grandson nathaniel song

of my over 20 trips to melbourne, this will be one when i will stay longest - from dec 13 2010 to jan 30 2011. i had come over on airasia, first flying to kuala lumpur low cost carrier terminal (lcct) and then connecting a flight on an airbus a330 to melbourne. it was a much more pleasant experience than the one i had on tiger airways, when i flew from singapore to darwin and from thence to melbourne. i am here for the birth of our first grandson. it is also the first grandson in the song family.




how different things are today compared to the time when we were babies. there was hardly any pre-birth purchases. my parents did not have to buy a pram or a car-seat from malaysia and carried it on a plane to melbourne. the only accessory, i can remember, we had as a baby, was the bamboo chair which we were confined in when we were about a few months old onwards.




we did not have a special bed all to ourselves. we slept on the same bed as our parents. the luckier ones might have this privilege. we did not have 'pampers', instead we used cloth diapers. change table? our bed doubled as a change table. nathaniel has 2 change tables. one in his parents' room and one downstairs, attached to the portable cot. there are also a host of other related baby stuff like a warmer for the milk, a steriliser for the bottles, a colourful gym mat, his own laundry bag and a special bath-tub.

then there are these musical mobiles to keep him entertained while he is having his feed, about to fall asleep or when he has to be left on his own for a while. all we had were the dialect lullabies that our mother or grandmother sang to us.

our mothers then did not have any resource to find out if they were pregnant. the sex of the baby was not known to the parents until the 'cart' was in their hands. today's mothers need only to administer a home pregnancy test where the result is known within minutes. a scan, carried out after the 10th week, will show quite distinctly the sex of the baby in the mother's womb.

during our time, as babies, we were confined to the house, together with our mother. nathaniel went with his parents to a shopping complex some 16km away from his home when he was barely 2 weeks old. at 2-week old, he attended his first church service. grandson nanthaniel will take his first plane flight when he is one month old, flying more than 6000km to singapore and then to kuching.

the benefits which my parents' generation did not have include pre-natal sessions for both parents and the many check-ups for the mother before the arrival of the baby. in those days, although we were breast-fed, our mothers did not have a device like the breast-pump to extract the milk, even though the pump had been invented earlier.

nathaniel was born on boxing day. he weighed 3.64kg (8.08lb) at birth.