It’s been 9 months since I became a father. I still can’t believe that the label “father” and myself are connected. The concept of “father” is always associated with my own father that I find it so hard to apply it to myself. Yet it doesn’t really prevent me from doing all the things that fathers are supposed to do: taking baby to rhyme time every week; playing with him every day after work; changing nappies and feeding him. It’s a hard work to be a father but I didn’t escape from it and adapt into the new role relatively easily. It’s just mentally I still don’t consider myself as a “father” figure.
The first 4 weeks were quite tough. As first time parents, we don’t know anything about how to keep a baby alive. It was pretty much reactionary: if he peed or pooed, then change the diaper; if he cried, then check if it’s time to feed again. We woke up 2 times every night, each time for about 40min which include feeding, burping and patting to sleep. During the day we’ll try to take naps to but we always feel tired and sleepy. It really helps that my previous job gave 6-week paternity leave so I could focus on being a full-time dad without worrying about work. Also our son is quite understanding: he doesn’t really cry out of no reason (well most of time). Even he cried, it’s easy to calm him down by cuddling or feeding or try the 5s, which we learned at the hospital. If we exhaust all tricks and he still cries, we’ll just let him cry and cover our ears. The longest time for him to settle is about 20min and I remember there’re maybe 3-5 times.
One thing we struggled is feeding. With every one around us advising break-feeding we tried hard to do it. We hired professional pump to express milk. We followed crazy regimes (soybean trotter soup, red rice millet date porridge, whole chicken soup without salt etc). My wife also breast-feed our son before bottle-feed to massage the breast. We tried all the advice given by lactation consultant, visiting community nurses but it didn’t work: my wife couldn’t produce enough breast-milk. Yes we didn’t 100% follow the advice such as using the pump to express every 2-3 hours even at night. But I think we did our best (6-7 times) and I don’t think being 100% compliance will make a big difference. This effort put a big toll on our physical and mental health. For example, in order to prevent our son to rely too much on formula (so that he doesn’t like the slow flowing break milk) we used a technique called “paced feeding” for a while. It’s basically deliberately slowing down feeding by letting pulling off teat or change the angle so baby can only suck air. This would make the feeding time from the usual 10min to 20min or even longer. And it caused our baby to drink less than he might have. My mom still attribute my son’s average weight and height to this method and would blame me every time she sees opportunity. I still believe people should listen to advice from professionals but as they even admit there’re always people who just cannot break-feed.
Now at 9-month old, our son is much easier to deal with. He can crawl. He sleeps and wakes up at regular times. He eats regularly (two solid food and five formula per day). Every Saturday we went to library to attend rhyme time and starting last week we bring him to swimming schools on Sunday. He might cry once of twice during the night but my wife would go and put the dummy into his mouth and he’ll be back to sleep. Every once in a while the dummy wouldn’t work and he’ll continue to cry as if he’s having a nightmare. In such cases we’ll pick him up from his cot and cuddle him, pat him or feed him a bit of milk and he’ll calm down within 20min. He usually has 2 naps during the days, one in the morning and one in the afternoon and he sleeps from 8pm to 7am. He doesn’t need company while he fall asleep. I could go on like this forever but I’m really proud of my baby and my wife (for giving and raising such as a good baby!).
There’re still issues we’re struggling with but that’s for next post!