Three’s a crowd – Benjamin
Our family of four was complete or so I thought to myself, until God gave us our third pregnancy. I remembered crying in the toilet in my office when I found out the result of the kit.
Struggled we did to keep the baby until God gave Theo the revelation to name him Benjamin, youngest son of Jacob. Would he be our youngest and last?
Benjamin means son of my right hand. And right from the start I already knew that I wanted to name him ‘Yong Yi’ which means forever righteous. The ‘yi’ character using the traditional strokes of a lamb over I, which symbolised the sacrificial lamb covering me as atonement of my sins, hence my righteousness before God.
Like the other two, I had no morning sickness with Benjamin and throughout my pregnancy, no particular cravings. He was quite an easy baby to carry. During my second and third trimester, I went nuts learning about setting up my own website and reading all about HTML and whatnot and thinking about business propositions so I stayed up till 4 – 5am for many nights.
Benjamin was scheduled to be delivered after Chinese New Year. However a week before, one evening while I was lying on the sofa reading a book, I suddenly began to feel contractions. Recognising the pain, I knew that the baby was coming so I told Theo to get prepared. It was about 11pm at night.
He asked if I wanted to start making my way to the hospital. But remembering my last two experiences, I was adamant to wait in the comforts of home. So I waited and timed my contractions which was about once every 5 minutes. I waited and dozed off intermittently until about 12plus when I went to rest on my bed instead. Before I knew it, I must have fell asleep.
At 1.30am, I woke up suddenly when a gush of liquid came out of me. I rushed to the toilet and realised that my water bag had burst. Theo was still taking a bath when I told him that my bag had burst. And he asked “So what does that mean? Can wait still, I got soap all over me.” I told him, no have to go now!!
I quickly changed clothes, dumped a few stuff into my bag and with the contractions ever increasing in magnitude, managed to call Dr John Yam on his emergency line and told him that I was going to deliver. I must have disturbed his sleep as he replied me drearily to make my way to Mt A.
I laid down on the passenger seat in the front, counting my contractions, doing my breathing exercises and all the way feeling warm liquid coming out of me. Thankfully there was no traffic in the wee hours of the morning and we got to Mt A around 2am. I could no longer walk so was wheeled straight to delivery.
I didn’t even have time to change out to the gown and was immediately placed on the bed ready for delivery. Dr John Yam came just in time to see the baby crowning. I think perhaps in about a push or two, Benjamin was out into the world. Because everything was in such a rush, I only had one nurse to assist me and Theo was there to help cut the umbilical cord, weigh and measure the baby.
Everything was over in 20 minutes, baby Benjamin delivered at 0220 hours weighing 3.15kg. Before he took his leave, the doctor told me that he would need to camp in with me the next time, and I told him quite confidently then, ‘no more next time’.
Benjamin is possibly the easiest to manage among the three, and he was such a happy baby, always smiling at all the faces that looked at him that my father nicknamed him ‘Mr Friendly’. This time I took no risk and ate the painkillers to help manage the cramps, so the breastfeeding was more comfortable.
As Benjamin grew up, true to his name, he is really the son of our right hand, skillful with his hands and ever ready to help his parents especially his dad to fix things at home. He also has the tendency to spoil toys, trying to always break things apart and put them together again in different ways.
However he also had one of the worst tempers, throwing tantrums and biting his schoolmates early on in childcare. Even the older children were afraid of him. While we don’t condone such behaviours, secretly we couldn’t help but feel a bit proud that our son would not be bullied at the very least.
Unlike Joel who was mainly in the care of his grandparents during his first year, and Elizabeth in infantcare, Benjamin was in the care of our domestic helper. It could be due to the lack of interaction that resulted in his speech development to be the latest. By 3 years old, he was still unable to pronounce certain alphabets like F, L, S properly. Instead of lion, it came out as ‘wion’.
Thankfully his speech is finally back to normal now and is enjoying mouthing off whatever he thinks these days, though compared to his older siblings, he is less able to verbalise coherently. Like his sister though, he has a penchant for books and can sit quietly looking at books.
And now he faces his first challenge as er ge, no longer the baby of the family. Let’s see how it goes – as the Chinese proverb says ‘niu tou bu dui ma jui’, not sure how the ox and horse will enjoy each other’s company.