Posted by: tituteo | March 28, 2007

Confinement Mate

The Man returned to work today. After 2 1/2 weeks of staying at home and serving me like a princess, I feel kind of lost now that my right hand man is missing. It was a busy 2 weeks. Our days were filled with the baby. Seth feeds at 3 hours interval, taking about an hour per feed. Meaning we’ve really only got 2 hours between the end of one feed and the beginning of the next. It took awhile for my wounds to heal and I was practically on the bed all day, feeding the baby or expressing milk (I feel like a cow… moooo). Daddy will be busy sterilising the bottles, running up and down, in and out, bring me food, bringing baby his milk from the fridge, washing this, cleaning that.

Contrary to myths and old wives tales, we’ve decided to do away with confinement maids. I figured since I’ll be breastfeeding my baby, the confinement maid’s tasks are really limited. And lucky for me, it’s made possible cause my sis’ in confinement too and her mother-in-law has offered to cook an extra portion of confinement food for me. Yummy! I suppose the best part of confinement is the food! All the fragrant sesame and ginger and dunno-what home-made wine! I like it! =D

Other than the food, I really detest the red date drink that I’ve gotta drink all day. I used the hospital’s excuse. “In hospital, we are encouraged to drink water to prevent dehydration.” Heh… so I supposed it’s not really a taboo to drink plain water bah… imagine 1 whole month without drinking plain water! Think I’ll go bonkers! =S

And whoever says women can’t bathe in confinement must be living in the Antarctic! With such hot weather and humid environment, taking a hot shower once a day is almost killing me already! And so I used the hospital’s excuse again… “I was told to shower and keep my wounds clean to prevent infection.” Heh! Thank God my confinement mate is very encouraging in this. A confinement maid would have stopped me otherwise! (Oh well, fact that I’ll be sleeping next to him at night makes a difference I suppose.. =/ )

I guess in this age and time, it’s really impossible to keep to those confinement laws. For example, I’ve gotta shuttle between the polyclinic and home every few days to get the baby’s jaundice condition checked. How is it possible for a mother to stay home the whole month when there’s so many things to be done? And no air-con nor fan? Kill me…

And now that I’m almost strong enough to do things on my own, it’s time to get some work done! Parenthood is taxing, but I suppose we are coping well. For someone who initially wanted 5 years of courtship before marriage and maybe as many years before childbirth, I think the Man’s doing very well coping with fatherhood in a mere 3 year span! =D


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