Son to go to temple!

Hands in prayer

I didn’t think I would face this question till maybe sonny boy was starting to believe that there was no Santa. Here I am with it. My husband wants to take our son to the temple this weekend. I am a Christian and my husband is a. …Buddhist? Taoist?

I had thanked Jesus for my child and presented him to Christ in a prayer. I had planned to read him children’s bible stories. It is not that my husband and I didn’t discuss religion; we had kind of agreed that he had to find his own way after being exposed and making and educated decision. However, my husband’s decision to take him to the “Temple” provoked a sense of possessiveness in me that yelled “ NOOO! He belongs to Christ!!”

See how easy it is to face promises we make and be so tempted to break them!

I was taken to Church as a child by my sister and it kinda stuck. My mother is a free thinker and my dad….ahh my dad….

“ Son, Grandpa could recite passages from the bible better then I could and he wasn’t a Christian. He read the Quran and other books…. there was the one with the guy with the third eye…whoever that was…Grandpa bought me my Children’s bible…..

I pray that Christ will come into your heart and that you will ask that he come dwell in yours but I will not force it no matter how I would want to. Faith will come to you and you must freely choose because ultimately our creator had made us with free will.”

I am strong for the love of Christ and I believe a very much happier person. Much about the rule of Christianity demand that I should have married a Christian(I didn't) and that I should bring my son up as one. This is a tough one for a mother but I still believe that faith is a choice made with a free will.

Ok...what is an appropriate baby outfit for a visit to a temple?

Word of the Day

One experience I shared with my dad is his “word of the day” thing. Almost everyday, (“ almost” because grandpa was intense but not exactly disciplined.), he would make a conversational statement with a hard word and then ask if I knew what it meant and if I didn’t he would either tell me or off to the dictionary I go. I remember one such statement clearly. “Life is ephemeral”. “Ephemeral” meaning brief… evanescent… fleeting….

So lately when reading books out loud to my newborn son and I find myself concern with the true meaning of words. Come on! Admit it, you have read book and come across words which mean was either foggy to you or you just took a leap of understanding.

It’s a discipline I must cultivate back, I guess.

So the word of last night’s book is “ exsanguination” Go try use that in a game of scrabble why don’t you!

By the way, “exsanguination” means to drain of blood; make bloodless. I have to stop reading murder mysteries to my son. Where is that copy of Winds of the Willow?

All Hail the Human Cow

Nursing is not easy. Not all of us are gifted human cows. And the evil eye to those of you whose milk come in on the third day and whose milk supply exceeds demand. I had my son nurse on me moments after birth. I followed all the rules but I found breast feeding riddled with anxiety. I could write a 3 part essay on this but do not want to add more stuff that a mother must read through. In summary....

1. Not everyone's milk comes in on day 3....mine around day 7-8.
2. When you think there is no breast milk, check the poop. If it has seedy bits that look like cottage cheese. Its because baby is drinking breast milk. ( a wave of relief came over me when my pediatrician told me that. 3 Lactation consultants and 4 nurses and not one of told me that in the 3 days i was in hospital!...sad faces and a failed attempt with " Hospital grade breast pump" is all I got.
   
3. Lactation consultants and well intention nurses can give you anxiety if you let them.
   
4. Formula is fine for the kid...better then listening to wailing. Supplementary feeder might be the way to go. Ask the hospital lactation specialist about it and they might give you a few free day use supplementary feeder. Medela supplemental feed is maybe around $50? Its a tube attached to a formula bottle and you put the tube into the side of baby's mouth when it is suckling at your breast. So it suckles and stimulates breast milk and gets fed at same time. Win-win.
   
5. Pump after baby has suckles.
6. Use cotton breast pads. They are soft and comfortable and reusable. Buy about 6 pairs. They can be handwashed or machine washed but let me just say this....putting it on after it comes out of the dryer is a delight.
   
7. Electrical pump - Lansinoh is cheaper the other electrical breast pump and works just fine.It has 2 controls.Speed and suction. Sometimes its the speed adn not the strength of the suction that brings in the milk.
   
8. Manual pump - Avent Iris Breast pump got me more milk the Lansinoh breast pump but my hands got tired. Its the Iris part that massages the breast and gets more milk.
   
9. Lansinoh breast pump with Avent Iris Attachment is wonderful. Best of both worlds! (see picture) and still cheaper then most electrical breastpump.
   

9. Fenugreek tablets or tea ( do your research) works for me. - Please read blog on being saved by Amazon.com
10. Green Papaya soup ( sudden jump in milk supply with this one...recipe below if I remember to include it..if I don't just, google it...thats how I found my recipe. Use the one with dried cuttle fish...yummm)
11. Red dates water. ( I think this one is just to encourage me to drink more water)
12. I am blessed, son takes breast milk at breast or bottle and takes formula willingly too. I didn't read about nipple confusion until things were settled and I am glad I didn't!
13. Continue breast feeding and try to use any glimmer of hope you can ..for me it was the seedy poop( made me very happy at diaper changes) and $125-$200 I was saving on formula( My Hokkien side jumps for joy. Breast Milk - Cheap and good! and supposedly able to speed up weight loss )

Presenting Grandpa

I am depressed that my son will not get to meet his grandpa who had passed away a year after I moved to the states. In fact, in a quiet moment between my son and I, I asked him if he met grandpa before was born (on the belief that souls are created in heaven before they are born into little munchkins). Next thing I knew I was bawling my eyes out. My feelings about the timing of leaving the country and if I had only known that it was his last year, is a blog for another day and in fact a blog not yet ready to be written because I am not ready to deal with the guilt associated with it)

Anyway, about my dad, my son’s grandpa… I love that man. I refer to him in the present tense ( I did say I haven’t dealt with it right?) I hear his voice in my head. I tell stories about what he did and his trickster’s ways. All my sister’s children got “grandpa time”. They have a memory of him and secretly think they are his special grandchild.That was grandpa's way. My son has nothing. I feel this great loss for him. I moved to the states and couldn’t take much with me of my father. I took with me his Robinson Crusoe ( his won this as a prize for English) and his Shakespeare Collective works. I took the keys to his old Mercedes.No, I did not do it in spite so that no one could drive it. He had sold it years ago. I do not know why the keys are still with us. I took with me the old brass keys to doors in the house he bought, renovated, cluttered, planted into a secondary forest and renovated again and in which I grew up and lived for more then 30 years of my life.

My Son…

Grandpa is a character …err was a character ( there I go again). I want you to get to know him and use his stories in your journey in life. Not just what he did that was inspiring, but his mistakes as well but most of all his humor and his interest in life of which there were many. Grandpa had "flavour of the month" and often they were consuming passions. He didn’t just have a interest in birds when he was interest in birds he had 38 birds of all manner and exoticness.( guess who had to clean and feed the birds??) He didn’t have a fish bowl or an aquarium when he was interested in fish but turned our house into an almost moat with three 30 feet long pools...not counting those we started of with to begin with( and friends who have visited can attest to this).He and grandma once decided to dis-invite -your mother to a trip to a nursery because she would take up “plant space” in the car. ( its does humble a person) He believed you could learn almost anything in a book and you will hear me say that repeated. He and grandma thought of me as the personal pack mule, doing their heavy lifting of pots of plants and other large objects. ( guess what mama's going to use you for son? Once you can stand up that is...)

So in the midst of me grieving at your loss of meeting him, your dad said that of course you would know grandpa because all you had to do was to know your mama. So son, guess what? Your dad has a pretty dashing and interesting character too, huh?

Hokkien- Cantonese conflict

I am Hokkien and Cantonese –The focus of Hokkiens is on Money and Business and the Cantonese on culture and arts. Which would explain why a typical scene in my home would be my parents sitting on armchairs with my dad( the Hokkien) looking at stock exchange and reading business books while my mother was either sculpting with clay, beading or knitting, ( The Cantonese). This is also why in the renovation of our family home my mother designed a house dimensions and form and and once my father took over we ended up with a square house because it was the maximum utilization of space( Manifesting hokkieness). Imagine a house a child would draw. Rectangle body, Triangle roof, square door, square windows. And because the yellow bathtub was cheap and we had some blue tiles left over from a renovation job 15 years ago, we had a yellow bath tub put in by the cheapest plumber in a very very blue tiled bathroom.

In me it manifests as researching price, quality,availability, guarantees etc of an item to the point of paralysis only to then decide to make it myself or in me purchasing the item just because its green. Most of all it manifest in my inability to enjoy any form of art without wondering if I can make money from it. A great part of that is the guilt I feel from spending time doing it purely because it give me joy. You know how some people picture a good and evil the left and right shoulder, counsellings the conflicted soul in the middle? Mine is a Hokkienme to the right and a Cantoneseme to the left.

How do i reconcile this aspects of myself? I would say it is summed up in my love for food. I love Bah Kut Teh( A Hokkien favourite) for is strong taste and chunks of Fatty bony juice meat served often in unpretentious shops with pots with burnt bottom and tea pots that have not been washed since first use ( add to the flavour of the tea apparently. I am sure the shop boss is trying to pull a fast one) and I love Dim Sum( A Cantonese fare) for its delicate blend of delicate flavours and how the artisty and design of the food is as much part of it as its taste.

So I take this as my license to be conflicted. I do wonder however how it will be for my son who will have to contend with being Hakka, Hokkien-Cantonese, first generation Asian American and being my child.

Overcoming blogophobia

My fear of blogging is two folds. Pictures and things once published “out there” can take on a life of its own or as bad, die an obscure and unread life!! It is however not my right to plaster my son’s picture all over the internet without consulting him when I don’t even like pictures taken of me!Or refer to him by name or something so personal that there is even a chance that it would thrill some sick perverted person out there for all the wrong reasons or fulfill the desires of some obsess fan when my son ( AND I SAY WHEN!! not "if".) is famous. I reached a compromise and decided to blog and use pictures that don’t completely reveal him or any member of our family. This actually appeals to me. Much like the seduction of a veil or being able to imply with subtlety and leave something to the imagination. A polite indirectness rather then “your face” bluntness...therefore BEHOLD!, you get the mystery butt to look at.

Why this blog then? Because in my younger days I use to write thoughts on pieces of paper and diaries etc but I suck at organizing. ( yes, its means I am a mess.) I don’t know where any of those things are now! A lot of use that was! So this centralizes things. More importantly, as I go on this journey as a mother I kept saying, “ I wish someone told me that” or “ I wish I knew that earlier” and “ I hope I remember that” So, this is my attempt to share, in the hopes that someone else out there is relieved of a small bit of the anxiety that motherhood brings and and more importantly as ammunition for my son, whom I hope will one day read this and keep his mama in check….”.