Moringa oleifera

Two things finally gave up on me as the new year took its first tentative steps into becoming. The passing of the first made me feel as if I’d lost a good friend. The second one continues to linger, but its faltering left me in a panic so hysterical and a sadness so deep that I sought a support group (hilarious really, Missus I-can-do-this-on-my-own-thank-you-very-much, finally asked for help).

The first one to reach the end of its path was my good old trusty electric breast pump. A gift from my aunt, it was Woog’s best bet at partaking from his mommy’s fresh milky goodness when she resumed work four years ago, and it was Eli’s as well…up until recently, when, despite Atch’s conscientious efforts at repair, maintenance and replacement of parts, it finally gave up its feeble ghost.

Almost immediately and all too soon, my milk ducts followed (oh woe! oh discordia!) I was in a state of denial, convinced that the success of motherhood depended on a neverending supply from the mommy pumps. And Eli barely six months old!

Who else can feel as useful and as needed as a breastfeeding mother? The very idea of being the beloved baby’s primary source of sustenance. The endless nights of jumping up at said beloved baby’s cries and the offering of one’s breasts to be suckled dry. The stinging cracked nipples. The muscle-constricting drum-tightness of mammaries screaming to be emptied. All that bleary-eyed sacrifice eventually becoming a source of righteous pride: here stands before you a nursing mother.

Even if my milk had slowed from its previous squirty gush, Eli still woke me every two hours in the night, like clockwork. He still fed for the usual half-hour before falling asleep. But the suspicion that I had become nothing more than this huge human pacifier wouldn’t go away.

I went online at my favorite parenting forum, seeking a solution, even going as far as inquiring if it were my modest bustline responsible for the dwindling milk supply.

And among those wonderful fellow mommies’ suggestions of increasing fluid intake, frequent nursings and imbibing cerveza negra (black beer), I found this: Moringa oleifera. The malunggay leaf, that bitter vegetable and bane of my childhood. More importantly, it came in capsule form (very convenient should I start gagging on a surfeit of malunggay-based broths). I went out and got some. I also bought a manual glass breast pump which promptly fell and broke (nerves? Nah, just the looming prospect my impending milk extinction).

Eli isn’t complaining, even if he has to work quite a bit to get his quota of milky goodness. He’s a very complacent baby, particularly now that he’s started working his gums around his first solids: what’s a trickle of milk when there’s that fantastically yummy banana & honey-flavored oatmeal to look forward to? He seems to say.

Ouch.

But I continue to take my malunggay pills religiously, hoping to delay the inevitable. And maybe, just maybe, prolong my usefulness – if not for my baby’s sake, then for mine.

Bite Me...And Everything Else As Well!

My younger son is teething. He drools on everything during the day, and at night when that maddening itchy-ouch starts gnawing at his poor mandibles, his sharp cries wake us in the night.

We have given him paracetamol, cold wet towels and teething rings. We have rubbed his gums with chilled xylitol gel and waltzed him around the apartment in the dead of the night singing “Moon River” while he whimpers and grinds his gums against our shoulder blades.

And in the mornings we stagger groggily downstairs, Woog with his eyes still encrusted and his brows bunched in protest. Eli meanwhile gurgles cheerfully at our zombie-selves (Good morning, my family! Isn’t this a wonderful day?), runners of saliva flowing from his grinning mouth and glistening on his chin.

I try to assure myself this is temporary, even as he bites down hard on my nipple and pulls it out like taffy (and I try not to cry out too loudly lest he choke on his meal in terror). Surely that tooth will rear its milky head soon, and we shall all dance with joy – yehey, one out, thirty more to go!

We are lucky this time, though. Woog, when he was teething, had the sniffles, a wheezing flu, a temperature hovering at 40 degrees (104 degrees farenheit), and a stint of barfing and wet bowels that ended with him being attached, screaming, to an intravenous drip. Of course we were younger then, and had the energy to stand sentry for two nights straight while he screeched, struggled to dislodge the needle, vomited and shitted his way to recovery. Eli’s suffering, and consequently ours, is trivial in comparison.

(Papa God, You are just indeed!)

And with that in perspective, we shall hunker down and grit our remaining teeth while our son sets out to grow his.

Happy Year of the Fire Hog!

We started out the year with our previously reliable high-speed DSL internet connection lumbering about like a well-sated sow. Apparently all pertinent fiber optic cables connecting us to the hub in Taiwan were badly dislodged after the earthquake last December. Dubious, I tried out a couple of internet cafes (and alas!), it’s the same case everywhere, and will be so till the end of this month.

Oh well, least I can do is open my mail and take a look at the e-cards I might have missed last year. That and to fling my wish in the air to the gods of north, east, south and west that this year turns out to be a bountiful year of lechon pig for everyone (high cholesterol count in mind, I mean that in the strictest figurative sense, of course).

My Very Brief Interview

I've been interviewed at "5 Minutes for Mom".












If I knew I'd be posted over there, I'd have taken the interview more seriously. Oh well....

My Favorite Sandwich...

The Mommy sandwich

Clogging The Blogosphere in 2007

Like all adventures I enthusiastically embark on, including marriage and motherhood, blogging took me on a frenzied journey of obsessive-compulsive recording of all thoughts and events within my personal jurisdiction, including but not limited to, sex, bowel movement and body fluids. With due deference to my nearest and dearest, however, vicious editing also became part of this adventure.

I have always enjoyed writing. When I could, which is not always. When I started blogging, I envisioned churning out e-pages and e-pages of e-words and e-letters every single day, without having given a single considerate thought to aforementioned nearest and dearest who happen to take up 99% of my waking moments (Eli takes up 60% of my sleeping ones, as well).

My nearest & dearest

Well, good morning! Wake up and smell the poopy diapers! Writing on this blog every single day became the exception rather than the rule. Which is sad. But not entirely unsalvage-able. So when the previous year came to a close just recently, I found myself falling upon that convenient make-yourself-feel-better contrivance used by all kiddies and kid-ish everywhere – (oh woe is me!) The New Year’s Resolution.

Which is not to say I am writing on this blog every single day. This is nigh impossible. I have resolved to write at least once a week, more if I have a surfeit of blogables to e-yak about. So now that leaves me with the entries I would’ve e-jotted down if I had the time, this last quarter of 2006, in no particular order:

1.) A Stroke of Fate

Ia was the first person within the realm of emergency that surrounded my mother-in-law on that fateful morning she had her second stroke. The toddler, as was her wont, made her early morning forage into her grandparents room where Nanay was asleep. Upon hearing Ia loudly babbling her way into drawers and shelves, Nanay got up to intervene. Or at least she tried to. Ia, if she could talk, would have told us how her Mama fell to the floor and stayed there. Instead, Ia burst into tears.

It was as if an ambulance siren had gotten stuck into all our heads that morning. We ran up, we ran down, we ran through both apartments. Through it all, my sisters-in-law, both doctors, moved with such calm, surgical precision (pun unintended), considering it was their own mother who was laid out limply, half her length paralyzed.

Atch and Sam carried her to the car, and all who could piled themselves in. At the last second, a worried-looking Woog squeezed himself up front with his Lolo. And with Eli in my arms, I waved them off to the hospital, mumbling prayers half of which I now don’t remember.

Before the stroke: two-week old Eli with his (grand)Mama

Long story short, Nanay spent a fortnight at the hospital, and she came home almost immobile and depressingly silent. After three months of wheelchairs, adult diapers, frustration-related tantrums, rehabilitation and constant medication, Nanay took her first shambling walk in public along the scenic paths of a nature resort, in the afternoon of her 69th birthday. How she smiled.


2.) Dulac Attack

Or rather panic attack. Because this was the state I fell into when I discovered that Dumex (and its World of Nutrition) was pulling their operations from the Philippines.

It started out innocently enough. We went grocery shopping and it just so happened our regular supermarket had run out of Eli’s favorite (read: can’t live without, spit up everything else) baby formula. The next day, I visited a couple more stores and wasted more time combing shelves until a sympathetic and helpful (a very rare state in these creatures) salesperson told me that Dulac, as I knew it, had ceased to be.

Oh. My. Gawd.

After a panicked consultation with Atch, and a highly emotional plea launched via email through the Dumex website (unanswered, blast them!), I decided to go through every single drugstore downtown, because, in theory, the smaller retailers are usually the last to hear the news, and because, in reality, these drugstores won’t care about so-and-so company going out of business as long as they sell what they have on their shelves.

New problem: not enough cash (at least not for the 3-month supply I was gunning for). But I had plastic. And so, near-violent reactions from Atch notwithstanding, I made a cash advance for 3-months’ worth of milk formula on my credit card (one finally has a picture of how small a town this is where the drugstores have no credit card technology whatsoever).

Eli now had enough Dulac to last him until his 6th month (and his mother a 5% cash advance surcharge to pay off). What happens after that? We’ll cross the bridge when we get there.


3.) Woog Swallows His Tears

Statements that have touched my heart from that King of High Drama, my older son:

(Sulking) “Don’t love me, just love Eli.”

(…and related to the above) “I want to be a baby again.”

“I don’t belong to this family!” (after throwing a tantrum and kicking out the glass from a framed carving of The Last Supper given by my Mom)

“I have a surprise for you, Mommy…” (just before handing me a bunch of tiny red flowers plucked on the sly from our landlady’s garden)

“I don’t want to be born anymore because I’m always misbehaving.”

“I’m really really really sorry, Mom…I love you!”

I love you, too Woog. So much.


4.) Free Instantaneous Birth Control

Turning up the nasty has been so difficult, nay impossible, lately. We have a curious pre-schooler in the next room (“Tatay, Mommy, what are you doing?”); we have a baby with an uncanny radar for pheromones launched into the atmosphere (“Waa-aaaaaaaah!”); and given my propensity for staying mostly awake at nights, the thoughts of peeling my eyes open to engage in (what used to be) our favorite pastime is just too much (“Oh no, are you kidding me?!”)

Poor Atch. It’s been taking longer for me this time. Post-Woog, I bounced right back into the game. After Eli…well, old age must be creeping up on me. That and whatever hormones might be channeling their energies into lactation

Still, hope springs eternal.


5.)Welcome To The Christian World, Elijah Raphael Tiples!

6.)Yellow Rice

Atch said I couldn’t do it, at least not in such volume (“think of the waste”), not on my first attempt, and not with so much at stake. He left me all alone to do it, too – taking his longest siesta ever, while I slaved over my “project” for four hours. Four hours!

At the end of it, I flicked the sweat from my hot brow and presented all and sundry with two well-turned out (I won’t say perfect, Atch wouldn’t stand for it) pans of valenciana, all 6 kilos of it. One pan I gave over to Door # 4, the other we brought to my family for our annual Christmas noche buena feast.

My family took one look at my “creation”, and fell to. My brother, the doctor (he of the garlic beef stroganoff and nutty choco-caramel brownies), took a couple of bites and pronounced it “not commercialized”. A miracle of verbage from him, if there ever was one.

Congratulate me, never again shall I be known as the only Demandante sibling who cannot cook.

Her Lumps…Her Lumps…Her "Lovely" Lady Lumps…

Define Mommy-envy. It’s when you think other mommies are doing a much better job at mothering than you are.

Which really sucks. Because you believe you’re busting your ass going all-out at trying to be the best mother in the world, setbacks notwithstanding. And since when has this become a competition anyway? Or so, you try to tell yourself.

I was godmother to Irene’s Eyla over the weekend. And I spent half the time ogling the teensy five-month-old princess who was wetly gumming a soft hand-toy and ogling everyone back with her wide-mouth grin.

After the ceremony, a mommy-group of fellow godparents eventually formed with Drixie, Eunice and myself, and we talked shop about milk formula; which ones were the cheapest, which ones our kids could stomach. And diapers. Oh diapers, that disposable budget drain!

Eventually the talk came around to breastfeeding, something I was entirely confident about. Or so I thought. Imagine my shock when Eunice shared about expressing an average of 24 ounces a day when she was breastfeeding her Mishka. Irene waltz over to our table just then and bragged of her 20 ounces a day, over and above the volume she squirts out to her exclusively-breastfed daughter.

I was still attempting to process this information, when Drixie (this sage mother of four) turned her long-suffering gaze to me, and sighed, “you’re lucky you don’t have this problem.”

And they all had this cringing look of remembrance of the fever-ache of ready-to-burst milk ducts, that I had to swallow my modest claim to the 8 - 12 ounces that I painstakingly pump out at work.

Saddest of all was the realization that these were friends who were not trying to put me and my efforts down at all. They were practically congratulating me on my pain-free breastfeeding, while they tottered around with their crippling D-cups, leaking milk. I looked down at my modest-B’s, and sighed. And I thought I had the nursing veteran-ship down to a tee.

Define Mammary-envy.

12/04/06