Upcoming D-day, I mean B-Day

In two more weeks, Saya turns 1 year old. Even though it seems nice to invite all my seemingly close friends (even though I don't have many, they are all just golden), somehow I dread this day more than ever. I'm not a fan of big parties, as you can see. The closest to partying I do are family get-togethers and company picnics. After I turned 21, I didn't hit the clubs with my girlfriends. In fact, in the past 3.5 years since I turned 21, I only went to a club once. And it was due to going out with DB because he wouldn't go if I went and his friends really wanted him to.

Anyway, I've already written down my guestlist. I haven't invited all the peeps yet, but am hoping to outsource that task to my two closest friends and mother. I've compiled a little spreadsheet to enumerate our guests as well as keep track of costs and supplies; for food mostly. (Of course, parties are ALL about the food!) Starting next week, I will need to start gathering supplies. blah blah blah...party...man I'm really starting to despise party planning. (It will be one of the main reasons for holding off our "wedding" as long as possible.)

Update on Saya:
Still hasn't walked yet. Some people are already calling her a "slow" walker, to which I reply,"Hell yea! She's lazy as heck. We have her walk and after a few minutes, she'll get back down to the floor and start crawling." I think it's amazing how being born around the same time can subject you to all sorts of comparison. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but I try to avoid making comparisons that promote the idea that my baby is superior to others. She's not. What she is, however, is one sassy ass lil' baby. She has been very good lately as I can't even tell when she's teething. But last night. Well, I don't really know what it was but she wouldn't stop going to the tv yesterday and pressing buttons left and right. DB and I tried to have a decent movie night (watching our Forensic Files, man I love that show), but Saya's antics had us a little frustrated. After several failed attempts to keep her away from the tube, he put her in "time-out" (in her crib) for a minute. She wailed at the top of her lungs, so we took her out. She went back to her bad girl ways. Wouldn't breastfeed or sleep, so DB brought her back to the crib. Strangely, she instantly made peace with the crib and sat there for a good 15 minutes, playing with her crib toys.

New Trick for Baby

Saya learned to wave goodbye today. Hak pretended to leave because she has a tendency to cry when she sees him leaving. So he waved goodbye to her before walking out the door and she waved right back! The funny thing is, she doesn't cry when I leave. I tell Lah (hak's younger sis) it's because when I leave, I never really leave Saya. I always come back, plus I'm never gone for long. Hak, on the other hand, is often gone when he leaves.

Did I mention Saya also knows how to do the "touchdown wave?" She learned how to do it along with Ben a week or two ago. Now, Saya has the movement down pat. Just yell out "touchdown" and she'll raise her arms over her sides high up in the air.

You might wonder how or why I ever found the time to write my blogs today. Usually, I'm either surfing the net for more free patterns or knitting or crocheting and obviously, TAKING CARE OF MY PRECIOUS ONE. Fortunately, she fell asleep very quickly today. I didn't realize how tired she was until I brought her to the bed and she fell asleep within a matter of seconds. It's been reaaaaaaaaaaal hard to do that lately.

Thoughts on Breastfeeding and Going Back to Work

I've been contemplating lately, about going back to work; looking for a part-time or fulltime job. It really pains me to do so, because even at 11 months, it doesn't seem like Saya wants to give up the breastfeeding at all. She gets incredibly cranky when I'm not there to nurse her. Or is it because I don't want to leave my baby? I'm heartbroken, almost. Before I knew I was even pregnant with Saya, I wanted to be able to take a 2-3 year hiatus from work to stay at home with my children. It was almost fairy-tale like because I'd assume that I would be having children long after I established my career. But then Saya came along. I decided that I might as well take that hiatus now since I wasn't tied to a career yet. The really unfortunate thing about all this is that DB and I are only starting out in our post baccalaureate years. We're so dirt poor because he was laid off from his job. (It wouldn't have been so bad if he had taken my advice to NOT leave his previous job. But he disregarded my advice anyways because he thought the new job offered better opportunities. And now, he's laid off, without any unemployment benefits at all.) Aside from Saya and my healthcare, we are currently without any governmental support. We live with his retired father while our savings are hemorrhaging money. Hence why I'll have to join the job-search party when Saya turns 1 if DB hasn't found a job yet by that time. Now that I made the decision to return to work, I'll have to juggle with partially weaning Saya and looking for a job (both equally daunting tasks).

I tell you, there's just not enough cultural support for breastfeeding in America. I've already received numerous unsolicited advice from family members and strangers to wean my baby. I'm the only person I know who breastfeeds her baby past the three month mark. In some ways, this makes me very lonely at times. Even though I view it as an entirely natural thing, and there's this whole community of mothers who encourage and support mothers who breastfeed, I feel like I feel vindicated, almost, by those closest to me, for continuing to breastfeed my baby. (well, enough ranting about that. It's the same ol' incoherent me again)

I know I'm in a financial situation, but if it's even remotely possible for me to continue my relationship with my baby (if DB finds a job to support us until Saya goes to school), I'd take it. I've already made the resolution to purchase clothes only from the salvation army and make the occasion splurge on knitting and crochet supplies (so that I can one day make patterns and dolls to sell) as my only personal expenditure. Despite our money problems, I've been really happy lately. My craft has turned into an obsession. I realized that even though there's very little money in this stuff, I'm actually very happy doing it. I want to get real good, so that I'll be an expert on something for once, and not a jack-of-all-trades.

Sleepless in Chicago

It has become such a pain in the rear to put Saya to sleep. She seems to have dropped her second nap at the tender age of only 11 months, making it much harder for me to get some ME time. Saya doesn't seem to sleep at all at my will. I'll do things like nurse her, rock her, feed her solids until she's very full, bring her out for a drive (which often successfully lulls her to sleep, but not without her dissent; she still hates her car seat to death). When Saya was first born, it was a breeze putting her down. She slept through anything, even through Ben's incessant cries (Ben cried more than she did as a newborn), or a loud vacuum going through the house, or people's screaming. Saya slept so much it made Phuong, my older sister, wonder whether she was "normal" or "well" at all. I really took that for granted. I never had to put her to sleep. She just fell asleep. If only it could stay that way. 

My little sleeping angel slowly turned into a sleeping rebel. In a desperate attempt to get Saya breastfeeding again after a series of nursing strikes, I decided to cut Saya from the bottle altogether and breastfeed exclusively. When she finally took the breast again, she nursed from me practically 15-20 hours a day, which to my surprise, is not rare at all. Staying that long on the breast, it'd make sense that she took some of her naps there too. (It's a very bad habit that seems to run along the bloodline of little babies born in Hak's family) It really didn't occur to me at the time that I was developing a bad precedent by nursing to sleep. But then again, I couldn't help it either because I could never really tell whether she was nursing to eat or nursing for comfort. I didn't want to starve the poor thing, so I nurse on demand. It was so easy to nurse her to sleep. Whenever I was around, she wanted me to nurse her to sleep. Other people could get away with other sleeping methods, but I had to nurse her if I (and I emphasize that I) wanted her to go to sleep. And when Saya's asleep, it's usually ideal that someone sleeps with her so that she takes long naps. She can sleep for a block of 12 hours every night when she sleeps with us. 

Saya started sleeping through the night (STTN) at 3 months. That lasted for a good 2.5 months. She started to wake up more for night feedings. Thankfully, it was easy to put her back to sleep. All I had to do was pop one of my breasts for her and she latch on quietly while she drinks herself back to sleep. However, I'm a very light sleeper and any interrupted sleep means nothing to me. I hated it, of course. The night feedings became more frequent. When I tried to wean Saya onto the bottle at five months, the night feedings became even more frequent. Ironically, I can't seemt o get Saya onto the stuff that I tried to get her off when she was a young baby. Saya til this day, refuses to take a bottle again. As a new mother, I never understood how POWERFUL breastfeeding can be. I mean, the babies just LOVE that stuff, like a druggie on crack. I didn't anticipate that she would refuse a bottle since she was taking that stuff so well in the first three months. Anyway, by 9 months I practically woke up 3-5 times during the night to feed Saya. It led to a lot of resentment between me and Hak. He just has it sooooooooooo easy that he can sleep through the night while I laboriously do everything for his daughter ( i even bathe her and feed her while he "works fulltime", some inequitable division of labor I'm telling you!). I began to wonder whether it's because I breastfeed Saya and whether I had made a terrible decision to breastfeed Saya.  

Funny because it's even harder now to put Saya to sleep. She has become so easily distracted that she'll cut off her nursing occasionally to play with her surroundings and then relatch to nurse again. She might repeat that cycle throughout the bedtime routine an hour (or 2, or 3, or 4) before she goes down to sleep at night. I've thought about letting her cry-it-out, but failed miserably after one or two attempts. I've tried to gently Ferberize her, but that never really works either. Once in a blue moon, she'll fall asleep on her own (after Hak and I are dead tired). Last night, I had to literally pin her down to nurse her to sleep. Otherwise, she'd just roam around the bed looking for walls to stand against.

I presume it's because she doesn't have enough time to practice her walking and standing during the day. Hak and I try to give her plenty of that. We've definitely become more nonchalant about her dreadful sleeping habits. If we didn't, I think we would have gone mad. I picked up crocheting and knitting (again) lately. I've been crazy about it. Everytime Saya sleeps is an opportunity for me to further develop my yarning skills. It explains why I'm up at 3 am in the morning blogging about my daughter's sleep habits. Actually, I should've have been looking up more free patterns (all I can afford these days) on Ravelry, or updating my projects application. I can't believe I've completed over 15 projects since I started 3? months ago. But that's another story in itself.