Category: Baby

Our daughter, Lauren has been exactly a week today. It’s indeed been an exciting journey for both JY and me to care for the new baby.

I thought I was well prepared for parenthood, read many books, attended baby-care classes and also has taken developmental psychology before. However, it turned out dealing with a new born on a hands-on basis is quite different than what you can learn in theory.

I’ve learned quite a few things in the past few days. The following is the summary.

Things we are doing right:

• We are feeding the baby the right amount of milk. According to the Baby 411 book, new borns need to take about 18-24 oz of milk daily, and Lauren is right on, although she sometimes eats more than recommended, but we are not stopping her 🙂 Guess mom needs to pump more.
• By now, I’m the resident expert in diaper-changing. Since Lauren eats almost exclusively JY’s expressed milk, her stool is generally odorless. However, she does produce a prestigious amount of it, and this stuff sticks to everything. I generally follow the procedure as outlined in the Be Prepared book, and it works like a charm. Using that and the Diaper Champ, we can keep 20+ diapers in our room without the smell. I’m quite happy that I don’t have to run downstairs to dispose the diaper every time I change the baby.
• I’m also quite adequate at swaddling the baby, I can wrap the baby up just right so that she doesn’t overheat yet can’t pull her hands out from the wrapping blanket. It sounds easy, but believe me, it’s not. Read the Happiest Baby On The Block book for details on how to do swaddling right.
• We’ve created an “parent dashboard” on a whiteboard that lists all the vital information related to the baby, such as last time Lauren was fed, the amount, last time mom pumped and amount of milk in storage. With this dashboard (currently updated manually), we are able to anticipate the baby’s next move (right now it’s just crying and waking up) much better.
• I’ve created a “dirty bottle”/”clean bottle” system similar to the one posted on Baby Bargains site. I had to run up and down stairs multiple times before we implemented this system. Now I keep the dirty bottles at one place and just throw used stuff on top of it, and clean everything once a day. By my calculation, this saves me at least 5 minutes per feeding.
• I’ve also purchased a bottle-warmer. I know it wasn’t recommended by the Baby Bargains book, however, I found it really useful in keeping the bottle warm while I’m burping and changing the baby so when the baby is later ready for the second round of feeding, the bottle is warm.

Things we didn’t do too well.

• The clothing we got for our baby were all way too big. None of the them fit the baby snug enough for her to stay in it. I had to purchase some more infant body-suits to put on Lauren so her hands are actually in the sleeves.
• I have not mastered the art of “burping” – need to read up more and find out a better way to burp the baby so that she can finish and hold down all the milk.
• Lauren is much more active at night than during the day, she wakes up more, eats more, and generally has more energy during the wee hours. I’m not a night person, and I a sound sleeper. For me to deal with Lauren at her peak of energy while I’m at my lowest puts me in a disadvantageous position in dealing with her needs. I’ll need to make subtle changes to the feeding pattern to generally nudge Lauren into my circadian rhythm so we are both happier.

Here are some more photos of Lauren. You can also find all the new photos on the same album 妞妞照片 from the previous post.
  

I’ll bringing Lauren to see her pediatrician for the first time tomorrow. Hopefully things will turn out well. I’ll keep you all posted.

Hello again.

After spending four days in the hospital with JY, I’d like to let everyone know that we (JY, Lauren and I) are home now. We are accepting visitors, however, I’d much prefer if you call me at home before coming so I can make sure the time is opportune. The baby is on a sleep-eat-sleep-eat schedule, and spent most of her waking hours feeding. So don’t be surprised if the baby’s sleeping when you visit, btw, she sleeps like an angel (most times, sometime she has a strained expression while sleeping, but I was told that means she’s having a bowl movement).

Lauren’s birth was a wonderful experience for both JY and I. It’s indeed a miracle, to feel our baby growing in JY’s tummy, and then emerging as a whole new person, it’s really gave me a sense of awe.

We delivered at Eden Medical Center, which was a great facility. The rooms was quiet and large, I was able to stay with JY in the same room to care for the baby when it’s needed. We have our own private bathroom. The nurses were truly wonderful, and we found out it’s really the nurse that matters the most in a birth because they are the ones caring for the mother and baby most of the time.

Here is the the very first photos I took of Lauren (notice her full head of hair):

One especially great nurse, Esther, is their resident lactation consultant. She spent hours with us to show us breastfeeding techniques. It was of great help to have such an experience person to help us out because frankly, we were both clueless about breastfeeding. Here is a picture of Esther with Lauren.

We also had two groups of visitors during our stay in the hospital. One is our pastor Jay and his wife. Here is a photo:

The other group was four of Jiayin’s co-workers, here is a photo as well:

We actually told our friends to wait till the weekend to visit Lauren at home because the hospital has visiting hours and rules that are limiting.

Anyway, we are home now, and are trying to get Lauren adjusted to the home environment. So far, she seems to be doing fine. I have some more lessons to learn regarding baby care, and hopefully Lauren will remain health and happy.

I’ve also created a photo album inside my photo gallery named Lauren – the beginning. You can find more photos of Lauren with her mom and other people. Although I’m biased, I must say I think Lauren is very cute, do you agree?

Please continue to pray for us to adjust to home life with Lauren.

Please call me before you decide to drop by to see the baby.

Just want to let everyone know that our daughter, Lauren Alexandra Wang was born today (01/16) at 3:58am. She’s 6 pounds 11 ounces, and had an APGAR score of 9-9-9.

As many of you may have known, our due date got changed around quite a bit. It was originally 01/13. However, my wife’s OB told us the baby’s bit small, so after another round of ultrasound, the due date got moved to 01/23. Then the OB found out the baby’s in breech, she’s not coming down, and advised us to make a regular C-section for 01/18. That’s what we did.

This morning, at around 1:45am, I was waken up by JY’s screaming. She just found out that her water broke. I immediately called the hospital, and was told to get her to the delivery room ASAP. I drove JY to the hospital, trembling on the way due to excitement. When we arrived, the nurse on duty took JY in, plugged in a fetal monitor, and told us the baby’s doing just fine. She also told us that JY was not having any contractions, so there is no immediate need to deliver. She then called the OB on duty, and after conferring, they decided to perform a C-section quickly.

JY was in the Operating Room for about 45 minutes, she was put on local anesthesia, and was conscious during the whole operation. I was allowed in to hold JY’s hand during the latter part of the operations. There were quite a lot of blood, I guess that’s to be expected.

The baby emerged at around 3:58, I held the baby and showed her to JY. I then followed the baby to the nursery where a bunch of tests were performed on her.

It was the most joyous occasion in my life. Being a new dad, seeing the baby for the first time. She had a full head of hair, and was crying loudly and clearly. At this point, it’s hard to tell who she resembles more, my wife me myself, but time will tell.

I just want to thank all of you who have been praying for us, and who had inquired about our baby’s progress. I’ll post some pictures of Lauren as soon as I get a chance.

Please continue to pray for JY’s recovery and the baby.

Thank you and God bless.

As many of you know, we spent quite some time searching for the “perfect” name for our baby girl.

Our last post, Naming our baby part 2, garnered a lot of attention. Apparently, the author of the Freakonomics book commented on it as well.

We were overwhelmed by all the response, and went through each one of the comment carefully before we settled on Lauren Alexandra Wang.

We don’t believe that we’d go wrong with any of the final candidates. For a detailed explanation of our the selection methodology to get to the final candidates, please refer to the Naming our baby part 2 post.

There were many good tidbits of information in your comments. We decided to settle on Lauren Alexandra Wang because it rolls off the tongue quite nicely. It also has a timeless feel to it. Both my parents and JY’s parents can pronounce it without much difficulty (they are no non-native speakers of English), although they think Alexandra is a bit long for their taste. According to the statistics on the Social Security Administration’s website, both Lauren and Alexandra are fairly common names, however, we don’t personally know anyone named Lauren, so it’s should not be a problem telling her apart from the other kids.

The name Stephen Dubner recommended, Lucienne Rachel is a great sounding name as well. We did have two concerns though. First of which is Lucienne is a bit hard to spell and pronounce for the baby and her caretakers. And secondly, we are afraid people will shorten it by calling her Lucy instead, which is not as great a name.

Atara and Aviva are both very nice sounding middle-names, however, we think they are a bit too unconventional. We want our daughter’s personality to attract people’s attention, not her name 😉

Thank you all for your help. We’ll have pictures of Lauren Alexandra Wang as soon as she’s born.

I’ve been asked by some friends as to the parenting books one should read.

I’ve put together a brief list of the books that I’ve read on Amazon, you can find the books I recommend here.

Enjoy.

In Chinese:
好多朋友问我该看那些育儿书籍。我在Amazon网络书店上收集了一些我看过而又觉得必读的书。你们可以在这找到这个 list.

JY just came back from her examination. Her OB told her that because the baby’s head has not dropped, and that her scheduled delivery is about 3 and half week away, we should schedule a regular C-section. Her doctor gave us the choice of either A. performing an External Cephalic Version or B. a C-section. We need to make a decision soon.

The doctor also told JY that we can always cancel the C-section if the baby’s head does drop down into position. The only thing is the C-section will be 5 days earlier than her expected delivery date, so I don’t know if that’s enough time for the baby to work her way down.

JY and I have been doing a lot of research on this topic. The ECV basically involves the doctor trying to move the baby’s head into position by applying external pressure. This will be done on the day of the delivery. The risks are numerous, including the possibility of torn placenta or umbilical cord. If that happens, an immediate C-section will need to be scheduled, which is quite dangerous for both JY and the baby.

As you can understand, both JY and I are quite anxious about the decision. We’ve been praying for the baby to get into position for delivery. We’ll need to pray for the wisdom for the right decision. We’d like to ask you to pray for JY and the baby as well, please pray for the safe and smooth delivery as well as peace of mind for JY and me.

Thank you very much.

OK. It’s been awhile since we wrote our first naming the baby post.

Since they, JY and I have done quite some research, trying to find the best way to name our baby. I told JY that I remember reading from somewhere that the name one gives to the baby has a long-lasting impact on the baby’s life.

I finally found out where that information was from, it’s from the excellent book Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. I will review the book very soon, so look for the review.

In the last section of the book named: Perfect Parenting, Part II; or: Would a Roshanda by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet? the author addressed the topics of how a person’s name affect how people perceive him/her. It was loosely based on profession Roland G. Fryer Jr.’s work on black and white difference on achievement. The research was based on the study of 40+ years of child birth certificate data from California. In it, the author used statistical method to find out all the best and worst (whether popular or not) names for boys and girls.

To shorten it, basically, we came up with a new set of names for you to judge. The difference between this time and last time, was JY and I spent quite some time pouring over the data in the Freakonomics book, and identified a set of desirable names based on the weighing of the attributes. We’re also now including the middle name as well. The second column uses the middle initial, and the third column listed the name without the middle-name.

Please leave your comments in the Comments section.

Lucienne Rachel Wang       Lucienne R Wang   Lucienne Wang
Sophie Clementine Wang     Sophie C Wang     Sophie Wang
Ella Lucienne Wang         Ella L Wang       Ella Wang
Lauren Alexandra Wang      Lauren A Wang     Lauren Wang
Lauren Atara Wang          Lauren A Wang     Lauren Wang
Hannah Clementine Wang     Hannah C Wang     Hannah Wang
Rachel Alexandra Wang      Rachel A Wang     Rachel Wang


Edit:
Since this post is garnering a lot of attention, here is our baby name research methodology.

• The initial set of names are from “most popular names in 2015” section of the book mainly.
• We then looked at the origin of the name, the meaning as well as the “Mother Year of Education” from the book. Here is the resulting matrix:
  

  Name	Origin	Meaning	Mother Year of Education
  Alexandra	Greek	protector of mankind	14.67
  Atara	Hebrew	A crown	16.00
  Ava	German	A bird	14.97
  Aviva	Hebrew	Springtime	16.18
  Clementine	Latin	Merciful	16.23
  Ella	Old English, old German	Beautiful fairy woman, all	15.30
  Emma	Old German	Universal, all embracing	15.23
  Hannah	Hebrew	grace of God	14.44
  Lauren	Latin	laurel leaves, honour, fame, spirit	14.58
  Lucienne	Latin	Light	16.60
  Maeve	Greek, Latin	Goddess, a purple flower	N/A
  Rachel	Hebrew	little lamb, an ewe, one with purity	14.51
  Sophie	Greek	Wisdom	15.45

• We then put the first name, middle name, and the last name together, and judged them on the sound of the name, the initials, and the anagrams. We also want the origin and the meanings of the first and middle names to be in harmony
• Finally, we went through a google search on the final candidates (first and middle names) making sure there is no one with that name that is of notoriety.

What do you guys think?

大家可以帮我们孩子选个好名字吗？

I didn’t know it’s so hard to make sleeping arrangement for my baby.

So I went crib shopping with JY the other day. There were so many to choose from. We found more than 5 brands/15 models of cribs at Baby Depot just the other day. I mentioned that I live the Baby Bargain book a great deal, and use it mostly as my shopping guide. Now their coverage of cribs is truly extensive. I looked around Baby Depot, and finally settled on Child Craft as the brand of choice. The other brands are either too expensive (eg. C&T, Bassett) or too cheaply made (eg. Delta, Storkcraft).

The next decision is to have either a vanilla flavor crib, or a convertible one, which can be converted to a day-bed, a toddler bed, and full-size bed or all of the above (Delta has a model that can do all four).

After weighing things, I thought convertible crib makes sense for me because we simply don’t have space to store the crib if our baby moves to full-size bed because I have a rather smallish house.

So I took out my ruler and made some measurement. After I went back to my house, I measured the dimension of my room, and low-and-behold, I found the fully assembled crib won’t clear the nursery’s door or our bedroom’s. Now, that’s a problem for us. We don’t the baby to live alone in the nursery for the first three months, but if we put the crib inside our bedroom, then moving it to the nursery after 6 months presents a challenge.

So I went home and did a bit more research and re-read the chapter of the Baby Bargains book on Bassinet. I wanted to get a Moses’ Basket for my baby first, then I looked at the basket stands selection, and didn’t like them much, too shaky for comfort. I then looked at a bunch of pretty bassinet on-line, some of them are real nice. However, I hate to just add a piece of nursery further because of this one problem with my crib.

Again, the Baby Bargains books came to my rescue. In it, the author actually advised against a bassinet, they were saying a playpen with a bassinet is the way to go. They actually recommended Pack ‘n Play – Mocha. So I went to the baby depot again the day after thanksgiving, and got my baby a Pack ‘n Play – Mocha. Setup was a snap, took no more than 15 minutes.

I’m going to get a convertible crib for my baby a bit later, no need to hurry now since the Pack’n Play will hold her for 3-4 months after her birth. I’m a happy man again.

Check back often to find my quests to acquire other nursery furniture.