Eaten alive

Yesterday Oscar and I met Krusty near his office for lunch (my new favourite hobby) and we decided to sit outside as it was not as hot as usual. But within 1 minute of putting my legs under the table, I was attacked by about 300 mosquitoes, resulting in what I think is the highest bite score in history for me.

This has prompted me to want to start a list of places that are baby friendly or not. L16 in Hong Kong Park: NOT.

Oscar's noises

Evil chuckle with lip smacking – I'm hungry
High-pitched squeal – I am enjoying this milk
Pout with raspberry blowing (and usually a violent shove of the breast) – I've had enough, thank you
Wistful sigh – Playing is fun
Rumbling explosion from below – Time for a change
Nga ger geeeerrr ga – I'm bored
Coooo – That's rather pretty (Oscar's very discerning)

Pride and joy

At Oscar's first postnatal check-up, he did everything he could to make me look like a good mother. First he wouldn't wake up for his tests, so I had to do the usual undressing him and shaking him around. Then, as I removed his nappy for him to weighed, he proceeded to do an explosive poo accompanied by a garden hose pee all over the changing mat, the floor, my shoes and my already sweat and breastmilk-stained shirt. The nurse was not impressed.

He had already done this to me a few days earlier – after feeling confident that we had the bathtime routine down pat, we skyped Krusty's parents to let them watch from afar. Of course, the first thing Oscar did as we lowered him into the water, with a giant smile on his face: do a giant poo, so that we had to draw the bath all over again.

And each time he has done this (I still occasionally get peed on, as if he is aiming), he has done it with a giant smile. I think he's going to be a comedian.

Should should should

The advice from strangers I had been warned would roll in started early, with two Chinese ladies who didn't speak English trying to tell me to put some socks on my son. I tried to get the guy they had grabbed off the street to translate for them to explain that it was 30 degrees outside and that both Oscar and I were boiling hot, but they wouldn't give up.

I have also been told, still by complete strangers in the street, that he is too big for his age, too small for his age, and that he should have a dummy.

And most recently, someone stopped me from getting in the lift to tell me that my son had incredibly pretty ears... Well at least that was a compliment!

Pillow talk

Hopefully Krusty is getting enough sleep for work now that we are settling into a routine – in the beginning he must have been sleeping lightly, as he cradled a pillow in his sleep, passing it to me every time the baby cried...

One night he woke three times: first he asked me what the baby was made of to be so soft; then he said "but the baby can't be there, I have him here!"; and on his final attempt to pass me the pillow, he said, with a sigh, "there's not much point in me cradling this baby, is there, since it's a pillow..."

I was relieved when he stopped – I was starting to worry that he was turning into one of those crazy ladies who play with dolls as if they were real... Not sure that his new colleagues would have understood him taking a pillow to work in the baby bjorn...

To do list

I am looking forward to NOT buying these shoes...

Family tree

We have of course not been able to escape the traditional game of "who does the baby look like", and initially Krusty was not too impressed with the results – he couldn't recognise himself at all in Oscar. I could see it, but he got to a point where he asked me if he was actually the father. I assured him that he definitely had his father's ears (although apparently our Columbian friends told us that in their language, that was code for "he's not yours").

Then, as we were changing him the other day, Krusty exclaimed "he's got your father's bottom!" Surely a statement only half as weird as the fact that Krusty knows what his father in law's bottom looks like...

Lemon drop

This morning, at our latest check-up, a lady asked me if Oscar's father was Chinese. I guess he still has jaundice then...

It started at the five-day check-up, when we found out that Oscar's skin was above the normal levels of neonatal yellow. Basically, babies are born with more red cells than they need, and often their livers aren't producing enough bilurubin to metabolise them. I just thought our boy was golden, turns out he was ill.

When the nurse told me, I was non-plussed as I knew that it was a condition that affects about 40 per cent of babies born in Hong Kong, but then she abandoned the usual hospital robot talk for a second and said "I'm sorry, I know this must be hard for you..."

I hadn't even considered it until then, but in that moment I realised that I was about to be separated from my child for the first time in nine months.

Then I experienced a minor version of the baby blues. All of the emotion of the past few days (and months) came pouring out of my body, and I cried for three days in a row, while Oscar got a tan in his incubator. I felt guilty crying so much in a hospital unit full of babies with tubes coming out of their noses, mouths and hands while all my baby was doing was getting a sun tan, but I couldn't control myself.

Those nights, I had a recurring dream about sprinklers bursting with urine, worried as I was about Oscar's peeing – frequent urination was the only way we could be sure he was evacuating the bilurubin from his system.

In fact I became obsessed with urine and faeces. Or to use the more medically accurate terms employed by the hospital – peepee and poopoo (it is so hard to keep a straight face when a doctor is asking you how many poopoos there have been...).

And because the incubator was so hot, every time I fed the baby I had to get him naked to cool him down and wake him up, much to the disarray of the nurses, who are advocates of layering and swaddling babies, not understanding my need to expose Oscar every time I came in. He brought the habit home for a while, too, making me look like a crazy woman every time I fed him. But if he didn't wake up, he didn't eat, and if he didn't eat he didn't pee, and if he didn't pee, he had jaundice.

I do worry that his stay on the tanning bed and his need to be naked have turned him into a nudist sunbather for the rest of his life, though...

He's pushing my leg

I don't believe in the tradition of the "pushing present," but it would have been nice to get a memento of the day my son was born, one that I could keep on me forever. Krusty disagreed, especially once I had had a C-section – he says the doctor should get a "pulling present" instead.

Then again, I do have a scar to stay with me forever. In fact, is it just a coincidence that we chose a name with the word "scar" in it?

My name is lagitane, and I am a sissypants

Upon leaving the hospital, the same nurse who had exclaimed "Wah! Big nipples! Your blests too big for baby's mouth lah!" came to give me a stash of pain killers, explaining that they were very effective and that I would need them because although "Chinese people could just take paracetamol, people with white culture do not have high pain tolerance."

Fine by me!

The aftermath

If contractions are impossible to define in words, then the sensation of hot, newborn skin against your breast as you feed a tiny new life for the first time can't even be fathomed.

Unfortunately I couldn't exactly concentrate on this new art I was being introduced to in the recovery room, because my face was so itchy (apparently a side effect of the epidural) and I had to keep asking the nurse to scratch my nose. Not that I was going to be prudish - I was still asleep from the waist down, naked for the most part and hooked up to a catheter... In fact that was the hardest part for me about the whole experience - nothing makes you feel sexier and stronger than a middle aged Chinese woman changing your nappy because you can't get up to change your baby's nappy, let alone your own...

The other challenge was the ward I was on - not in terms of staff (the nurses were lovely), but in terms of my fellow "in-mates". I could have been luckier - one woman wept uncontrollably all day, gazing like a zombie at her daughter, who meanwhile screamed for hours right next to my bed, and another spent all day complaining that she was being discriminated against because I was given the call button. Not that I couldn't walk or anything...

Meanwhile, I was simply content, getting told off by the nurses for not sleeping, because all I wanted to do was stare at the pink bundle next to me (Queen Mary babies start life in a uniform of white dresses and pink blankets - stylish!).

Sleep was difficult anyway, interrupted as it was by nurses taking my temperature, Oscar asking for food and, most impressively, bath time - that's when all of the babies get lined up as if at the car wash. Each time the door opens to gather another batch for bathing, a shrill orchestra of screams comes out, as if someone had opened the hatch to a chicken coop...

Soon, my own, self-administered bath time made me feel human again. The nurses couldn't understand why I wanted to wash so badly - apparently Chinese ladies like to wait a whole month before washing, but I just couldn't stand laying there in the same skin that had been drenched in broken waters not just hours, but DAYS beforehand. I think that's what made me recover the use of my legs so fast. I was ready to go home.

A shower also gave me the chance to see myself in the mirror for the first time since giving birth. The next day, I would feel even more whale-like than before, but for a few minutes I couldn't believe how small my belly was. How empty. I had been surgically removed from my son. Then again, I felt somehow more whole when I looked down at his cheeky eyes...

Oscar is calm, gentle, soft and so full of character. It's a cliché, but it's true: he has changed me forever.

This is it

On the Monday before the operation, I sat down to finish the knitting that I wanted to get done in the four days I had left. Bambino was doing his usual moving around, until I felt one very painful kick, and then, I was in a Hollywood movie. The nurses and books all warned me that the waters breaking was nothing like on film, where the liquid suddenly gushes all over the place. Well, true to my Bridget Jones existence, my waters breaking were very much like they would have been in a film - it felt like someone had emptied three bottles of evian between my legs. It was everywhere and all I could do was laugh hysterically.

I called Krusty in a panic, who told me to sit down while I waited for him to come back from work, and after updating my facebook profile (this was no time to be behind the times!) we left for the hospital. We rushed down to get a taxi, at which point the sky's waters broke too - we both arrived drenched at the hospital.

Unfortunately I had had a piece of toast before the excitement began, so the C section that I was still planned for (although now that it was an emergency operation Krusty would not be able to attend) would have to wait six hours until the food had passed through my system (otherwise I could choke on it in the event of general anaesthesia). And so I lay on the monitoring bed, sans Krusty and hooked up to all sorts of machines, as the nurse told me to relax.

I was quite cosy, until I suddenly felt what a real contraction was. The books don't tell you what kind of pain this represents. Then again, I don't think anyone could ever describe it adequately, or that anyone who hasn't felt it could ever understand. They say that the pain is equivalent to having an ear infection, but as the sufferer of numerous DOUBLE ear infections, I can confidently say that they came nowhere near the pain of labour.

By now I was worried that I would have to have the baby naturally (after months of "too posh to push" jokes, I was now more than ready to go under the knife to escape the pain that was escalating, not to mention the fear of my baby's umbilical necklace tightening to a choker on the way out), and I called the nurse, who immediately changed the plan and rushed me to the operating theatre.

A string of unknown faces appeared above my bed telling me to relax as I watched the neon lights go by on the ceiling. In no time I was in a very bright room full of women who had been summoned to lift me from the stretcher to the table. I burst out laughing as these eight or so tiny, fragile Chinese ladies tried to pull me over - me, the "obese" Westerner... I think they had called the entire staff to help for what would seriously have taken two people back in Europe. I mean, I'm not saying I'm skinny, but this was just hilarious! My attitude obviously did not impress the anaesthesiologist, who asked me what I thought was so funny...

A contraction soon called me back to order.

The same doctor then started to put my legs and abdomen to sleep, telling me to co-operate between contractions, which had by then become about 30 seconds apart. The drugs took quite fast, and suddenly I was blissfully unaware of what was going on behind the curtain that had been placed in front of my chin. I couldn't even feel the tilt in the table anymore (this had scared me at first, as I felt I was going to fall off, but it is apparently designed to prevent the uterus from crushing any arteries. Then again for all I know this might be some veterinarian trick that they used on me because of the fact that my height and weight was off their charts...). All I could do was look up at the giant lights while someone played cheesy lift music in the background, saying "focus on the piano". It was all rather odd.

After a few minutes, I asked why they were giving me electric shocks (they were in fact moving things around to grab the baby, but it felt like I was the conductor for some weird electrical experiment). Someone said "Congratulations" and while I wondered why (had I guessed right about the electricity?) someone shoved a pair of testicles in my face, asking "is it a boy or a girl?" (apparently this is protocol in Hong Kong to make sure parents accept the sex of the child and don't accuse nurses of swapping babies - rather crucial when you're over from China and the one child policy makes you wish for a boy). But then, bambino was turned around, and I got to see for the first time the face that would melt my heart a million times a minute forever (well, until his teenage rebellion at least).

The OK story

Have you ever seen a dog that doesn't want to let go of a rag, growling as it thrashes its head from side to side? That's what my son likes to do with my nipple while he breastfeeds. But perhaps that's not the first thing I should mention in the story of Oscar's first month in the real world...

I should probably proceed in installments and backtrack to the last appointment before the birth, I suppose. I handed over my book (the one that says that I am a "chronic alcoholic" because before the pregnancy I used to drink more than two glasses of alcohol a week – which actually makes almost everyone I know an alcoholic...) and waited for the usual abuse, hoping that to the by now customary "you're obese" the nurse might add "you are a drug addict", just to spice things up. Instead, I found out that the C-section I was dreading was now a sure thing, and before I could even ask if the baby had turned around yet, I was informed that the date for the operation was booked. Bambino was to be born by the knife, six days before his due date.

Fear of the operation aside, after all that waiting I was rather keen to meet the little one, so giving birth a few days early suited me just fine. Although I had spent a few days feeling guilty because all I could think about was how bambino was going to change my life forever, and not necessarily in a good way. In a sense, my life had already changed dramatically, and I had gone from spoiled princess to simply a vessel for a baby who was already stealing away all of my attention. My husband would greet my belly first before saying hello to me, my friends could only talk about whether I was ready or not, and my parents kept reminding me to be careful and to protect their grandchild... But then I spent the day with my friend and her two-week-old baby Kilian, and I realised that it was all worth it. After a day of feeding, changing, bathing, burping and starting all over again, I felt overwhelmed with the love a baby can bring just by blinking.

I was also looking forward not to have to keep answering the same question - "where are you giving birth?" It is a fact universally acknowledged in Hong Kong that a woman in possession of a pregnant belly must be in want of an outrageously priced private clinic. Yet Krusty and I had opted for the public hospital route (where instead of the $100,000 package that then goes on to be charged by the hour overtime, we could pay the $300 bill with our automatic Octopus card), most importantly because Queen Mary Hospital is the best pediatric hospital in Hong Kong (plus it's located immediately behind the building where I lived with my parents the first time around... Full circle indeed).

So it was all planned. I would come in the day before to check in, and on the morning of the 14th May, I would become a mother. And because I had my deadline all set, I then moved on to make the very most of it in the meantime. Parties on rooftops, trips to the south of the island, dinner with friends... I tried to fit it all in...