Mothering Corner

I received an email from a reader asking about nipple confusion, but I won’t reveal who she is.

Firstly, just remember that a baby is born as innocent and as pure like a piece of paper. She doesn’t know much, but she has the basic instinct to search for the breasts which God created as the food source of any mammals. But if the baby is introduced with bottles before she has a strong association between milk and breast, she will most lightly to have nipple confusion. That’s why most experts will advice mothers to breastfeed exclusively for the first 6 weeks, if possible. If you have to supplement, use the feeding cup and avoid introducing pacifier or bottles.

You can start introducing the bottle to your baby 2 weeks before you return to work. Just replace one feed at a time with expressed milk in bottle and see how your baby takes it. Some babies are very particular and they will reject the bottle, just like my little gal. But some will take bottle easily, like my boy. I didn’t have to look high and low for various teats for him! After a few days, you can increase the number of feedings with bottles as if you are away at work. But please be reminded that you will have to express your milk, if not your production might be decreased.

Anyway, some babies don’t show nipple confusion at all. It’s all depending on individual baby. I have 2 extreme babies, so I know.

Out of all my blogs, this is the only blog which has the same page rank since many months ago, but I’m not sure if it will still hold on to it since most of the blogs are demoted. But anyway, no one knows if the updating process has been completed, and I can’t do anything about it either.

I have a lot of my mothering experiences written here, with or without the page rank, it will still be a mothering blog of mine. That doesn’t affect much. But if other parenting websites are affected, especially those with web stores, then something has to be done to secure their ranking in organic search engines, especially Google. Maybe they will need to get a website optimization firm to look into it and see if there is anything can be done about it. But for the time being, I don’t need any website optimization firm because I can’t afford one anyway. LOL!

But let’s see how. To me, no changes is the best for current situation. No matter what, this blog will still continue as my mothering corner, but not mainly on breastfeeding anymore. It’s been 4 days that I stopped being a moo. So far, everything is progressing well.

I am still thinking if my boy should be attending his nursery until the end of the year. I am thinking of dropping him from school so that we can celebrate Christmas season at my parents’ place, if he doesn’t have to go to school. But I haven’t made up my mind yet.

If we can’t make it, I hope that we would get some gift baskets for my friends and relatives who are celebrating Christmas too. I know that we have some online gift basket services from some florists in Penang, but none could beat the variety of gourmet baskets offered by iGourmet.

But if possible, I would prefer to send the baskets ourselves, it’s been a while since I last visited some of my close friends and relatives. It’s the season of greetings and joys, don’t you wish to see your loved ones too?

After more than 2 years of nursing 2 children, I can finally declare that I’m no longer a moo, even if it has only been for 3 days. My gal bit me a lot recently because there wasn’t much milk for her anymore and she got frustrated. She has been supplemented but she’s still not taking much.  But it’s time to wean her off since the supply is really low now and I have no intention to increase it.

She still comes and asks for milk, but after some talking and persuasion, she will continue playing by herself again. It’s just that she needs a lot of  rocking to fall asleep and I have been rocking her a lot for the past nights. I didn’t sleep much, and now it’s even worse. But I am willing to do this now as she’s ready for it.

Hopefully, she will be successfully weaned off in a week.

We got another stroller recently for my boy and a few days ago, we went out with 2 strollers. My kids are not used to confining the strollers for long hours and we ended up pushing 2 empty strollers in shopping mall during that outings. Hubby said having 2 strollers were troublesome, and I joked that we might just get a tandem stroller. LOL!

When we had done shopping and wanted to go home, hubby couldn’t fold up the new stroller. Both of us were not familiar with it and he gave up and put the whole stroller in the truck! Luckily we don’t have the tonneau cover that covers from the top, if not I don’t think it can be closed. However, without the cover, all the shopping bags and strollers would be wet since it was a raining day. Thank god our truck has a cover at the back!

So, after that outing, I doubt hubby will go out with 2 strollers again.

I fell in the bathroom and had a deep cut in my foot before, so since then I will be extra careful about the bathroom and keep an eye on my kids when they are using it. My boy hit against the tap once when he was brushing teeth and playing with hubby, and he had a really swelling boo boo on his forehead! So, bathroom is a place that we have to be extra watchful of.

On top of that, we try not to install those Taps that come with an easy notch for both hot and cold water. Sometimes, children will accidentally turn on the hot water and may get themselves scalded. I prefer those taps that come in pairs like this:

Then we are easily tell the children which one not to be used, especially the one with the hot water. I don’t care much about the taps at home before I have kids, but now, a good design with safety elements can help to reduce the bathroom hazards.

One of my friends is going through the treatment for her cancel right now and she told me that she has been suffering from hair loss. It’s not too serious, but I asked her to watch out for it. My mum is a cancer patient and I have been through the surgeries, radiation and chemotherapy with her. I know what to expect during or after the treatments and at most time, hair loss is unavoidable.

But no matter what, it will grow up. If she’s not a cancel patient, then she can try out products like provillus. But if you have some medical history, it would be better if you talk to your oncologist first before trying out any products. But hair loss is only a temporary condition. My mum was on wig for some time but now she has all her hair back. As long as we are healthy after the treatments, let’s not be over stressed about the hair.

I think this blog should have started since the day I started breastfeeding. Then it will be easier for me to share my experience. I’m not sure if I have blog all about mine but one thing for sure, I’m not going to be a moo forever. However, I will have some new readers leaving comments or email me about breastfeeding tips and advice. I know that most of us can read from parenting sites or related materials, but sometimes, we want to hear from the real experience.

But I won’t be able to blog about breastfeeding alone forever. I will be out of topic soon. LOL! But hopefully this blog will be around for as long as possible as a record of my breastfeeding and mothering journey. Thus, I might as well just backing it up with Raid Data Recovery Service from Data Recovery New York as it’s hosted in a private server. Too bad I have no idea to reboot my own server yet, so I will have to ask my web host to do this for me.

But one thing for sure, a blog that is started out as my own breastfeeding journal as evolved a lot. Most of our blogs do, we can’t just be blogging about the same topic over and over again huh? Unless it’s my kids blog. That will still center around them.

I met one of hubby’s business partners today and we had a little chat of our kids. He mentioned that his kid loved only branded clothes like those from Nike and Adidas, and he’s only 12 years old. I joked that after a while, he might want his daddy to change the handphone every month and also demand for a nice car!

It’s pretty common for kids and teenagers to have peer pressure and most of them are willing to follow to group to be in the gang. When I was in uni, there were a lot of parents from the East Malaysia who got Car transports to send over the cars and motorbike for their kids in JB. The Car transports charges may be expensive, but most parents prefer to send them the cars.

Maybe one day my kids will be asking for things like these too, but it’s still too early to worry about this. That’s why I decided not to send my kids to private school. Most of the kids there are rich, and what if my kids would like all the best things they can get before they know how to make money?

Government schools are not perfect, but my kids will have a place to set their feet on the ground.

I haven’t seen a kid who doesn’t like playground. My kids will always notice the playgrounds before we do whenever we are moving on the road. Both of them will be pointing at the playground excitedly and asking hubby to stop the car. Of course, we don’t stop the car unless we have plans to bring them to the the park.

I suggested to hubby that we could just get a playground set as I know a person who has intention of selling off her set at a cheaper price. But the thing is, if we place it in the garden, there are a lot of mosquitoes there and the children cannot play on the grass all the time. Other than that, we don’t have a place for it.

So, let’s forget about this idea unless we found a piece of land for sale which we can afford it and it’s big enough for the house and the set. LOL! But by the time we have made up my mind, the playground set is gone. So let’s just stick to the public playground at the park. Besides, most schools have playground too, so there is not need to get one.