The three weeks have been a blur as I've been busy doing the Dada-thing.As to be expected, our little Ikai has taken much of Elvie's and my attention and not writing on this blog is unfortunately one of the consequences. Being the sweet, little baby that she is, Ikai has demanded our attention, most especially the attention of her mother.
Our little baby is not a cry-baby, literally. She does bawl when she needs something done -- a diaper change, a change of clothes, or when her stomach grumbles. Other than those times, she occasionally cries when she's already in the verge of sleeps but needs the closeness of her mother (and when her mother is unavailable, moi) to finally knock her out.
Of course, our normal lives have been blessedly disrupted by Ikai. In fact, my normally insomniac life turned for worse because of baby-taking-care-of-duties that often occur just when I was about to fall asleep. As to be expected, Baby Ikai cries once or twice during the hours when you're supposed to be asleep but it's a welcome interruption of sleep nonetheless.
During the first few nights, I had to take over from my wife in taking care of the baby when she couldn't fight off sleep. I may not have mentioned it before but unlike myself, my wife needs her 8 hours of sleep. So, when little Ikai decides not to sleep by around 11:30-ish, Elvie (already groggy with sleepiness) will hand over the reigns, so to speak, and I have the gargantuan task of making sure Ikai gets fed, gets diaper-changed and not make a scene enough to wake up not only my wife but the neighbors as well.
I'd like to think I succeeded in that. Being a part-time insomniac helped, of course.
Later on, we developed tactics so that Ikai will be asleep during the same hours we were supposed to be sleeping. It helped as well that Ikai got used to sleeping 4-5 hours straight before waking up and crying for milk. So, now-a-nights, Elvie and I get roughly 4 hours of straight sleep at least before Ikai sounds of her feeding time alarm.
Ikai has developed a voracious appetite that amazes and alarms us. The prescribed two ounces infant milk formula is just an appetizer for her. Now that Ikai is breastfeeding, we can no longer measure how much milk she consumes. I believe Ikai has made nursing a comfort zone. She prefers sleeping being held by her mother than falling asleep in her crib. She also prefers to fall asleep while feeding which is problematic for us because we have to burp her and thus interrupt her sleep.
One of the hardest baby-stuffs to do was actually burping the baby. What made it more difficult was the fact that being a hairy person (beard, moustache, and hair on the chest, arms, etc.), I had to avoid letting my hair touch the baby's still-delicate skin otherwise, she'll develop rashes. While Elvie can burp Ikai with the baby's head tucked securely by her neck, I do it clumsily because I have to make sure Ikai's face does not touch mine to avoid the rashes.
I also was supposed to do some work while I was in my hiatus but unfortunately with Elvie focused on Ikai, I had to be the one to run errands. Despite having a househelp already, some of the other errands like the grocery trips, wet market excursions, bank visits, etc. still had to be done by yours truly. I like to believe that these were indirectly related to taking care of Ikai too.
Ikai will turn one month old on December 18 and we are planning a small celebration to mark the occasion.
I've made a blog for my daughter, you can visit it at http://ikairagandan.blogspot.com.
