Debuted as parent 2 years ago, the journey has been an emotional roller coaster ride. With parents who have the heart but no the strength (有心无力) to help, our life is so much busier an energetic bunny in the family. Below is the word of advice from my friend when I asked him before I started my parenting journey.
“Days are short. Nights are long. Parenting is fulfilling journey when you learn to embrace and enjoy it.”
Anonymous
Reminiscing past 2 years of photos, every single one makes the sacrifices on sleep, me-time and couple-time worthwhile. You will realize that they are growing up so quickly every single day. I, sometimes, hope that they will pause for a moment so that I can take some time to indulge. Being there with them in their growing up journey, and capturing the moments help me a long way in my parenting journey. Because these are the memories that will let me overcome the difficult periods.
As first-time parent, I had anxiety issues that inadvertently causes stress to people around me. So, I would like to share some useful tools and materials, as well as the mindset that I should have when I started on my parenting journey.
3 Useful Apps for Parents
Glow Baby is a tracker app that allows you to track feeding, diaper changes, sleep cycle and milestones. The basic tracking features are free. It also allows you to add caregivers so that multiple people can log the details of your baby at the same time. Though the premium version provides you pattern analysis, I personally don’t find them particularly useful. The historical chart in premium version gives good visual overview, but the same information can be filtered out using the free version.
I was writing down manually on a book for the first few weeks. However, I realized that tracker app is very handy when doctor asked about historical feeding and diaper change. In technological advance society, our phone with us the most. There is negligible chance leaving your phone behind as opposed to a hardcopy book. If there is no particular app that you are looking for, you can give Glow Baby a try. Otherwise, I recommend that you find a tracker app that suits you.
Wonder Weeks is a paid app (S$6.98) which lets you understand all about the 10 leaps that your baby will be going through until he or she reaches 18 months old. A leap refers to a period of rapid development, allowing your baby to gain new abilities after that. Just like how you experience pain or soreness in your muscles after exercising, your baby is also experiencing something similar during the leap. This also means an increase in the most dreaded 3Cs (Crying, Clinginess, Crankiness). Wonder Weeks gives a good gauge of personalized leap period and things to expect so that you can empathized with your baby. As human beings, we always need to rationalize why things happen. When babies cry, we often attribute it to hunger, diaper change, overtired or illness. If we cannot soothe them based on those reasons above, we get frustrated easily. Wonder Weeks give us a better understanding what our baby’s development, and to interact with him better after every leap.
Xiao Hong Shu is an social media and e-commerce application that my wife frequently uses to find food recipes for us and my boy after he started on solids. Xiao Hong Shu’s users share their lifestyle, experiences and content through posts in the form of videos, photos and texts. Majority of the users are early 20s & 30s, consisting of mostly female users. Hence, my wife found quite a lot of good contents and interesting recipes posted by young mothers. The catch is you will need to be able to read Chinese for most of the content. While there is also an e-commerce aspect, we did not use it before.
Sleep Training
Sleep training is to train your baby to have good sleep hygiene and be able to sleep independently with any form of external aids. Just imagine that you can just put your baby down during bedtime and kiss them goodnight. They will then be fast asleep after a while with minimal or no fussing. No more carrying them to sleep or using of baby cradle. Though my wife is all for sleep training, I was 50-50.
With such tempting benefits, the thoughts that I had during sleep training makes me half-hearted:
- He’s crying so badly after I leave the room. How do I know if he really needs something?
- He seems to be crying longer than what was written in the articles or blogs. Maybe he really needs something?
- After I go in and soothe him, he seems to be even more agitated. Are we doing anything wrong?
- Perhaps he is still too young to be doing sleep training?
However, those thoughts are the main reasons why I failed in sleep training multiple times with my wife. This means multiple meaningless crying for my boy, and meaningless stressful nights for us.
So, please read up on sleep training before starting to avoid going through what we went through. I recommend joining the Facebook group “Sleeping Like an SGbaby”. They provide good reading materials and guides that help to debunk some myths of sleep training. It is crucial that both parents read the materials. Both needs to have the same understanding and agreement, be it whether to commence sleep training or the method to use.
We engaged a sleep consultant, Lavinia (Our Little Chicks Sleep Solutions), as it was hard for me to rid my thoughts. Therefore, it was good to have a 3rd party expert that assures us that we are doing it correctly. Sleep training was definitely worth the effort, or the money if you are thinking of engaging a sleep consultant. One key important note is consistency which needs to be maintained even after sleep training. I will share more on the journey of sleep training separately.
Baby-led Weaning (BLW)
Baby-led weaning process empowers your baby to feed themselves. The typical age that most guides recommend to start BLW is about 6 months old. They should be able to sit by themselves, and have the tendency to grab things towards their mouth. BLW helps my boy to train his motor skills in pinching and picking up food. His oral skills to chew and swallow the food also improved quickly over time. I appreciate through the process he learns how to feed himself and there is no need to chase him around with a bowl and spoon on hand during mealtimes.
In the BLW process, you may hear a lot of gagging at the start. I was really worried initially, but it is a reflex to help them push the food out from their mouth to prevent choking. Messiness after each meal is also a norm as opposed to typical Asian mindset where you don’t allow your kids to play with food. So do prepare to do some cleaning after every meal.
Do read up on BLW before starting on the process to know the Do’, Dont’s, and what to expect. My wife highly recommends “Solid Starts – Introducing real food to babies”. The website provides a lot of information on starting solids and BLW. There is also a food database that provides a list of foods that are suitable for different age group, starting from 6 months old. This was also when my wife gave herself a challenge to let my boy tries 100 different food before the age of 1 years old.
Mindset as Husband and Parent
I had mentally prepped myself to be a parent. I was all ready to take on the parenting role with an expectation of 180o change in lifestyle. After my baby boy was born, I had pretty much help out with everything I can, hoping that my wife could get some rest. This back-fired badly as I became so stressed and fatigue in being overly focused on our baby that I end up quarrelling with her. I neglected my role as a husband to take good care of my wife during the parenting journey.
As the saying always go, “Happy wife, Happy Life”. The conclusion that I had was there should only be 1 main caregiver for everyone. Wife takes care of baby, husband takes care of wife. Postpartum emotional mood swing is real. Even though it may not be displayed on surface, husband needs to extra care of wife after baby is born. My wife once shared that she could not bring herself to love our baby boy for the first few weeks postpartum.
There will definitely be sacrifices of me-time as the dynamics in the family is no longer the same. If you are not able to leave your baby in the hands of your parents or in-laws, I recommend taking turns to enjoy the day or night off so that both of you are able to maintain your sanity. It is perfectly normal and healthy that you spend some time on yourself.
Ending Thoughts
As a first-time parent, I was especially anxious and wanting to provide the best for the baby who is young and vulnerable. I look forward to them growing up well, picking up abilities fast, and sometimes concerned that they seem to be lacking behind other children or not developing the skills as expected. In my humble 2+ years of experience, the most important thing is being healthy. As long as they are healthy, there will be tons of opportunities for them. Every baby is unique just like you and me, hence there’s no need to be super concern as long as they are growing up well and healthily. In parenting, the rewards mostly do not come in any physical form, but an indescribable feeling of euphoria when you see your baby achieving the milestones and their display of affections for you.
Enjoy the journey!
