The Fourth Month – the Mommy Cow

As Jojo entered his fourth month, he was morphing into a chubby smiley baby. Babies are supposed to double their birth weight by the fourth month, which means Jojo should reach 7kg. But this month he already weighed a whooping 8kg, above average but still fell within WHO standards. Jojo’s body was compact and firm, his eyes shone brightly, he had high energy and laughed a lot. I really believe that the Lotusbirth method we have chosen, combined with exclusive breastfeeding, are responsible for his robustness and health.

The breastfeeding routine has been established – every time he made the gaspy “agh-agh” sound, which was about every 60-90 minutes, I offered my breast. Seemed like he was always hungry, and he could nurse with the strength of a hoover. I’ve read that a  normal breastfeeding session should be around twenty minutes at each breast, but with Jojo it only took less than ten minutes to completely deflate one breast and often he refused when I offered the other breast because he was already very full. So I became a nursing mom with one breast almost always larger than the other.

Info: Management of Breastmilk

There are several reasons why breastfeeding mothers need to express their milk:

1. They are working moms who are away from their babies during the day

2. The babies sleep soundly through the night (like mine) so the breasts get full in the night

3. The babies can’t latch on properly (tongue-tied, inverted nipples etc) so they get breastmilk in the bottle

4. To increase or maintain breastmilk production rate – ideally we should empty both breasts after each feeding

5. To relieve breast engorgement

We can express breastmilk by hand (the marmet method), using manual or battery/electricity operated breastpump. I never got the gist of hand-expressing, so I chose to use a breastpump instead. During the first few months when the production rate was still low I used a manual breastpump, then during the peak period of breastmilk production I used an electric breastpump which gave more milk at a faster time. Working moms often chose double pump that can express both breasts at one go, very useful if you have limited time to express at the office. There are also pumps with massage feature to induce the let-down reflex. Nowadays there are myriad of options regarding breastpump types and brands, you’ll need to do a thorough research before deciding to purchase one. Or you can just receive one as a gift and stick with it, like I did.

The Third Month – feeling alive again

One of the first thing we did once Jojo hit his three month mark was taking him for a swim – well, a float really. Theoritically even newborns can swim, but we clueless parents just didn’t have the guts to take him swimming when his neck wasn’t fully functioning yet. It’s quite scary to hold him with his huge head falling from side to side, let alone drop him in the water. But once he could hold his head up, we put him into a swimming tube and watch him float. We filled the tube in the morning and let it under the sun to warm up the water before Jojo took a dip in the afternoon. First he could only last for about 15 minutes, but gradually he was able to stay longer and longer. He was really a water baby, so in his element while floating!  Before long we were able to take him swimming in the normal outdoor swimming pool, and enjoyed each swimming session together.

Jojo was a happy little baby, always smiling and making gurgling sounds. He started to see better, recognized our faces and made more movement with his hands and feet. The loose newborn skin was starting to be filled in with flesh and the spots on his face started to fade away, leaving clean soft chubby cheeks. His hair hasn’t grown at all since we shaved him a month ago, so he still had a bald head with uneven spots of hair which the unprofessional barber aka daddy had failed to shave off.

Info: Breastfeeding

Right from the very beginning of my prgnancy, hubby and I had decided to breastfeed exclusively. We requested in our Birth Plan that no formula or sugar water should be given at the nursery room unless for emergency medical purposes. We also requested that early breastfeeding initiation should take place right after the delivery. We were planning for waterbirth but ended up with a Caesarean section instead – hubby steadfastly stuck to the agreement and followed the nurses to make sure no formula was given to the baby. He even took it up a notch and brought the baby to be breastfed off me at the surgery room even before I regained my consciousness – the ob-gyn was still stitching up my lower abdomen.

At the first attempt, no milk came out for about 15 minutes, and Jojo cried angrily. After a short break we tried again at the recovery room, I wasn’t fully conscious yet so one midwive and one nurse held the baby while Tom hovered near me. This time the colostrum came out and Jojo had his fill for some time. And I’ve been breastfeeding ever since. To this day, baby Jojo has never known formula.

First Month With Jojo – the horror!

There was a reason why the maternity hospital’s VIP room provided a mirror so tiny that it could only fit 3/4 of my face. It was to shield me and other new moms from the harsh truth.  The first thing I did when I got home (after greeting my dogs) was taking a long hot shower and hairwash (with hubby’s assistance since I was still wobbly from the C-section, plus the scar wasn’t supposed to get wet). In the view of my full-length mirror in my bathroom, I cried out in dismay. I was a total WRECK! With my unwashed hair and oily face, super wobbly stomach that looked and felt like pudding, swollen breasts that were just as wobbly, ass and thighs that were still as big as in my pregnant days, I looked a total fright. That’s not all, folks – I’ve developed ugly red rashes on my stomach from the tummy wrap AND scratches on my butt from the hospital bed’s waterproof sheet. Yuck, yuck, yuck. It was almost as if I wasn’t human anymore, just a broken package to be discarded.