Life, Day by Day

If only I could hold it off a little bit longer but Preemie girl is turning 4 in July and yes, I know...she needs to start school now. So it's off to summer classes for our little girl, in preparation for the regular school year this June. I enrolled her in our local parochial pre-school which has been putting out graduates who easily get accepted into the first grade of the big schools. I am hoping that if she does well, she can get accelerated to Prep school by the time she is 5 years old since the government's primary and secondary levels will now be 12 years all in all (K12), as compared to the old curriculum which took only 10 years. That means Preemie girl will graduate from high school at 17 years of age (I was only 15 when I graduated from high school) and if she takes up medicine, that will be another 10 years!. It's been 2 days now and so far, so good. She seems to be enjoying herself in the 2 hours that she is in class and made friends with another ...

I used to think that bringing up kids wasn't all that hard. My parents raised us their 3 children (1 girl and 2 boys), fairly and without biases. We all had the same privileges and got the same kind of punishment when we did wrong. I never felt any more special than my 2 brothers. But when I became a mother to a 3 month old baby boy in 1991, I realized that it was not easy at all and that parenting is the hardest job in the world where there is no retirement ever. And so when I took home a 5 month old baby girl (who was born severely premature) for Christmas in 2008, it was an act of faith and trust that this too is God's will for me and my family. You see, raising my son was a relatively fun task for me, maybe because as the eldest in my family and the oldest grandchild, I grew up looking out for my brothers and playing with my cousins, majority of whom were male. I have always been partial to boys, even as a child. I remember each time my mom became pregnant, I would al...

Who is Preemie Girl? Last year, in mid-July, a woman was brought DOA to the emergency room of the provincial hospital. Her severely premature baby miraculously survived but was brought to the hospital 6 or 7 hours after birth. Her mother was previously admitted to the hospital's ICU due to hypertension and was closely monitored for several weeks.  She was relatively in a stable condition and the doctors were waiting for the baby to become more viable before doing a caesarian section, but the family decided to go home.  She eventually delivered at home and died due to severe postpartum bleeding.  The baby developed acute respiratory distress syndrome and was not expected to make it.  Because this was a public hospital with limited resources, she was not getting the kind of care severely premature babies like her should have. Some mothers nursing their own premature babies would give her their milk and help take care of her. Initially I really did not take much...