We named you Anya Faith Wee because we want you to have faith in God, to experience God’s favour, goodness and grace in your life and for you to be gracious and merciful towards others in turn. Anya also means ‘inexhaustible’ in Sanskrit and we hope that you will work tirelessly towards what you believe in. Your Chinese name reflects our desire for you to be knowledgeable about God’s grace. You are one month old now and you have grown so much in this one month. You are changing a little bit everyday and I want to cherish every moment that I have with you.

When I saw you for the very first time, you were grey, slimy, disgruntled and screaming your head off. Despite all that, I thought you were beautiful. It wasn’t love at first sight and I didn’t get all emotional or cry as I held you in my arms for the first time. It was more of a “There you are! Finally!” moment for me. In fact, since I didn’t have to go through labour pains, I was worried that the absence of the appropriate hormones that were supposed to come flooding in would make me feel detached from you and prevent me from loving you. It took me a while to warm up to you especially since I was stuck in bed for the first day and couldn’t really hold you. Fortunately, you are easy to love and after the first couple of days, I was besotted. Since you weighed less than 2.5kg and my breast milk hadn’t come in yet, you were fed formula every three hours in the hospital by the nurses. After I was allowed off the bed, a nurse would bring you in before you were due for feeding so that I could practise breastfeeding you. You got so frustrated and agitated when you sucked and got nothing that you would yell at the top of your lungs. Even now, you still make a great big fuss if you’re not fed quickly enough.

Right from the start, your daddy was so good at taking care of you. You were very well-behaved for the first week or so and slept quite a bit, only crying when you were hungry. It took me some time to feel confident feeding you and changing you. I remember curling up on the bed and crying on the second day that you were home because I felt like such a useless mother. This sense of guilt has not left me since because I constantly worry about whether I am doing enough for you. One main source of guilt was the issue of breastfeeding. For a variety of reasons, we decided that expressing breast milk and feeding it to you from a bottle was the best way for us. This has worked out quite well so far but it was not easy at first because opinions expressed by certain individuals made me feel like I was shortchanging you and I felt guilty. There are still many things that stir up feelings of guilt in me but I’m just trying to do my very best for you.

I worry a lot about you. I worry about whether you are too hot or too cold, whether you are drinking too much or too little, whether you are sleeping for too long or too short a time… There are a million things I worry about each day. I even check on you several times a night to make sure that you are breathing properly. I also worry about spoiling you. You are our first child and the first grandchild for both sides so it seems inevitable that you will be a bit spoilt no matter what. Many people have said that you are full of expressions and I have been taking photos of you everyday to try and capture all your different moods. I think you are quite a grouchy little baby and your grumpiness amuses me. You don’t sleep as well now as you did initially and you seem to like being carried a lot. You are drinking more, which is good, but it’s also getting harder to burp you. You are showing greater interest in the sights and sounds around you and trying to make sense of everything that’s going on. Night feeds are still tough but I know things will get better with time.

I look forward to the rest of the time with you but I already miss this one month that has passed. Just know this: you are loved!