Pregnancy

The New Scientist reports that recent studies on mice suggest "vitamins and supplements that mothers-to-be take to protect their kids from birth defects could predispose children and even grandchildren to asthma" – a phenomenon that could explain the mysterious rise in the rates of asthmatic children in more developed countries.

While these findings may seem alarming, the article points out that although “mice who ate the supplement-rich diet delivered pups with some signs of asthma,” other genetic factors may be at play and more research needs to be conducted on expectant mothers themselves. 

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As if pregnant women weren’t inundated by health advice already, a new study in The Journal of Physiology suggests that a poor diet in the womb might have long lasting health effects on the child. 

The experiment found that rats whose mothers were fed fatty, processed foods during pregnancy had high levels of fat in the bloodstream even after adolescence, and despite switching to healthier grub. (Not that breaking the habit is easy; the same team showed previously that you might crave the snacks you had in the womb.)

Translation: If mom gobbles Doritos and swigs cokes throughout pregnancy, baby—or teenager—might have a greater chance of developing Type II diabetes. No big shocker there.

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I’ve been away from this blog for awhile but busy as ever with our baby. In the month or so since my last post, Marianne has continued to grow, so much so that the doctor warned us to watch her weight during our last visit.

It’s not to say that she’s fat, but our daughter is now pleasantly plump in a Michelin Tire Man sort of way (we can now count three little rolls of baby blubber on her legs as opposed to the two from just a few weeks ago). Her growth is quite normal, of course, but we can’t help but wonder if her now nearly exclusive diet of Similac baby formula is a little too nourishing (my wife’s breast milk supply has, alas, gone almost completely dry).

Nevertheless, we have been stockpiling baby powder over the past few weeks – mainly because like many parents in China, the recent news that formula powder is going up due to rising milk prices around the world has compelled us to buy in bulk. 

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After much interest and concern from the general public, on Feb 16, the conjoined twins, Liu Tianyu and Liu Yuxuan were successfully separated at Beijing Military General Hospital (北京军区总医院). Those two boys will now be able to live a normal, healthy life.

On November 5, 2007, the mother Wang Tianying from Tianjin gave birth to triplets. One is a very healthy girl, but the other two boys who were joined at the back.

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It would seem a rational assumption that while a woman is pregnant she is eating for two. But according to Christine McKinney, registered dietitian and diabetes educator at Johns Hopkins, this is only half-true. In fact, eating too much could be bad for the baby.

According to McKinney, a reasonable increase in is a total of about 300 calories, and only then after the first trimester. Overeating – especially foods that are high in fat and sugar – can affect the areas in the fetus' brain that regulates appetite and food preferences later in life, which may lead to a predisposition to being overweight.

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I’m not writing this to complain about what is essentially a luxury service that not everyone, especially here in China, can afford. Nor do I intend to discount what I have seen for myself to be a huge help to young families “in need.” But all the same, we have come to feel a bit disappointed and frustrated over the differences between What We Were Told vs. What We Actually Experienced.

For starters, the bit about “taking care of baby and mom” was definitely not the case. The curt, minimal attention my wife received at the hospital was dismaying enough (we were booted out after four days and a total of perhaps 20 minutes of actual attention to mom’s condition and c-section wound. The rest of the time was spent by hospital staff on a few diaper changes and an alarmingly immediate and old school reliance on bottle feeding).

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Jerry Chan's Baby Blog -- Chapter 5

Picking a name for your kid is no easy task – after all, this is the moniker that will follow your child for the rest of her life. Take the States for instance, where Chinese kids with unfortunate English names abound. The Eunices, Arvids, Pearls and Eugenias that I grew up with all have their parents to blame for their awkward handles – and they would have been much better off on the playgrounds of America with just English phoneticizations of their Chinese names. Fortunately my parents had the good sense to take my Chinese name 家伟 “Jia Wei” and phonetically translate into “Jerry” (though here in China people can’t seem to get enough of the Cat and Mouse references). 

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Jerry Chan's Baby Blog -- Chapter 4

Everybody needs time to recover from giving birth regardless of whether it was a natural delivery or caesarian section, but what and how to do it varies widely from culture to culture. Take my sister in Norway, for instance, – a week after she gave birth to my nephew (also by c-section), she was up and at ‘em, and practicing rock climbing at the gym a mere ten days after her surgery.

Here in China, though, it’s a different story: new mothers are expected to “zuo yue zi” (做月子) after giving birth, which means resting at home under from very strict conditions for anywhere between 42 to 56 days.

And just how “strict” are these conditions? As I write this, my wife has not been allowed to shower or bathe since her surgery last weekend (fortunately, she’s not as naturally smelly as me). Naturally this has a lot to do with preventing her c-section scar from getting infected, but it has as much to do with the fear of her catching a cold or chill in her weakened state.

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Jerry Chan's Baby Blog -- Chapter 2

Describing the feeling of what it’s like waiting at the hospital for the birth of your firstborn child is like positing what the color purple tastes like – you can roughly imagine the nervous excitement coupled with sheer terror, but trying to put it all into words is utterly futile. I was handed a small stack of documents, all in Chinese (save for one with some rather alarming-looking English medical terms like “HIV,” “Thrombosis,” and “hemorrhage,”), which I signed in a flustered flurry, half-suspecting that I was surrendering any and all form of liability on their part should something go terribly wrong with her heart. By the time I watched my wife, looking utterly pale and wearing one of those operating room shower caps, get wheeled away on a stretcher, I felt very much like vomiting, or jumping out the window, or both.

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Jerry Chan’s Baby Blog -- Chapter 1

After months of check-ups, dietary supplements, pregnancy books and gender guessing, our baby girl was finally born early Saturday, January 12^th
, at Peking Medical Union Hospital at 2:41am. As with just about every aspect of this pregnancy, we were caught unawares – due to my wife’s pre-existing heart condition, we had originally scheduled a cesarean operation for January 8 (10 days before my wife’s original due date), only to have her come down with a cold. After she more or less recovered, we then set a date for Wednesday, January 16^th (today, as I’m typing this, as a matter of fact).

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