All About Your Child

Have you heard of breastmilk jaundice? Sounds unfamiliar, I was ‘lucky’ to have such an experience.

As you know I fully breastfed my second boy fully for 6 months. On the first week, his jaundice level was quite high, the polyclinic doctor was ready to send him for Phototherapy but was held back because the level drop down to below ‘dangerous’ level.

Binbin’s jaundice level just went up and down like a yo-yo, that is when the doctor conclude that it was Breastmilk Jaundice.

No one knows what the cause of breastmilk jaundice is. In order to make this diagnosis, the baby should be at least a week old, though interestingly, many of the babies with breastmilk jaundice also have had exaggerated physiologic jaundice. The baby should be gaining well, with breastfeeding alone, having lots of bowel movements, passing plentiful, clear urine and be generally well.

Breastmilk jaundice peaks at 10-21 days, but may last for two or three months. Binbin’s jaundice lasted for 3 weeks. Breastmilk jaundice is normal. It is not necessary for breastfeeding to be discontinued even for a short time. Only very occasionally is any treatment, such as phototherapy, necessary. Binbin need not go for that even though the level was relatively high.

There is not one bit of evidence that this jaundice causes any problem at all for the baby. Breastfeeding need not be discontinued “in order to make a diagnosis”. If the baby is truly doing well on breast only, there is no reason, none, to stop breastfeeding or supplement with a lactation aid, for that matter. To find out more read this….

Have you heard of breastmilk jaundice?

For the experienced mummies, you know how short the lifespan of toys are, especially when their fate is in the hands of a 2-year-old.Their Christmas presents, as expected, were mainly remote control cars. Allan and I were already expecting the outcome of the fate of these cars, errrmm…not so much of the cars but the controls’ antenna.

Binbin loves to pull them out to the maximum and then push them back. I guess he enjoys playing with it more that getting the cars to work by pushing the buttons on the control.

Extending the antenna is easy. The difficult part is when Binbin tries to push it back down. You know, my 2-year-old is a ‘muscle-kid’, he is even stronger than his 4-year-old brother.

Whenever he tries too hard to push the antenna back, it BREAKS INTO 2! He will run to us with the panic look,”Mummy, spoil already. How?” Then we would just unscrew the antenna out and he will have to control the car from a near distance.

This time, it was the same, the only difference was we found blood on one of the broken end of the antenna. We searched for the source of the blood stain all over Binbin’s body, by the way my little one was still giggling, thinking that we were tickling him.

Then we saw the blood stain on his shirt, tilted his head up and saw the 4cm cut at the bottom of his left cheek.

“Is it painful?” I asked the most silly questions in the world.

“Nope.”

Ever since Binbin was able to crawl, I learnt that my boy had the highest level of pain threshold that I have ever seen in any kid in my life.

He can fall from his crib and all he did was a loud ‘waiy’ and then he is quiet.

His walker can turned upside down with him in it, and he didn’t even made a sound.

He can knock his head on the wall with a huge bump and he don’t even frown.

I am not exaggerating, I truly have an amazing boy when it comes to pain tolerance.

Do you have an amazing kid like mine?