Monday, November 14, 2005

The Three Sisters

Updated:
To answer Michelle's question better understand the following, I think it is wise for me to tell you that J's uncle is the only son in his family or 九代单传. Now you should be able to guess why they tried for the forth baby...

The following post is contributed by J...

My mum has been babysitting my youngest aunt’s three daughters, JN (9), JY (7) & JS (5) since they are one month old, for day and night except for weekends and public holidays. My mum has always been willing to take care of her child for her. She actually offered to baby-sit for day and night, considering my aunt and uncle’s inexperience with baby (when they had their first child), long working hours and they stayed quite far from us and they don’t trust outsiders with their kids. However, this time, she is quite reluctant.

Here’s the story...

My aunty and uncle will only fetch the kids back on Saturday evening, and bring them back on Sunday evening. After a one day one night of excessive pampering from the parent, the kids will have their Sunday/Monday blues when they are back at my house. They become very fussy, cried a lot and needs to be carried a lot when they were babies, as they grow older they tend to wake up in the middle of the night to cry, either yelling-loud-cry when they are babies, or cries until you bring them out to living room to watch TV until they fall sleep or silent cry when they grow older. They will be ok again after a day or so.

Back then I just thought that babies will ‘suddenly’ develop funny habits or behaviour. After become a mum myself, I think I know why they cry in the middle of the night – because they miss their parents. Even if they don’t tell you, and even if they say they prefer to stay with us. They still miss their parents.

They are very cute and adorable girls. They love our family a lot and we pamper them a lot too. They will call my parents "papa" and "mama". However, they are even smart enough to avoid calling my parent papa & mama whenever they parent’s around, without having to teach them.

JY’s the worst case with her parent. When she was two months old, her elder sister is only almost two years old. So her parent decided not to bring her home on the weekends because they won’t be able to handle two kids themselves. When they want to bring her back for the first time when she is 4 months old, she already too used to stay with us and cries all the way back to her house and all the way back to my house within one hour time. Since then and for almost a year, she never went back home to stay with her parents. They only had little time together when they come over to fetch her sister. She knows she has a home elsewhere and who are her parents but she is just too scared to go home with them.

Now, they no longer calling my parents papa mama, and they understand that their parent needs to work and only able to bring them home during weekends and they are excited to go home. Maybe it’s just like holiday trip back home every weekend to them. However, there is a hidden side-effect of this long-time separation from parent. They tend to worry about things easily & scare easily. I suppose it’s because of the feeling of insecurity.

Having all the above said experience, my mum’s very reluctant to baby-sit for her any more, at least not day and night because it will mean no breastfeeding for the baby. But I don’t think their parent will be able to come and fetch them back every day and send them back every morning. They stay just too far away. My parents don’t mind to have another baby at home to accompany them since all her children are away (I stay in KL, my brother work in US temporary/Penang permanently and my youngest brother studying in Malacca). Actually they feel lucky to have those little girls to accompany them. However, my father thought it's better to take care of the baby like the others for my aunty again because he thought the siblings must grow up together. It wouldn’t be fair to the baby and the kids if my mum continue to take care of the kids but not the baby.

My mum have actually asked my aunty to consider to quit her job and be a SAHM but she isn’t ready for that and think she might go crazy having to take care of four kids and the house all day. (I thought she might be having some problem of being too obsessed with cleanliness and do too much housework). However, it will be really hard for the three kids to go back to their parent’s house because they already start schooling and have their teachers and friends at a nearby school.

I think lots of you would be wondering why want to have kids when you couldn’t handle and take care of them. To be fair to the parents, I need to clarify that they love their kids a lot. They would do anything to make them happy. They actually thought the best place for the kids to grow up is at my parent’s because my parent’s great with little kids and my parent’s kids all grown up to be good guys and have proper education. They don’t trust any outsider baby-sitter will be able to provide good care, good discipline and good education for their kids while they are at work.

They think it’s important to have good discipline and good education for their kids because they haven’t got chance to go for higher education. They need to work harder (longer working hour) to earn for a good living for their kids. They hardly spend any money for themselves. They save all the money up for them for their future’s study, buy things for them, bought a big house and renovated nicely for them for their weekends, bought a bigger car to drive them around. They stayed up all night to watch over them when they have every little/serious flu/fever during the weekends. I do think they must have missed them dearly during the weekdays. I think my three little lovely cousins know that too and will understand when they grow older. Funny thing about them is that whenever we tease them to ask their parent to trade house/car with my parenst so that they can stay in a bigger house every day (my parent’s house is only single story with 3 rooms), have a bigger car where my father can drive them to school and go shopping, they just doesn’t agree.

I guess every parent have a different way showing love for their kids, given a different background and living experience.

Anyway, my mum will be babysitting the new baby for a month because the newly found baby sitter for the baby can only start babysitting after Chinese New Year. I really think she will end up babysitting for her again after one month’s bonding with the baby.
Jotted down by Egghead :: at around 11/14/2005 07:20:00 AM :: and invited 10 Blah(s):

10 Blah(s) by:  mom2ashley,  Anonymous,  ZMM,  Lazymama,  Annie,  Anonymous,  Sue,  Anonymous,  Jess,  sqkiki,

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