Baby @ 21 Weeks

Its a girl! We are going to have another girl.

We had our detailed scan this morning and the gynae pronounced that baby will be a girl.

Sure... we don't mind either ways, although it would indeed be nice to have a pair of kids with mix gender.

This way, there are several pros immediately. Firstly, the name has long been decided. Way before we planned for #2, we kinda decided on another name for a girl. To date, we are still clueless about a name for a boy.

Secondly, there's economies of scale - I've got lots of Faith's clothes neatly packed away in wardrobes. Clothes that are mostly in good condition. We might not need to buy too many, although we still need to buy a few new pieces e.g. for the home trip from the hospital and for the 1-month baby shower.

Thirdly, girls are sweet. Faith is... so we hope #2 would be too.

The detailed scan indicated that all is fine with the little one. I'm a little jittery myself though. I'm nearly 5 months along and my total weight gain so far is a miserable 2 kilos. Jittery becos I only ply on 8 kg the last time with Faith and she came out so small at birth.

Most certainly, the tummy looks a lot bigger this time around. I think the size of it is closer to how big I was with Faith at about 6-7 months. As much as I hate to admit it, I think some of that 2 kg weight gain might have gone the way of my hips and butt cos my maternity jeans feel snug when I put them on.

So, if I've put on weight, my tummy is bigger this time around (I'm sure its becos the tummy's less elastic this time) and I've only gained a miserable 2 kg, I'm wondering if its going to be another low birth weight baby despite best efforts and measures to work around it.

Oh well... as always, the key is as long as mum and baby have a safe and uneventful delivery. There's really not much I want to ask for at this stage :)

Deepavali Treats

Louis and I are fortunate to have known and count many Indians among our network as great friends. Even though we have always enjoyed the local Indian fare, it is through our Indian friends that we'd learnt to understand and appreciate the culture a little better, along with the great curries, dals and myriad creativity of the cuisine.

And becos a number of them are vegetarians, I've learnt to make a few vegetarian dishes along the way and picked up other dishes from my own little limited collection of Indian cookbooks to create my own favourite home-cooked Indian dishes.

We really dig the diverse and tantalising Indian cuisine and on the occasions that I do make some of these dishes at home, Louis would be happily mopping up the curries with roti/naan or covering the top of his basmati rice with it.

Today's Deepavali, as it is known in Singapore. For many of our friends who are of Northern Indian origins, it is called Diwali. I guess they mean the same thing, just that its called differently depending on whether its in Tamil or Hindi.

Our neighbour right across from our units are Indians. Other than the nodding of heads and the occasional smiles when we see each other on our way home or in the estate, we have not really built much rapport or talked much to.

However, in recent months especially, they have been particularly friendly towards our little girl, smiling and talking to her when they see her at the lift lobby. Maybe its becos Faith smiles a lot even to strangers or kids just have this knack to break the ice even among the most reticent of adults.

This morning, the door-bell rang at lunchtime. When we opened the door, it was to find our neighbours with 2 big bulging plastic bags, filled with containers of briyani, chicken and mutton curries, prawn masala dishes and Indian sweets.

We were absolutely surprised and touched by their gesture. In fact, when I was reading early this morning in the living room at 4-ish am (I've become an insomniac ever since I'm conceiving #2), I could already smell the tantalising aroma of curries wafting through the corridors and into our unit.

They must have been hard at work, chopping, cutting and preparing to cook all the curries and great food fresh for the festive season.

It was a lot of food for the 2 of us and Louis brought most of the food for our in-laws. The great thing about curries is that they keep well and taste even better a day or more after cooking.

So, Louis and I are going to have us a great lunch today, compliments of our neighbours.

To all our Indian friends out there, Happy Deepavali or Diwali!

#2

Most friends that we know of who have had 2nd kids professed that they adopt a less hands-on approach towards their offspring for a number of reasons. Or rather, they display lesser anxiety and are generally more laid-back compared to being first-time parents.

That might well be true for us too going by the number of posts we have posted on our #2 so far.

Zilch, nada, zero, none.

After reaching the milestone of the 3rd month, which we could publicly inform all and sundry that we are expecting #2, I had merely updated our profile to indicated that there's a bun in the oven.

So now, I'm about 19 weeks along, or think I'm about 19 weeks cos I keep losing count of how many weeks along am I, and other than close friends, I've not really made any announcement on this blog.

So there you go. Now you know. We are expecting #2 in a matter of months.

Do we know the gender yet, do we have a preference for which and when am I due?

For the first question, we'd probably would be able to find out at the end of this month when I go for my detailed scan around the 20th week. Do we want a boy this time since we already have a girl. Well... I'm not sure. All we are hoping for, given our last experience, is that mum and baby would have a safe and uneventful delivery.

Technically, I'm due on 12 Mar 2010. Owing to my placenta abruptio from the previous time, the gynae is pre-empting that it might happen again. So, we are targeting for me to go for a scheduled c-sect around the 37th week. That would put it around end Feb 2010.

I do hope that with this post, we would be a bit more diligent about our posting. After all, we do not want our #2 to feel neglected.

Toddler toilet seat

The verdict on Faith's potty training is that it is a veritable success.

So successful that in the day, she no longer pees in her diapers even when we put it on for her for those "just-in-case" moments. Like when the public toilet isn't of desirable hygiene, or when we can't rush her to a toilet quick enough.

This week, I left her in our master bedroom for a moment to grab a towel for her shower. When I got back in just a matter of seconds, I found her balanced on our adult toilet bowl, peeing.

She was rather steady on it. She had managed to balance herself quite well on it, with her 2 hands holding on to the sides for support.

What scared me was how did she managed to scramble up onto the toilet without assistance. And the toilet seat was rather large. Large enough to potentially be a hazard as she could fall into it and hurt herself if she wasn't careful.

I told Louis that we needed to get a toddler trainer seat for her pronto. And we did it in a great big hurry.

It wasn't the most ideal but there weren't a lot of choices for trainer toilet seats. The trainer seat was merely placed onto the existing toilet seat, although its got 2 little handles by the side for little hands to grab onto. It wasn't totally stable and could shift as Faith tries to position herself onto it.

Thankfully, the little one wised up rather quickly and manages to employ a fairly effective method of getting herself up onto the toilet seat with the least precarious movements -- by stepping up onto the little stool that we placed in front of the toilet bowl with her backside facing the toilet set before inching herself up slowly.

Faith now has two options - use the potty that we placed outside the common bathroom or the trainer seat in the master bedroom if she wants to do her business like the adults.

Our new toy

There's a stronger impetus to blog more often.

We have a new toy in the house ever since the start of Comex '09. After more than 5 years of pinning, I've finally managed to justify the purchase of a DSLR. Our favourite test subject needs no second guessing. She's the key reason and most often blogged about person in this online "diary".

Dinner was at Hard Rock Cafe tonight, at the request of my elder BIL, who's recently back from a one and a half month overseas working stint.

We managed to capture Faith at one of her happiest moments -- being together with her two cousins. Her expressions in these few pictures are those of unadulterated joy and pure delight...

Faith at 2 and a half

It has been a while since I blogged. During this time, Faith has grown to be a fountain of endless surprises. At 2 and a half, I thought it is timely to recap the milestones that our little girl has reached....

Potty-Trained (fingers-crossed)

If you would recall, in one of our earlier posts in Dec 2008, we described how we had unsuccessfully "tried" to potty-train Faith. Back then, we had bought two types of potties - a modern-looking one from IKEA and a traditional "trophy" cup that mum-in-law purchased from a provision store at Toa Payoh.

In any case, after close to 9 months, as our little girl would say - "I did it!!" - all thanks to mum-in-law's perserverence. And as you might have guessed, tradition triumped over modernity and the "blue pot" proved more functional than the IKEA one.

It all happened quite quickly last week. Last Wednesday, when I picked mum-in-law and Faith from JG, mum-in-law proudly recounted how Faith was now able to pull down her pants and pee into the potty on her own. It seems Faith had also pooped into the potty - however, when she did it that afternoon, she had cried when she actually "did the deed". However, that evening, just to show that her daddy could really be proud of her, she actually, on her own accord, ran to the potty, pulled down her pants, and popped one more time into the potty and this time round, not only were there no tears, our little girl proudly said to me, "I did it, papa!" (of course :)).

All this has been really timely as Eve and I have not been able to find Pampers Dry Large for sometime now!

Drawing and Painting

Faith has been playing with her Magna Doodle for some time now. Where she was first largely fascinated with using the Magna Doodle to trace her hand and footprints, she has since graduated to scribbling things on the board on her own. Recently, she picked up drawing a bunch of grapes, using the circular magnets provided. And she now does it quite deftly - first imprinting the circles, and then drawing the "stalks" of the grapes. Given the amount of practise that she gets at Bishan, practically every weekend, doing colour painting with my parents, we are all secretly harbouring hopes that our little girl would at least be a little more "artistic" than her mummy and daddy.

Finger Dexterity

One thing I learn as a parent of a precocious baby girl is how kids tend to "rotate" their toys with seemingly no predictability. Perhaps they get bored easily. And perhaps, they never tire at challenging themselves. Faith recently rekindled her interest with the "bead-maze". Just some context to how this toy came about: When Faith was still at the Little Gym, Eve had chanced upon this toy at a store next to the LG. This was about a year back - and she was quite convinced this was a good investment for Faith, to help her develop her finger dexterity. When she brought it home, I recall that Faith got bored with it pretty quickly as she was unable to really manipulate the beads.

Things have changed. Faith has recently been keen to experiment with the bead-maze. Just this evening, she pulled the toy down (it is pretty heavy) from the console. And she proudly demonstrated how she could "transfer" a bead from one end to the other, through the most difficult maze. Imaginably, Eve and I were so proud of her :)

Piggy-bank

It just occured to me that Faith's milestones in this blog all revolve around something that Eve invested in :) Ditto for the piggy-bank. Eve had bought this nice piggy bank that gave a "oink oink" sound whenever a coin is deposited into the bank. Since then, whenever Faith sees any stray coins lying around, she will duitfully deposit them into her piggy bank. Our little girl somehow figured that there must be a way to take the coins out and she had kept pestering us to show her how. But so far we've managed to keep that a secret. Hopefully the day she finds out how to take the coins out, she would also be sensible enough to put all the cash into a savings account and not have it scattered around as toys :)

Happy Birthday to me

I didn't want any celebrations of any sort.

Absolutely not in the mood for any kind of celebration since healthwise, I haven't exactly been feeling dandy for the last few weeks. The family agreed to just doing a normal weekend dinner like we always did.

The concession was that we adjourned to Prive for desserts thereafter. Younger BIL wore jeans for the night and paid for desserts at Prive, both of which were in honour of my birthday :) Its a big deal when any of the 3 brothers in the family wear jeans cos they are perpetually clad in bermudas.

HM & E proposed to have dinner too on a weekday, which we usually do whenever one of our birthdays are around the corner. I begged off.

They gave me a great surprised on the actual day, which was Monday.

They sent a cake and a basket of flowers. Faith immediately lay claim to the teddy bear that came with the flowers, declaring that "I love my present! I love my bear!" and put words to action by smoothering the bear with wet kisses :)

We cut the cake that night. Faith lapped up the cake and the strawberries decorating the top of the cake.

Thanks, guys! I loved it!