Growing OUT, it seems. He hurries through four full bottles of milk in seven hours, wears clothes meant for 6 month-old babies and eyes our meals as he drenches his bib with drool within 5 minutes of putting it on.
While he doesn't seem particularly obese, his triple chins has three red patches of irritation that refuse to go away, and also at the backs of his chubby knees sprouting from thighs resembling fat drumsticks (the kind Alley Oop tears apart with his teeth... am I showing my age much?)
I have already waxed lyrical about how Dobbes changes everyday and is hardly the tiny being I cradled home from the hospital close to four months ago. No mother would lament how her child is well-fed, healthy and growing steadily and strong. The trouble is when she can hardly catch up.
Like a Superhero Mum I aspire to be (breastfeed, career, fashion, lustrous curls... we can have it all!), I made a commitment to breastfeed for two years. It's not a difficult decision: mother's milk is the best food and nothing is too good for Dobbes. Besides, my supply had always been abundant and I'm good at multi-tasking.
But a month back at work and the cracks are beginning to show (though thankfully, not on the nipples). I started with a 3-day workweek but the changes in schedule, activity and focus were enough to make it hard to well, produce. Dobbes does not automatically sleep through the night because Mummy has to go back to work. And it doesn't help that milk expression at the office is mostly a hurried, harassed affair, filled with thoughts of rushing back to work, so that I can hurry through my tasks and speed back home to the Dobbes.
A vicious cycle it is, chasing for time.
I've taken to ferrying bottles of milk back during the day to his highness. Daddoes is a faithful servant when it comes to his grandfatherly duties. Naturally, Dobbes laps it all up (literally).
What mother would begrudge her son, her only son, good food to eat? So what if it's a little challenging? To even view this issue as a predilection is almost an insult to Dobbes, the magic baby himself who made the impossible possible, who inspired an exercise in faith, feats of imagination come true and a new resolve for all things bright and beautiful.
I blunder about in the mornings bleary-eyed, throwing on pre-fabricated outfits planned in my head as I shower and train the unruly rat's nest on my head into some semblance of a french braid. All this an effort to save time so that I can smell him a little longer, or even find time to wash him up myself instead of always depending on Bibik Su.
It's no use trying to fight time. Love is a commitment and making it work derives from a place where time, stress and hardship have no meaning and still I keep on.
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