Max is 2 months old ! :)

Max is 2 months. :)

He seems to grow a lot faster than Kaitlyn, actually probably because I just don't have the time to pay a lot of attention to every single details and day.

He is now 4.8ish kg and about 55cm long and is getting chubby rolls on his arms and legs.

We've finally figured out all the feeding issues. He now eats every 3 to 5 hours and each feeding takes around 40 minutes, which is a vast improvement.

He is alert when awake now and a lot more interactive. He is such an easy going smiley baby, I feel very lucky.

He and Kaitlyn are getting along great too. Yesterday, Kaitlyn gave him a high five, and he was all smiles. :)

He has these amazing grey/green eyes whereas Kaitlyn has warm melted dark chocolate coloured ones. I just love my kids' eyes...

He started to make noises, grumbles, yawns, gagas.

He appears to have found his hands. He bats at toys, plays with his hand with his other hand, and always tries to stick his fist in the mouth. :D

I love the moments when he finished feeding and places his head on my shoulder when I burped him. He has this completely drunk, content look on his face, just so adorable. He looks just like Kaitlyn when he does that. :)

Happy 2nd Birthday Kaitlyn!

This morning as I woke up, I looked at the clock and saw 6:30am, and thought, hey, 2 year ago this day, this time, I was being wheeled into the Operating Theatre, about to become a mother for the first time...

It's incredible, that my baby girl is TWO years old today. We shall now stop counting her age in months, and start counting in YEARS!

Being a mother is difficult, for me anyways. But everyday, I am grateful that I have my children. They never cease to amaze me each day, with their little personalities, and little/big achievements/developments. It makes everything all better when Kaitlyn runs up to me and hugs me, and when Max stares at me with those deep thoughtful looking grey eyes.

With Kaitlyn, it really was love at first sight. I remember the first night at the hospital as I held her in my arms, the world melted away and nothing else appeared to matter anymore, and at that moment, I thought, now, THIS IS CONTENTMENT. That moment, just she and I, and that moment, even though I knew that there will be many challenges ahead, I knew what love really was. I knew that this love will only get stronger with time, no matter what happens.

I remember the first time she smiled at me... it was in the middle of the night... she had been fussing all night. Then out of the blue, she smiled, looking right AT me, smiled. It was one of those "awww" moments...

The first time she rolled, I missed it, and she rolled off the chair and we rushed to ER as I feared possible head injuries... LOL ah, first time mothers...

I am not sure what her first word was, all I know was, all of a sudden, she was talking. Not just the baby babble, but she was saying actual WORDS and quite a number of them, around 10 or 11 months.

She never learned to crawl, and went straight to walking. The first time she took 3 steps on her own, everyone was so very excited, she got scared by all the cheering and clapping.

Ah, memory lane...

Now, she just started to say "why not?" and says all the time when we tell her to not do something or not go somewhere. She has quite a temper, well, she probably got that from me... Yesterday morning, I was feeding her breakfast, and she wanted something else, and I wouldn't give it to her. She threw a tantrum and cried. I told her, you can keep crying, but mummy is not going to give you . She gave me a death stare, and turned her face away stubbornly and wouldn't look at me. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. I clearly remember myself doing that exact same thing for years. LOL ah, I knew karma would get to me... if karma has its way, the teenage years will surely be h3ll for us...

She talks a lot, serious, this girl talks too much... It's funny to listen to her talk to herself when she's put to bed. She says everything she thinks, out loud, sometimes for hours, literally. Random thoughts being babbled out. One minute she's telling her pillow bear to sleep, next she's talking about grandpa taking her to play on the slides... I should tape it one day and keep it for her 21st birthday... She has an amazing imagination, she makes up songs, tells herself stories and does lots of pretending plays with her stuff toys and her doll.

She sings ABC, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and bits of Old McDonald has a Farm, as well as quite a number of Chinese rhymes. She doesn't carry tune very well though, but still cute when she does it.

She's a good helper with Max. She helps out when we change his nappy by bringing the supplies and she keeps him entertained when I bring him downstairs.

Her toilet training had stopped. :( She sees Max being changed, she also wants to be changed. She will take her doll to the toilet and go through the whole routine, but she wouldn't go to the toilet herself. It's frustrating. I guess we will have 2 kids in nappies for a while...

We didn't do much for her birthday this year. We went to yum cha, just the family. We will give Kaitlyn the birthday toys gradually over the next month or so. I need to clear out some of her old toys first. Our living room is becoming way too cluttered with her mountains of toys...

So, people say that the height a kid is at 2 years old will be half the height she will be as an adult? Well, Kaitlyni s roughly 85cm tonight, does that mean she will be 170cm fully grown? That's not bad, considering I am only so very tiny. Hopefully the other side of the gene pool wins out here...

We got her some tiny cupcakes, and she chose a pink one. She likes pink. :) We put 2 candles on it and asked her to blow it, but she got a bit too close to the flame and got scared, and then wouldn't go anywhere near the candles, so I had to help her blow it out. She did enjoy her cake though :)

Anyways, happy birthday my precious baby girl. Mummy loves you very much.

Quite a fright

My parents just walked out with Kaitlyn to drive to an early Chinese New Year dinner with my aunt and her family. 5 minutes after they walked, around the time they would be driving out of the complex, I heard a VERY Loud BAM, something/someone had crashed, and crashed HARD!

I ran straight out, all I could think about was, please please please, not my dad's car...

Dad's car was about out of the driveway, and it was NOT my dad's car, thank goodness. My heart could finally stop trying race out of my mouth.

What happened was:

A car turned down Park Road way way too fast, lost control, crashed into the corner of our wall, lost its front bumper, swirled hard, accelerated while turning hard right, cut acrossed the busy intersection, across 4 lanes, and crashed hard, finally stopping on the other side of the road, into another house's wall.

So, the car took out the corner of our wall, loads of plants, 3 road signs along the way, and the wall at the house across the road.

The ambulance finally turned up now, 10 minutes later. Apparently the driver is fine, just in shock.

All it all, it had been very lucky:

* This is a very busy intersection, but there is only ONE car involved in the accident, no other car or pedestrians got hurt
* It was literally seconds before my dad's car drove out of the complex and right into the path of the crashing car! Seconds, making the difference between life and death, for half of my family! I am grateful, grateful for my mother's obsessiveness. She asked me to lock the front door, then, she came back to check that I had indeed locked the door. Those seconds, made a world of difference!

I think I had lost my appetite...

I am going to give Kaitlyn a HUGE hug when she gets home...

This is like the movie "Sliding Doors"... seconds, life could've been very different...

I am grateful, I still have my whole family, safe and well.

Terrible Twos + 6 week growth spurt = Exhausted Parents

It hasn't been a great week in our household and I am pretty much like a walking dead right now. I've had less than 4 hours sleep each 24 hour period for over a week, and even those 4 hours are broken up into 30 minutes to 1 hour chunks... My back is sore, my head aches, and my hip is playing up again...

First of all, our Little Miss finally caught on that new baby means mummy won't be able to pay her as much attention. So, she's become extremely clingy whenever I am downstairs, and sometimes gets very upset when I have to go up to feed Max. She is still very loving to Max when she sees him though, guess she just doesn't want me to leave her. She squeals and screams (in words and sentences) when my parents, especially my dad, are around. My parents raise their voice as well to try to be louder than her to "be heard" by her. LOL/sighs. I kept telling them, kids model our behaviour, screaming matches are just not the answer. It's quite effective most of the time if she screams, I actually whisper by her ear, and she would actually lower her voice. But then, hey, my parents never ever listen to a word I say about how to raise MY children anyways. :( So the screaming matches continue. All the loud noises are giving my migrains and keeps Max awake when he tries to drift off to sleep. :(

Our Little Prince is hitting his 6 week growth spurt and demanding to feed around the clock. Usually it's probably fine to feed every hour or 2, IF the kid eats fast... But Max takes about an hour to hour and half to complete each feed... so eating every hour pretty much means he's ALWAYS on the boob!! It's been like that for 2 days now... I am seriously considering using a sling and just permanently attaching him to my breasts.

Some days I wonder what it'd be like if the 2 kids were spaced further apart. Maybe I would've been able to spend more time and attention on each kid? But then, neither of the kids were planned. Oh we planned... but the kids just had other plans...

Days like these, I just have to keep telling myself "the nights are long but the weeks are short", and "this too shall pass". I am just grateful that I have the kids, and they are healthy...

Max is one month old today!

Drowsily one month had passed. LOL

Max is doing great. He is gaining almost 200gms a week and starting to get chubby rolls and double chins. Last weighed, he was almost 3.74kgs. We will get full measurements at his 6 week check up.

We put him on his tummy after each nap, he rolls from tummy to back consistently. He lifts his head and moves it from side to side very well.

He just looks so very serious with the huge eyes and wrinkled brows, always makes me laugh. He looks like a little old man. He makes a few more different noises now and his cries are even louder (I didn't think that could be possible).

He smiles often.

I just can't get over how much hair he has. His hair is a natural mohawk up top. It just doesn't behave regardless how much we try to brush or comb it down. He has a perfectly circular hair whorl. His hair is very fine and soft, sort of feels like down feather. It's a dark chestnut colour with blond-ish roots.

It looks like he may have a dimple, but only on the left cheek.

His eyes are black with blue mixed in, and they are quite large. It looks like he will have long pretty eye lashes too. His eyebrows are very neat.

I can't find any birth marks on this little man.

He appears to have my nose and mouth, just like Kaitlyn. His mouth is bigger than Kaitlyn though. Max also has skin tone closer to mine whereas Kaitlyn is quite fair skinned.

I think I have lucked out on both kids, as neither of them got my crooked toes and mole on the nose LOL. They will probably both need glasses and have their teeth straighted. But no biggie really.

I am finally starting to feel more human now that my tummy and scar are not constantly hurting anymore. I still tire easily but then, it could just be that I don't get enough sleep... So far we've survived the 2 week and 3 week growth spurts. I am glad that after the 6 week growth spurt, we get a little bit of a break till the 3 month one hits. Growth spurts are nasty, especially when the baby decides to feed non stop...

Brett will be going back to work in a week. It was good to have him home to help out, especially in the first few weeks when I was "less than mobile".

So tired (whine fest)

You know how sometimes you see these women that have a clan of children and are saying how easy everything is and how being a mother is just so natural to them?

well, I ain't one of those women. Don't get my wrong, I wanted 2 kids, and I feel blessed every single day to have my 2 beautiful children and I love them to pieces. I just get so frustrated that my body is just not doing tasks that are supposedly easy and natural!

My body is definitely NOT made for pregnancy and birth. Neither of my kids ever dropped or engaged, so even if I didn't choose to have c-sections, they most likely wouldn't have come on their own anyways without surgical assistance. As they were, the obstetrician had to literally put his foot on the table to pull my babies out.

Breastfeeding, geez, you'd think with D cup boobs feeding a tiny baby would've been a piece of cake eh? Well, apparently not. The first kid had a bad tongue tie, so feeding her was a constant battle. She never latched on properly until we got her tongue tie released at 6 weeks. So, I was attached to the breast pump to try my hardest to get enough milk to feed her. Even with a bottle, she wasn't drinking properly. Even after the tongue tie was clipped, she's gotten into bad routines of feeding every 1.5 hours all day long! That lead to her not sleeping enough and not settling herself to sleep... That went on for another 7 months. It wasn't till I landed in hospital that my GP took me serious enough to give me a referral to go to Tresillian for help... Anyways, it was almost a miracle that I was able to breastfeed her for 14 months.

The second kid is a lazy sleepy eater, feeding him means constantly attaching him, then detaching him in a few minutes, try to wake him up, then re-attaching, rinse and repeat for 1 hour to 1.5 hours! Then, still having to express to keep the supply up as Max just "couldn't be bothered" to finish the job.

It's like deja vu, even with his 3 hourly feeding schedule, I still end up with no more than an hour between feeds, day or night...

To add salt to injury, there are all these women complaining about engorgement and having too much milk and not knowing what to do with it? Why couldn't my body do the same!

I am so tired. :( I am so annoyed with my body not doing what SHOULD come naturally! Argggh!

I swear this mothering thing is harder than doing a Master Degree and sitting the Mensa Test... and I have done both...

stats, Kaitlyn 23 months, Max 3 weeks

Kaitlyn, 23 months:

• Height: 85cm (I am so glad that she will definitely be much taller than me...)
  
• Weight: 9.9kg (yes, we are under 10kg again, she's currently refusing to eat meat and vegies.../sighs)
  

Max, 3 weeks:

• Height: 52.5cm (up 2.5cm from birth)
  
• Weight: 3.475kg (up about 90gms from birth, he lost 12.9% of his birth weight when we were discharged from hospital, so we've gained pretty ok since then)