ask for epidural<\/a>. And boy, it was such a pain-relief. I could actually take a little nap during the contractions! :) I salute those so many women who had to endure the pain of childbirth during pre-epidural days.<\/p>\nI had the mind of taking care of Hannah myself until sometime into her 3rd month. During the initial period of adjustment to a different lifestyle, e.g. feeding, burping, changing diapers, bathing, playing with her and putting her down to sleep, everything was a new learning experience and though I was endlessly tired, I didn’t really mind caring for her full-time.<\/p>\n
It was only when things started to settle down to a predictable routine did I start to feel bored and somewhat down. Don’t get me wrong, Hannah is worth every bit of my time and attention. However, I feel rather detached from the world out there. Work, however much I complained about it before, seems to have its attraction to me lately. May be it is the intellectual stimulation at work that I’m missing. Or perhaps it is the society at large that’s missing. After all, I have studied and worked for like 30 years before a total change of lifestyle took place.<\/p>\n
I told Yang recently about how I felt about the absence of work and the guilt of the possibility of not spending more time with Hannah during her early years of foundation. I asked myself what Hannah would really miss if I were to go back to work. Will she be worse off than other babies who have their mothers as stay-at-home-mums?<\/p>\n
So here comes the question: How can I strike a balance before I go mad (Okay, that’s sounds a bit strong. Say, my neurones slowly deteriorate?)?<\/p>\n
Probable scenarios after Hannah’s first 6 months of life:<\/p>\n
Option 1: Take a few more months of no-pay leave and then return to work full-time.<\/p>\n
Option 2: Work part-time, i.e. work half-day (while Hannah is cared for by someone else) and mother half-day.<\/p>\n
Option 3: Put Hannah in the care of someone else full day and return to work full-time.<\/p>\n
The ‘someone else’ could be Yang’s parents, infant care centre or a domestic helper. Currently, we’re leaning more towards the infant care centre option due to reasons cited by Yang in his earlier posts.<\/p>\n
Sanity aside, it would also be better that I continue to help to bring in some income for the family according to darling’s prudent financial planning. Ya.<\/p>\n
I worry too that I might be myopic in my outlook. So ya, I’d love to hear opinions from others on the issues of childcare, if any. :) Thanks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During my pregnancy, I was telling Yang things like “I want to breastfeed our baby”, “I think I can tahan without epidural” (judging from my pain threshold), “I think it would be better that I take care of Hannah full-time”,<\/p>\n
Read More Ideals versus Realities<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-home","category-children-blues","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-7-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4983\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} ![\"blog-ideals\"](\"https:\/\/chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/08\/blogideals1.jpg\" "\\"blog-ideals\\"")
During my pregnancy, I was telling Yang things like “I want to breastfeed our baby”, “I think I can tahan without epidural” (judging from my pain threshold), “I think it would be better that I take care of Hannah full-time”, “Let’s go for 2 kids”, etc etc.<\/p>\n