Child Care woes

We took the babies for the 9 month developmental check today. They're 9 months today. I've survived 9 months as a mom! Amazing. Anyway, the joy ends there because I got severely told off because Baby J is what I fondly call an anorexic baby. She's at the 10th percentile for her age and she's about 700gm smaller than Evan. And the doctor basically tells me that the girl needs to drink more milk. Don't I know it?! My response is, we try to give her as much as possible but she has a mind of her own or is what Daddy fondly refers to as a 'strange puppy'. She is. She won't drink if she doesn't want to. Then the doctor asks if she drinks any water and I said yes she does. She likes water, she drinks water with her food and when she plays and gets all sweaty. That's when I get pounced on and chided for giving her water. Her rationale is that if I gave her water, she wouldn't want milk and I'm puzzled. I'm a natural water baby myself and drink about 4 litres of water a day but it's never stopped me from being hungry. Apparently, according to fierce doctor lady, every time she needs water, I'm to replace it with milk. At this point, Aunty D and I exchange sceptical looks. Obviously, she's giving us instructions for another child. The girl is smart enough to suss out milk hidden in her food, in the chawanmushi that I try to steam for her, the cereal that she has for breakfast or the porridge she has for lunch. She is like the little sniffer dog that she was when she was a wee baby, except, now it's sniff out and avoid. And I'm told to feed her milk whenever she wants. Demand feed. Again. At 9 months. My brain refuses to accept this. Because this means throwing what little sleep training they have out the window and I'm not really willing to sacrifice that because I still harbour the hope of them being able to sleep through the night.

So that's my mommy angst for today. And it's made worse by the realisation that a lot of this angst, I have no control over because I'm not home to dictate what happens with her. The carousel of care givers that help look after the twins all have had kids of their own and therefore think that they know better than any instruction that I set. This means my children end up, despite my best efforts to impose it, not having regular sleep patterns on certain days and eating everywhere out of their high chairs despite Packrat's insistence that they sit in the chair and eat for a good 20 minutes. I have likened it to having many chefs in the house. I often come home to a very stressed Aunty D because the other caregivers try to contravene my instructions and it really does seem that despite the fact that this mommy spends some of her time out of the house at work, she seems to have her pulse on her babies' behaviour and needs best. As a result of my instructions not being followed, the children are grumpy, crying, have had 80 ml of milk the entire day, have regurgitated their porridge and so on. This makes for a grumpy angsty mommy who got told off this morning for not doing enough to ensure her child puts on weight. Growl.

It brings me to the issue of child care. Unless I quit and take care of the children myself, I have to accept all that all these things are out of my control and they will happen. And with two bums to diaper, it's quite tough for us if I didn't work. Ok, I'm trying to justify it. It's second nature to me to try and justify it seeing that not only do I know Breastfeeding Nazis, I know some Stay At Home Mom Nazis who basically intone judgement on the fact that I work and how I am actually screwing up my kids by not being home or spending some couple time with Packrat, my husband.

But I have been reminded also that I don't have it bad. I got to know 2 mothers over the last week whose child care dilemmas are worse than mine. Both have their babies in infant care. One arrived at the centre one evening to find, to her horror that her baby was in the centre, with the door wide open nary a carer in sight. When confronted, the principal of the centre chided the mother for being late and since her carers needed to spend time with their families as well, they had been given permission to go home while the infant would be kept an eye on by a play school teacher who had 15 toddlers under her care. To make it worse, their idea of keeping an eye on the infant meant popping their heads in every now and again. Not a wise thing to do for an infant who'd recently learned to flip over but wasn't all that good at keeping her head up. I shudder to think of all the things that could have happened in the hour and a half that she was left there just chillin' on her own. So this mother has the unfortunate task of spending today scouring around for another centre to leave her kid at while she is out working.

The other mother was stressing about how the centre her baby was at had Hand Foot and Mouth and since I know someone whose child actually died from HFMD, it is something that sends deep chilling shudders down my spine.

I was talking to my sister-in-law about all the stresses we faced, having to juggle work with being a mommy and this is just the mommy part. Don't even get me started on the work part. Anyway, we were talking about it and she was saying that people needed to hear how hard it was, and not just people but the right people since there were lots of people, bosses included out there who don't have a sympathetic bone in their body and look at us mommies in disdain as we try to run as fast as we can because it's expected, by society, for us to be supermoms- breastfeed, nurture the baby/babies, spend time with the husband and be the career woman Bully to she who even dares to utter a squeak about how tough all of this is.


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