight was given – 3.2kg – but you know how those machines are: like, totally unreliable! coz it also gave us the EDD as 12apr, ie. the day we were at the clinic itself. riiiiight. doc insisted that he never crossed out the original EDD, and he did say “give and take two weeks”, but i guess the womb (and everything else down there) is holding out better than we thought, nevermind its sorry, flabby state. hah. so it’s another week of waiting. in the meantime, ENJOY LAH! jalan-jalan time has been extended, mah!
and this shall be the last chap II entry till, well, you know… the inevitable happens. (well, she HAS to come out eventually.) coz all this “WHAT?? NOT OUT YET?? WHEN????” is making me pret-ty tetchy. as do all the well-meaning ’suggestions’ to ‘naturally’ induce labour. coz at this point, where, i might add, am feeling TOTALLY unattractive and mojo is at an all-time low – ok, let’s say zero, – i’d rather let the baby stay inside forever. but really, i do thank you for all your concern, anticipation, etc. much appreciated. my only consolation is that the husband says his wife doesn’t look pregnant at all, especially from behind, as opposed to his theory and general observation of women who are pregnant with girls. which is always a nice thing to hear from the spouse, however biased he may be. thanks, hor. you better say more nice things ok. (a vasectomy would be nice too ha ha… KIDDING.) ok, so that’s it… crabby & grouchy cool-one-minute-blowing-her-top-the-next-minute-probably-schizo-and-in-serious-need-of-therapy mommy says “OVER AND OUT!” as the saying goes, a watched pot never boils. and apparently, a watched tummy never pops.
anyway, it’s still technically 40weeks, so i still have, err, two more weeks before ‘deadline’. the original EDD *was* 17 apr after all, you know. ok ok, we’re going to see the doctor later in the morning, happy? if nothing’s wrong, we’ve decided to wait some more for the pot to boil by itself. i mean, what’s another week, right? right. another week of doing EVERYTHING sideways. wash those dishes at the kitchen sink? sideways. do the laundry at the washer and take it out from the dryer? sideways. reach for the switch at the computer desk? sideways. put on makeup and look at the mirror at the vanity table? sideways. coz the tummy comes in between me and EVERYTHING! so as i was looking for more baby stuff at a shop earlier – sideways of course, coz i can’t reach the back of the shelf, can i? – i was asked again, for the 358th time, if i was carrying twins. (or was it 359th? i lost count.) the lady was equally amazed that i could still squat. hey, i’ve been workin’ out, baybeh. well, ok, if you can call picking up after aniq’s stuff strewn on the floor everyday as ‘working out’. i’ve also discovered a new, fool-proof way to ward off phone spammers. you know, those *&%^ irritating telemarketers who insist that you need another credit card or a new insurance policy or a free makeover or a gym membership, etc, and will just take “a few minutes of your time”. well, here’s an example of a recent ‘conversation’. caller: hello, may i speak to miss XXX? yep, HE hey, technically, i wasn’t reaaally lying. i just didn’t say when i was about to give birth. coz technically… i myself don’t even know when lah, ceh! ok, better go. maybe do more exercises. kegels, maybe. and brush my teeth at the bathroom sink – sideways. another attempt to get the baby out was thwarted yet again – coz she’s still snug as a bug inside. BAH. i brought the little fella on another trip to the airport, this time ON THE BUS, a rickety one too, where he sat on my lap and sang ‘the wheels on the bus’. sounds like a great way to induce labour? not enough. then he was let loose, and ran and ran and ran and… well, you get the point. he even ran in circles when there was nowhere else to run to. did i mention it was his nap time? then we took the skytrain to T3, in which he cooed at little babies in prams, who watched him all a-gog, fascinated by this strange creature who was cooing at them. then we ate some cake at ’secret recipe’ because there was a tea time special and mummy badly NEEDED cake. and iced lemon tea. and heck, why not feed him with some chocolate cake too while at it, right? might as well up the sugar content so he’d run more rounds. another great way to induce labour, you think? think again.
COZ STILL NOTHING HAPPENED DOWN THERE! ok, so maaaayyybe i cheated and had mum along with me during our little excursion. heh. passed by a couple of girls, one of whom was also pretty heavily preggers. her friend asked when i was due, and i said, well, anytime now. she said, she thought her friend’s tummy was bad, and she’s got two more weeks to go. we laughed and i said, welllll, mine’s WORSE. and i get that kind of camaraderie from fellow pregnant women and mums wherever i go. commiserate and empathise, commiserate and emphatise. so anyway, then we went up the viewing mall, where all that chocolate cake worked its magic and more running was involved. i think i like the viewing mall at T3 best – there’s something serene about the place, somehow. yes, despite all those kids running around. what finally made the running cease was the sight of a group of policemen who beckoned him while we waited for our ride home. hmm, duduk diam sekejap. darn it for me, relief for my mum. and since there was STILL nothing going on womb-wise later at home, i thought, whaddaheck, let’s do one diapercake and mess up the baby room again.
got around to figuring out that square diaper cake that the elves attempted, since it’s for a cukur rambut this saturday – which i’d probably attend at the rate my non-contracting uterus is going. BAH! “dear aunty esah, now i have to apologise to you too, for not coming out on your birthday, despite your and aunty rini’s animated coaxing the day before when we met in town! what can i say? maybe mummy’s plumbing is stuck!! :O it’s gotten to a point now where not just aunties are staring openly at me (or rather, mummy’s tummy), even little chewren are pointing at me. and shrieking. ok, maybe not shrieking, but they get all high-pitched and excitable, and their own mummies don’t even bother to stop them. how rude, these chewren are! tsk. anyway, it’s been a week since mummy last saw the nice doctor who keeps giving her the wrong date. should she go see him again, you think? she didn’t exactly make an appointment, you see, because EVERYONE expected me to come out before the one week has passed. see the date that’s circled on the picture of my heyuuuge head?
HA HA! 3 april indeed! phooey! you know what, i think i’ll just stay in here. for good. it’ll ruin mummy’s figure – but what the heck, it’s ruined aaaanyway, even if i DO come out. heh. let’s see… what can i do in my now-ten-month-old crib? maybe i could redecorate in here. some nice wallpaper, perhaps. and a chandelier, coz it gets a little dark. don’t think i need a cooker and kitchen cabinet (what do you think of white eh, aunty esah? hurhur) though, coz of this cool umbilical cord that’s stuck to me and getting me food 24/7 direct from mummy. hmm, maybe i can ask aunty Is for some suggestions, i hear she’s good at home furnishing. i wonder if i can get cable in here… in any case, aunty esah, i hope you had a wonderful date with uncle. i hear he likes… oysters?? eeww! sure sounds as disgusting as placenta (and ouhh, i *know* placenta). ok, nothing much to do now, so i’ll just chill out in my crib some more. till my next update… (but don’t hold your breath!) love, BabyA-Whatever-i-givap-on-my-parents-for-still-not-naming-me” |
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