Month: August 2024

Tov meets Woori

Published on by Sophia LeeLeave a comment

I remember the day of my first date with David.

It was my first official date ever, really, the first time a man had formally asked me if he could take me out for a date, instead of that annoyingly ambiguous “Want to grab a bite to eat?” that could mean so many things.

We were to meet at 6 pm, but I started getting ready at 5 pm. There really was no need– it took 10 minutes to do my very minimal makeup and another 3 to change from sweats to jeans– but it was the anticipation of getting ready for something exciting and slightly nerve-wrecking. I felt like a high school girl getting ready for the dance.

I felt similarly the morning after I gave birth to Woori. She was dozing deeply next to me in her hospital bassinet, and the morning sun was starting to pour golden pools through the window blinds. It had been less than 12 hours since she was born, and I hadn’t had more than 20 minutes of uninterrupted sleep. My head was light, and my heart was fluttering.

David called to tell me he’d be visiting with Tov at 9 am. By then, I hadn’t even yet announced to any of my friends that I had given birth. Only our family knew (and unfortunately, all of David’s business clients), but Tov did not know.

We had been prepping him months before Woori’s birth, of course. I told Tov repeatedly that there’s a baby in my belly. “Where’s the baby?” I’d prompt him, and he’d smile and point at his own belly. He did not get it.

A friend bought Tov a book called “You’re a Big Brother.” I pointed at the pictures in the book. “Look, there’s omma. There’s abba. There’s Tov. And there’s…baby!” He loved that book. We read it over and over again, and I kept pointing to the characters in the book: “Omma…abba…Tov…baby!” And then later I’d ask him, “Where’s Tov?” hoping he’d point at the boy, but he’d always point at the baby in the crib. He thinks he’s still the baby in the family.

As the due date approached, people asked me how Tov feels about becoming a big brother, and I told them he has no idea. “He’s in for the shock of his life,” I joked, but I guess it’s not a joke. He is in for the shock of his young life. Never ever has he not been the center of attention since he was born. He was the baby of the home, the emperor and prince. Guests came and cooed at him, not anyone else. And now, someone was about to take his place.

I wondered how Tov will react to meeting his little sister. I was nervous, but more curious and excited, just like how I felt that evening waiting for David to show up at my apartment gate. Will he show interest in her? Will he completely ignore her? Will he break down into jealousy? Will he be thoroughly confused by the appearance of a stranger who never left?

The minutes ticked down. I ate the hospital’s very bland breakfast and saved the blueberry muffin bottom for Tov (the hospital menu claimed it was homemade blueberry muffin, but it was a package from Otis Spunkmeyer). I watched Woori sleep. I tried not to get annoyed as nurses barged in every 5 minutes.

And then around 9 am, I heard him. He’s a very loud boy. I heard his running footsteps from down the hall. Several minutes later, the door opened, and Tov stomped in with David behind him.

Oh, I missed this boy. It’s only been 17 hours since I last saw him, but a whole world had changed since then. My balloon stomach had deflated. I don’t have to drink decaf coffee anymore. Another Lee-Herrmann was in the birth records. And our family dynamics will never be the same.

“Hi, Tov!” I greeted, and he bounded over to me like a kangaroo with a huge grin. I gave him a big hug and kissed him. I purposely delayed introducing him to the baby; I wanted time for him to adjust to seeing me in a strange new room, to greet him properly and make him feel like he’s the star attention.

“Look what we have for you!” I said, and whipped out a wrapped gift that the women in my discipleship group had bought for Tov. They had thoughtfully written “Especially for Tov” on the wrapper.

“Woooow!” Tov exclaimed, and immediately demanded, “Open, open!”

We opened the gift. It was a digital book about animals. While we tinkered with it, David went over to Woori and bent down to look at her, and that’s when Tov noticed the baby.

“Tov! You want to come meet her? Yeah, that’s your little sister!”

I took off his shoes and lifted him up onto the bed. He crawled towards the bassinet and peered over to gaze at the tiny pink face, whose eyes were closed in peaceful slumber, her head covered in that classic newborn pink-and-blue striped hat.

“See Tov, that’s your little sister. Her name is Woori.”

“Bebe!” Tov cried, pointing. Then he got distracted and pointed at the clock on the wall: “Cuckoo!” And then his interest got drawn to the baby again. “Bebe!”

That first moment was about as anticlimax as expected. He was constantly distracted, either by the clock or the packaged blueberry muffin or the new toy, and most especially, the bassinet, which he insisted on climbing into and lying spread-eagle as though he himself is the baby.

And it was also as sweet and precious as I had hoped for. When he did remember the baby, he was enthralled. He pointed at her eyes. He pointed at her nose. He patted her on the head. He pressed his forehead onto hers. He kissed her forehead, her nose, her cheeks, over and over again, delighting in the act. It was sweeter than my first kiss, more precious than my engagement ring, more satisfying than my first byline.

I wanted to hold this moment with both palms and cradle them into the deepest groove of my heart. I wanted time to pause, and replay slowly, over and over, that moment when my firstborn met my secondborn, and my whole family bunched together in that morning glow like a fresh-picked bouquet, pure and crisp and new.

Even as I was pregnant with Woori, feeling her kicks and seeing her little figure on the ultrasound, I couldn’t imagine loving her as much I as love Tov. People with multiple kids told me your heart grows. Bitterness and anger corrode the heart, but there’s always space in the human heart for more love; in fact, the more love it fills, the bigger and stronger and healthier it gets.

My heart is the biggest and strongest and healthiest it’s ever been.

Lord, you are so good.

God, please help Woori suck

Published on by Sophia LeeLeave a comment

Woori is five days old today. As I write this, she’s sleeping on her tummy on her play mat, while David builds a mini lego set with Tov.

If you visited us right now, our day would seem pretty peaceful and calm. There’s the soft ocean breeze blowing through the open windows. The gentle snores of a blissfully slumbering newborn. A contented toddler and a present father. A woman smelling sweet from breastmilk, sitting at her desk with a coffee mug and chocolate-covered pretzels, click-clacking on her keyboard. Ah, isn’t the newborn days just wonderful?

NOT.

Two hours ago, I was fighting back tears because I was so overwhelmed. Three hours ago, I was slightly freaking out that I was going blind, because it had been four hours since a white film had covered my vision, powdering everything I saw, giving me a headache.

Five hours ago, I was at a lactation support group, watching other mothers nursing and weighing their babies after to measure how much they’ve consumed. “Up 40 grams!” Jennifer, the lactation consultant pronounced, and the women cheered. Another woman’s five-week-old baby had consumed 5 whole ounces– that’s 150 grams, that overachiever.

Meanwhile, it took 30 minutes for me to finally get Woori to stop wrestling and grunting and finally suck on the breast for 20 minutes. “Oh, I can hear her swallowing a lot,” Jennifer remarked encouragingly. We weighed her after, I holding onto my breath with anticipation.

“Oh. 8 grams,” Jennifer said in a dismal voice. “Ah, she tricked me! I thought it would be more than that.”

What the freaking hell, Woori!

Six hours ago, David was yelling at Tov because he was having a roll-on-the-floor-with-snot-smearing-his-shirt kind of meltdown, simply because he did not want to wear pants. Six hours ago, I was holding Woori and watching David fly off his handle, feeling a little gratified, remembering all the times when I had lost patience with Tov, and David’s response was that I didn’t try hard enough to control my temper.

And then 12 hours ago, I was up in the wee morning, light-headed from sleeplessness, having finally finished bottle-feeding Woori 2 ounces of pumped breastmilk and formula after trying for 30 minutes to get her to breastfeed. That took more than an hour, and now I had to dry the pump parts, still wet from the last pumping session, so I can pump again before crawling back to bed.

It’s been anything but peaceful and calm.

We are on a crazy feeding plan for Woori because she refuses to breastfeed. She’s maybe successfully breastfed only three times since she was born, and even then, as the weighing scale today informed me, she barely even put 10 ml of milk inside her. So every three hours, round the clock from morning through night, I have to try to get her to practice breastfeeding, then bottle-feed her, then pump. That takes at least an hour and a half, which means about an hour later, I have to repeat the process all over again. There is no time to rest. The moment I fall asleep, my iphone blares an alarm, reminding me it’s time to feed again, and I wake up bleary-eyed and brain-fogged, a zombie with swollen, aching boobs.

Speaking of boobs. I had never once experienced the kind of engorgement I have this time round. Tov was born premature so he had a hard time latching properly, and he fed very slowly, but with the help of a nipple shield, at least he would still breastfeed.

Not Woori. This girl knows how to latch. There’s no problem with her tongue. She’s a lustily healthy baby. Two lactation consultants and a pediatrician examined her and pronounced her physically capable of breastfeeding. No, little stubborn girl just don’t wanna. When I finally jam a nipple into her mouth, she grunts and twists her head and even worse, sometimes bites down and then twists, which releases a string of obscenities from my mouth. And then she dares complain when milk sprays her in the face.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve been suffering from clogged ducts, hard swollen lumps measuring 2 inches all around the breasts that finally loosened up only after two days of continuous, painful massaging while pumping.

And that brings us to my cloudy vision. This morning, I put on my contact lens, and as we were driving to the lactation support group, my eyes started fogging up. I thought something had gotten into my contact lenses. Everything I saw had white halos. When we got home, the first thing I did was take off my contact lenses, but the cloud did not lift.

“I can’t see,” I told David, as he was wrestling with Tov to get him into the tub to wash off what he’d randomly vomited in the car.

I poured eye drops into my eyes, rubbed, blinked. Still cloudy.

“I still can’t see!” I said, starting to get a little panicky. Meanwhile, the clock was telling me it was time to feed Woori again in 35 minutes, and I still haven’t had lunch, or pumped from the last session. And now I was going blind???

“It’s probably from lack of sleep,” David said, seeming irritatingly unconcerned.

“I’ve never had this happen before,” I said. The more I blinked, the more I closed my eyes, the foggier my vision became. I called the optometrist to get my eyes checked, and they made a 3 pm appointment for me.

I pumped. I forgot to eat lunch. I lied down in bed and closed my eyes for 20 minutes in a restless sleep of anxious dreams. Then my alarm clock went off: Time to feed Woori.

As I tried to unsuccessfully get Woori to breastfeed again, fighting through pain and stickiness and frustration, my vision started clearing. Huh. I guess David was right. My body was telling me I’ve hit an exhaustion point I’ve never reached before.

And even as I write this, Tov has skipped and galloped over to me several times, once again butt-naked, breaking my writing flow. He’s climbed onto my lap, rubbed his naked butt on my pants, and stolen three of my chocolate-covered pretzels. He’s claimed he needs to poo-poo, a clever manipulation to steal my attention for 20 minutes while we pointlessly sit at the potty, his butt and penis completely dry, but he thoroughly entertained while I read and sing to him.

But that’s newborn days for you. There’s chaos, fatigue, frustration, mind-numbing repetitive rituals, boredom. And then there’s precious rare moments of peace, beauty, wonder, thankfulness, sweetness, like the third time Tov ran over to me while I was writing, and then stopped to kneel down beside his little sister and nuzzle his face into hers. Or when Tov is napping, and David comes to lie down next to Woori who’s also sleeping, and gaze at her little wrinkly, piglety face. Or when I’m pumping while holding Woori to my chest, inhaling her natural fragrance, feeling her warmth match mine. Such moments are so fleeting, so glorious, a ray of heaven shining into the pit of hell, blasting all darkness and doom away.

So ask me how I’m feeling, five days in. And I’ll say: tired and thankful, frustrated and content, bored and delighted, a seemingly contradiction of emotions that actually meet and rise into this extraordinary, one-of-a-kind symphony of postpartum. It’s life on earth.

This is a time when no prayer seem trivial or silly. I’m not praying for world peace, or justice, or souls saved. My prayers are brief and simple but earnest, as real and raw as cracked nipples and toddler tantrums and a newborn baby who refuses to suck on the breast.

It’s the prayer David prays every evening during dinner these days: “Oh God, please help Woori suck.”

Woori’s birth story

Published on by Sophia LeeLeave a comment

This post is for our secondborn, Tov’s little sister, Woori Grace Lee-Herrmann.

Woori Grace Lee-Herrmann was born on August 19, 2024, at 7:39 pm, on a Monday in which I had planned to make no-cook tomato capellini for dinner using the sun-burst heirloom tomatoes we picked at the farm.

I did not get to taste that pasta, but I was told Tov ate very well that night.

But this post is about the birthday of Woori, and to tell that, I need to start on Sunday, the day before.

For weeks before Sunday, I had been having some pretty nasty contractions, some up to level 4 pain. Some nights, I woke up convinced I was going into labor from painful contractions, only for them to subside by morning, and every morning I rolled out of bed surprised and annoyed that I was still freaking pregnant.

It wasn’t just because I was suffering from the discomfort of contractions, cramps, backaches, and sciatica. Tov will be starting school on Sep 3, and I was worried that he’d have to deal with this huge transition mere days after his sister is born. That’s enough big changes in his life within the month. So I had been chugging about five cups of raspberry leaf tea each day, hoping to trigger the labor process, but all that happened were a frustrating series of false alarms.

On Sunday, I had a level 5 contraction during our family afternoon walk that lasted at least 20 minutes straight, my uterus clenching as tight as an Olympic gymnast’s abdomen, refusing to loosen until I finally sat down on the edge of somebody’s flower bed and rested.

Then that night, around 11 pm while I was snacking on homemade sourdough banana bread, I felt a wetness that imprinted a damp spot in my sweatpants. The last time I had gone into labor, it had started with my water breaking as well– not a gush like in the movies, but a small, clear steady trickle that very quickly rolled into intense contractions. Could this be it? I put the banana bread down and started walking around the house, wincing from the back and leg pain. But no more trickle, no building contractions. Ugh. Of course. Another false alarm. I returned to my banana bread.

The next morning, on Monday, I woke up 38 weeks and 6 days pregnant, irritated that I’m rolling out of bed with a watermelon belly once again. “Come on, Woori,” I grumbled. “You can come out now.”

I decided to start the week assuming Woori wasn’t coming any time soon. I made a pediatrician appointment for Tov to get his lymph node checked. I filled the inflatable pool and let Tov splash about the backyard. I refreshed my sourdough starter and baked sourdough Irish soda bread. I texted my neighbor and a friend to plan playdates for Tov. I made plans to do an inventory of the deep freezer and pantry so I can stop buying things I already have. I put Tov down for a nap, crushed tomatoes to make the pasta sauce for dinner, and headed down to the gym to work out.

During my workout, I felt wetness again. It certainly wasn’t urine. And it was too watery to be discharge. But from my last experience and everything I’d read on ruptured membranes, shouldn’t the leak be constant, rather than sporadic? It’s probably a false alarm, wistful thinking on my end, I thought. But it wouldn’t help to message my ob/gyn, just in case, so I texted a message to the ob/gyn office, marking it “non-urgent.”

An hour later, they responded. They told me to go to the hospital to get myself evaluated. “That would be the safest thing to do,” they wrote.

Eh. Seems like a lot of fuss and work for something that’s probably nothing. Besides, it was soon time to take Tov to the pediatrician.

I texted David what happened. “I think I’ll go probably after dinner,” I wrote.

“Why don’t you go now?”

“I have to take Tov to the pediatrician in 5 mins.”

David offered to take Tov instead, which gave me time to take a shower, do my skincare routine, and get dressed to go to the hospital. I briefly considered finishing packing my hospital bag, just in case, but decided against it. Nah. Too much work.

At 3:30 pm I drove leisurely to the hospital, listening to a podcast on book recommendations and munching on chocolate-covered pretzels, ignoring the cramps and contractions that were by then too familiar. I felt silly. I wasn’t leaking anymore. It was nothing. I was wasting time.

Thankfully, check in was swift. A nurse greeted me within five minutes of waiting, and ushered me into a room. She hooked elastic bands around my belly to monitor the baby’s heart rate and my contractions. When she saw I was having a contraction, she pressed her hands on my stomach and looked down at me in surprise. “You said you’ve been having contractions for weeks? Did they always feel this tight?”

“Yep,” I said.

“These are really strong contractions,” she said.

While we waited for the test results on whether I was indeed leaking amniotic fluids, she told me what’s likely to happen. If I test positive for amniotic fluid, I’d be admitted immediately and induced, because that means I’m at risk of infection. If I test negative, I’d be admitted or released depending on the dilation of my cervix, and whether I choose to be induced anyway.

I tested positive. And surprise! I was already 5 cm dilated.

The nurse looked at me with arched eyebrows. “Oh, you’re not going home.”

And for reasons I cannot understand, after all that impatience to give birth, my immediate reaction was, “Oh crap. But I need to go home and make that pasta.”

The nurse saw the expression on my face and she softened. “How are you feeling about this? You feeling OK?”

I couldn’t tell her about the pasta. She wouldn’t understand that I’d been really eager to put those $16 heirloom tomatoes from the farm to good use and make sure Tov eats it. Instead, I told her I needed to call my husband.

I called David and told him what happened. “Good thing I didn’t wait till after dinner,” I said.

“I had a feeling since yesterday,” he said. “That’s why I offered to take Tov to the pediatrician.”

I gave him detailed instructions on how to finish making the pasta. The plan was to call Mimi, Tov’s former nanny, to come help watch Tov until my cousin got off work and take over until the baby was born. David would feed Tov, take him for a walk, put him down to bed, and then head over to the hospital around 8 pm.

While David called Mimi and my cousin, the nurse wheeled me to a labor & delivery room. It was about 4:15 pm then. She called the ob/gyn on call and he recommended I get induced right away, as my water had broken nearly 18 hours ago by that point. They wanted me to have the baby in my arms by 11 pm that night. I told them I wanted to wait before being induced. From everything I had read, induction makes the labor process even more intense and painful, and I had been hoping to have an unmedicated birth so I can still move about freely before and after birth.

So the nurses left me in my room and I bounced on a grey yoga ball, waiting for a spontaneous labor to happen.

Praise God, I didn’t have to wait long. It was like my body knew it was game time. The random contractions I had been having for weeks started picking up in pain and intensity. They were a level 5 pain, and within half an hour, a level 6. The nurses came to check in on me once in a while, offering an epidural. By 6 pm, they were at least a level 7.

“Am I officially in labor?” I asked a nurse when she came in to readjust the monitor.

She shrugged. “I suppose you can say that?” She looked at the chart. My contractions were still irregular and inconsistent, ranging from 3 to 6 minutes apart. But I was having a harder time breathing through them. I told the nurse my husband isn’t coming until 8 pm. Would that be too late? “Oh, you will have time,” she assured me.

I texted David anyway. “Come here around 7 pm? I’m definitely in labor.”

He FaceTimed me so I could instruct him on which skincare products to pack into my suitcase. I might be in excruciating pain, but I need my Skinceuticals CE Ferulic serum.

He arrived at a little past 7 pm with my suitcase. By then, no position and breathing could keep me relaxed. Every contraction seized my shoulders and curled my toes. I know this pain. I remember this pain. It was the same pain I felt two years ago as we sped up the 405 at 4:40 am on May 4, 2022, the day Tov was born, while I clutched to the side of the car, fetal-positioned in agony.

But this time, I knew what to expect. I knew the pain would get worse. It meant I was transitioning into delivery, like the guillotine at the end of a torture session: sweet, cutting relief.

A new nurse knocked then and entered. A new shift was beginning. She introduced herself, asked about our birth plan, started typing things into the computer. Meanwhile, I gripped onto the bed with both hands and groaned. “I feel pressure,” I gasped.

“Oh, OK,” the nurse said, floundering. She started explaining that because my water had broken, she was hesitant to do too many cervical checks, which increases the risk of infection. She talked about getting an epidural, but I’d need to be able to sit still to get it, she said, eyeing me uncertainly as I twisted the bedsheets in the midst of a whooper of a contraction.

“You don’t have to get an epidural if you don’t want to,” David told me, which I believe he learned from a YouTube video titled “Support Tips for Birth Partners for an Empowered Birth.”

I was only half-listening. “I feel a lot of pressure,” I repeated.

The nurse slapped on a pair of gloves. “OK, we can do a cervical check now,” she said.

I was a 10. Now the nurse looked and sounded frantic. Nothing was ready, nothing was prepared. “Don’t bear down yet,” she yelped, paging her ob/gyn and her team to bring in a table or whatever it was they needed. It was all background noise to me by then.

I knew what was going to happen then. I was no longer moaning but bellowing. As I felt another contraction, this one so familiarly uninhibited and powerful, like a tsunami of pain and force, I flipped over, got on my knees, grabbed the headboard of the bed, and let my body go.

Fluids gushed out, like guts from a fish. Then a searing pain.

I heard someone– David? The nurse?– screaming, “I see the baby!”

Another contraction. Another ripping pain. And it was over. Shouting, but not from the baby. A hatter patter of activity– thundering footsteps, squeaking wheels, exclamations and mutterings and orders.

Then I heard the cry. Woori. They laid a sticky, wailing purple little thing into my arms. I pulled her to my thudding chest, adrenaline and blood still pumping through my veins. I did it. It was done. And the delivery itself couldn’t have been more than 4 minutes. She had come even faster than Tov.

As my cousin marveled, “Faster than Uber Eats.”

Or as my friend in London remarked, “Faster than Yuriy (her husband) pooping.”

About 15 minutes later, the ob/gyn strutted in, very late to the show. I could have had this baby at home. Oh well.

About thirty minutes later, everyone left the room, leaving David, Woori, and I to enjoy silence together. The sun was setting, and the room was shimmering blocks of shadows. I had finally wound down, and only then did I properly look down at my daughter to meet her.

She was beautiful. She had a full head of light brown hair, like Tov did, and bright blue-grey newborn eyes that peered up and around in surprise. She refused to grab hold of our thumbs like Tov did. Perhaps she’s got an independent streak, like me, but from her tiny semiformed features, I saw a petite, prettier David, with his furrowed brows and expressions.

My second child, and I’ll never get over how beautiful, how sacred, how astonishing it is to meet the child you’ve carried in your womb unseen for nine months.

Woori Grace Lee-Herrmann. 7 lb 1.1 oz, 19.45 inches. Welcome to the family, our Woori. You came just in time.