An Addis Ababa New Year

May the new year bring health, wealth, good cheer and less depressing news feed. And more regular blog posts even if my only audience is the middle of the night net trawler from Ukraine. Hi! Happy New Year and thanks for reading !

I am not alone in starting the year with aspirin and coffee

The featured macchiato

Mixed juice - Guava, Avocado and Mango

I am starting my Addis New Year very appropriately in a coffee shop, fighting and rehydrating an incipient  hangover with macchiato and juice. We had a wonderful end of the year celebration last night at the Indian Embassy which is the mother ship, shielding us from home sickness on the occasions which count. After much debate we decided a toddler free new year celebration would be in the best interest of both parents and aforementioned toddler, considering that his bedtime is at 9.30 pm and that the party would continue till, well, the new year. We executed the toddler bed time routine with military precision, stuff him with food till he is green- trick him into drinking milk twice-hurried bed time book-diaper change-double socks and lights out. Of course the toddler sixth sense alerted him to his impending abandonment and he tossed and turned and fought sleep with his last awake breath until finally succumbing by 10.30 pm, after which we did the change clothes-token make up-wake up nanny and careful right side of the road drive, finally arriving by 11.00 pm. It was all worth it. Drunk dancing under the stars on a perfect chilly night is the best way to bring  in the new year. And we were still back in time for the 2.00 am milk and cuddle.

So why am I rehydrating in a coffee shop instead of having a lazy morning in bed ? Because I work for an Ethiopian company and Ethiopia follows a unique Ge’ez calendar which means it is 2005 now, New Year was in September and Christmas is next week. The Ethiopian Christmas falls on a Monday – two day weekend! We are taking a short weekend break at Wolliso and will be back to start Vihaan off at his new play school after the Christmas break. My new year resolution is to post both a review of the trip and of Play Schools in Addis within this month, we should all keep our ambitions grounded and realistic.   

  

Note:

 I wrote this post on 1^st Jan but did not post because the photos were stuck in my phone because Google including Gmail is suddenly not working on Android devices in Addis and it took me four days to transfer photos by cable. Me and Ethiotelecom are a lethal combo, as of this date the glitch has still not been fixed.

First cough

My baby has a cold. If I wore a saree, I would be wiping his snot with my pallu. There are very few things in this world more pathetic than a baby with a cough. I am now inducted into the league of parents who lie awake at night cringing whenever their baby coughs.He has a blocked nose and hence he can't breathe when he starts sucking his thumb. But hey, thumb sucking is way more important than oxygen, so he has cycles of stick thumb in mouth-laboured breathing-pull thumb out, gasp for breath and yell with annoyance. Entertainment comes in all shapes and forms.

Back to the mother ship

I took Vihaan to get his Hepatitis B shot today. We still consult the Paediatrician  who attended his delivery at the same hospital he was born in. This is reasonably convenient except that we get caught in peak office hour traffic in the mornings. The alternative would be to consult him at his clinic in the evenings. I still brave the traffic and go to the hospital because Vihaan has always been scheduled for a vaccination at each of his visits. Now, here is a trade secret. Big hospitals with a busy paediatric department administer a lot of injections in a day, so think of it as a restaurant with a high turnover. Automatically their injections are not stored for too long as they are used up continuously. When getting your shots administered at a private clinic it is possible the vaccines may have been in storage for a while. Some injections are available in multiple user vials, that is once opened they can be used for multiple injections. These especially may be dangerous if they have been stored after they have been opened, for lack of sufficient number of patients on the same day.

I like going to the hospital with Vihaan because it provides me with a visual confirmation of how much he has grown since we first started going there.

So at our initial visit he was among the smallest babies in the waiting room except the premies. Then gradually month by month I started seeing more babies his size until today when he seemed to be among the bigger ones. The little sleeping wrinkled faces with the tiny clenched fists gave me a pang because Vihaans tiny baby phase already seems so distant. Meanwhile Vihaan was on his best social behaviour- jumping, squawking and wriggling at all the entertaining babies and bright lights. The hospital visits also let me know how well we are keeping up with current baby fashion. I get pretty jealous if I see a kid in a smarter outfit or a nicer stroller. Also it enables me check out the other mothers to see how well I am faring on the post partum weight loss game ( Not too well, my current regimen consists of eating cheesecake and muttering under my breath when I see Padma Lakshmi in yet another bikini ). I sure as hell am not going to look like that at one year post partum, above or below the neck.

 I am eternally grateful that babies have the attention span of a fish because that means Vihaan cries for about 3 seconds after an injection before getting distracted by something and going back to normal smiling mode.   

I don’t need mummy no more

As I didn’t post at all for three months after Vihaan was born, I haven’t written about any of the basic  baby blog topics like breast feeding and diaper changing yet. I didn’t really put much thought into breastfeeding during my pregnancy because well, breastfeeding is good so just do it, right? Surprisingly, in the hospital I delivered in, I was given the baby only on the day after the delivery. Apparently babies need very little feeding in the first two-three days after birth which is when the milk starts to come in. Up until then, the breasts secrete only small quantities of colostrum  or pre milk which is sufficient to nourish the baby besides containing essential antibodies. Fortunately, I had absolutely no problems with the baby latching on or learning to feed. We were off and running from the first try itself. Initially, the baby used to feed every three hours regular as clockwork. However, he also used to feed for an hour at a time. Apparently a baby sucking efficiently can empty a breast in 6-10 minutes. However, they also have a “need to suck” which is variable in babies. I was feeding on demand and not by the clock, I decided to be guided by the baby on the duration of the feed as well. As I was spending upto seven hours a day feeding the baby, I shifted a straight backed chair with arm supports into the room and acquired a feeding pillow. This is a soft half doughnut shaped pillow which fits around the waist on which to lay the infant. As I am a creature of habit, I fed on the chair even in the middle of the night. It has become second nature to grab for the remote before settling down to feed. I have watched a lot of sitcoms over the past few months. I later realized that maybe feeding in the bed might have been less disruptive of my sleep cycle but I never got the hang of it. Usually the baby was as anxious to go back to sleep as I was although there were a few nights when we were up to hear the morning azaan. I had the usual anxiety for the first couple of weeks about whether the quantity of milk was sufficient and ate arhar dal and other weird herbs to increase milk production and felt appropriately like a cow. The anxiety was not helped by my mother in law commenting that the baby was hungry each time he howled. He is a baby. He howls. Thats just how it is.

It took me about two months  to get really comfortable with the whole feeding deal. At about ten weeks, my son the angel started sleeping for longer and longer stretches at night and gave up his three a.m. feed by twelve weeks. He was always regular as clockwork about his three hourly feeding schedule ( I could feed him, hand him over and dash out for dinner or shopping ) By his fourth month, he has started having longer gaps between his daytime feeds as well and the duration of each feed has reduced to twenty minutes. I could leave him at home long enough to watch a movie in a theatre when he was four and a half months old.

The current guidelines recommend that you start weaning from breastmilk only after six months. Many paediatricians however continue to recommend that the best time to start introducing semisolids is at four months. I don’t have much choice in the matter as I will be resuming work full time from April when the baby will be five months old. I initially considered expressing breast milk for his daytime feeds but after much research decided to opt for early partial weaning. I will of course continue to feed him when at home. Next came the question of what to wean him with. I have started him on Rice Cerelac for one feed and it seems to be working well till now. I started with a couple of spoonfuls and have gradually increased it to three scoops of Cerelac. He learnt to eat from a spoon easily and the photo is evidence that he seems to enjoy it.

I am planning to substitute one more feed with formula milk ( Nan 1 is the most recommended brand ) By the time I start working, I plan to feed him in the morning before leaving, at 6.30 a.m. He will be fed Cerelac at around 11.00 a.m. followed by a bottle of formula at 2.00 p.m. Traffic conditions permitting, I should be home for his evening feed by 5.30-6.00 p.m. I also tried to feed him a bit of mashed banana yesterday which he spat up promptly. I am planning to replace the formula milk with a puree of rice, dal and vegetables next month. Fingers crossed, it should all work out well.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed feeding the baby and all the warm, fuzzy feelings it generated. Literally as well, it was all warm and cosy to cuddle in December. It was great fun watching him grow like a weed on nothing but milk. Magic Potion ! Also, power! I am the Master of your Universe kiddo! Definitely going to miss this phase when it is over.