"Fotherhood"

I had to go home in a hurry this morning since B informed me that the milk I’ve left for baby seemed to be sour already. It was expressed last Friday while I was on travel. Since I was home from Saturday to Monday, I was able to nurse baby by myself so we just stored the expressed milk for today. Expressed milk is supposed to last up to 7 days when refrigerated. Obviously, something must have gone wrong – contaminated bottles (which was likely since I did express the milk while I was on travel and not at home where I get the bottle straight from the sterilizer), not storing it well (I had kept the milk in a cooler while I was on the road which could have not been enough considering it took me almost 4 hours to get home), etc.

Anyway, when I got home this morning, I immediately fed baby. My Mom who happens to be there reproached me for getting the baby hungry by my insistence to feed him purely on breast milk. The discussion leaned towards our having to resort to mix feeding. For a while, I relented. So B and I both figured out the directions indicated at the back of the milk’s tin can. We bought a can of formula a week before I was due to return to work, in-case we might have to resort to mix feeding. Thank God we haven’t resorted to that yet! Perhaps for now :( Heaven forbid!

Being pesco-vegetarian ourselves, we opted to have a soya-based formula for baby. This, with the assurance from our pediatrician that it could meet baby’s nutritional needs as cow’s milk formula can. It was a little tricky trying to figure out the directions at the back of the tin. Instead of the usual 1:1 ratio (read: 1 scoop of milk for every 1 oz. of water), it said something like 1 scoop for every 60 ml of water. We understood that fine. The confusion came when we checked the chart for how much to feed baby vis-à-vis his current month-age. The chart jumped from 2 months to 4 months. That left us somewhat clueless as to how much to feed a 3-month old baby. We figured maybe somewhere in-between. Since we’re talking about our baby’s well-being here, we felt quite uncomfortable having to leave everything to guess work. So we opted to ask some close friends whom we know are bottle-feeding their babies. Bolo called up Vince, a close friend of his who also just recently became a father. The whole time they were talking, I was laughing silently. I really found the whole thing amusing. Well, it’s funny, here are two men who are supposed to be “macho” (read: very much into sports and outdoor activities and well, a “little” into womanizing in their “younger” days) swapping information on the basics of bottle-feeding he-he-he cute! :)

The fact that Bolo is very much hands-on when it comes of taking care of our baby is something that I’m truly grateful about. I thank God everyday for that. The fact alone that he obviously dotes on our baby is enough to make me happy but to see that he really takes an active part in taking care of him tops it all for me. Thank you B, for being such a good “fother” to our son.