Category Archives: Mom in Law

Crazy Chinese People, Mom in Law

What my mother-in-law learned

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Yet another article about my mother-in-law, hope it is not taking over soon!

Today I am writing about what she learned since arriving here and how it changed her perception towards much of the traditional Chinese art of taking care of newborns. As any other Chinese grandma 奶奶 she came to help us out when the baby was born. This would usually mean a lot of forcing the daughter to stay in bed for about a month, much soups and other food which in theory, should improve the mothers well-being after giving birth and of course all sorts of cuddling, singing, swinging and spoiling the little newborn baby prince. But instead she encountered a daughter who was strictly against any kind of zuo yuezi 坐月子and especially against the Chinese art of taking care of newborns. There were many battles between my wife and her mother which a lot of shouting and tears but in the end my wife won!

For endless weeks mother-in-law was frustrated, saying always how much her daughter will suffer because of not doing the resting month, that the baby won’t have enough milk because of it and how much the baby will suffer because she can’t cuddle him. But much to her surprise, my wife showed no trouble thus far, there is more than enough milk for the baby and besides our little son is a peaceful little thing who barely cries. Now, here is the kicker, according to mother-in-law her daughter is just a special case that she has enough milk, she also doesn’t believe our doctor who says that 98% of all women produce enough milk for their babies. Somehow she is able to twist it around  and says things like “Chinese are different!”, so Chinese are the only human beings who needs to drink oily soups to produce milk for their babies? I don’t think so…

Now the real learning started when we visited other Chinese couples who just had babies or they came by at our place. All of them followed the zuo yuezi and all of the felt still miserably weak, they had not enough milk and all of them were exhausted of taking care of their babies as since their mothers or MIL’s left, no one had the energy to take care of the baby on such a high degree as all of those babies needed now 24/7 carrying around, swinging and whatsoever. My wife told them to try to stop drinking for example those soups and 4 out of 5 had weeks later enough milk for their babies! Now I don’t want to suggest that all the food during zuo  yuezi is bad but there are things which are not really useful such as the soups. We asked our midwife and doctor about it and they recommended not to eat any oily food as it might reduce the milk production (nearly all soups I have seen thus far were pretty damn oily).

After meeting these different Chinese with their experiences my mother-in-law was suddenly very happy that she didn’t do all these things and how much easier our life appears now compared to others. Of course it also depends on the baby, every baby is different, but we learned here from the midwives that we should try to avoid carrying the baby around the house as much as possible and just should try to calm it down when it is in its own crib etc. otherwise the baby would somehow develop this “must have to be” feeling towards being soothed down through cuddling etc.

 

Please note: We let mother-in-law hold her grandson and sing to him but not on such level as we have experienced at other families, so no worries there.

 

Crazy Family, Mom in Law

Living with mother-in-law

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Today I present you a new story of my crazy Chinese mother-in-law. In the past seven weeks she has been both a big help and a nightmare for us. Big help when it comes to supplying us with food (though there were some issues in the beginning) and nightmare for my wife when it comes to zuo yuezi 坐月, how to take care of the baby and in my special case due to cleaning.

I am not saying that my mother-in-law is not trying to clean up but it is the matter of how she does it and how she leaves her marks in our apartment, car and other places. First of all, it seems she uses the same oily cloth to clean the tables, ceramic cooking field and our glossy kitchen cabinets. Because she uses this same cloth everywhere, it kind of just smears the dirt all around rather than cleaning something. Now, no problem because I am responsible for cleaning the apartment which is usually a pretty easy job and furthermore because my wife told her not to try to clean anymore.

Now we come to the second point, the main issue. It used to be easy to clean the apartment, such as once a year cleaning the windows, once a month making the kitchen cabinets shiny again and basic cleaning all around once a week. In the past seven weeks I have cleaned the windows seven times, I cleaned every second day the kitchen cabinets and I am busy trying to clean everything else nearly every single day!

It basically seems she has an issue with using door knobs and handles, thus leaving rather oily hand prints everywhere, really everywhere. Have you ever watched a child pressing its face on a window to see something outside and leaving a nice facial print on the glass? Well, mother-in-law is the same, each window has on a daily basis new hand and face prints, the window where she sits in the car is one big mess, each door is full of oily hand prints. At first I did not know how every door and window can have so many hand prints each day until I went to the super market with her. There we searched for some ice cream for her and those were behind sliding doors made of glass. Now the average person uses the handle to open those doors (I know, full of nasty stuff) but she pressed her hands on the glass and opened them (looked kind of hard to do so). Well, I guess I have to just deal with it, six more weeks she will stay with us, I should be able to cope with that. Untill then I will have many more doors, windows and cabinets to clean.

 

Oh, before I forget, my wife can be really cruel/ mean sometimes. After I told her about my “observations” she asked her mother if her dad had already back in the day his OCD (cleaning everything three times etc.). She told her that in the first few years he was still normal but it changed shortly after they got married and moved together. My wife answered then “Now I know at least the reason why dad became so obsessed with cleaning the apartment!”. Both true and mean at the same time but apparently her mother didn’t get it…

Crazy Family, Mom in Law

Ideas of my Chinese mother-in-law

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I had big plans to write this weekend of our newborn baby but this plan is currently on hold as the baby is just still too fond of his current residency. I know I know it is disappointing so I have to go with plan B for this weekend’s blog post.

Remember when I wrote about my mother-in-law and her adventures at the airport? For a normal human being this would be already a highlight for some time but not for her, oh no, she just continues with weird things. Now it is not anymore the way she does things but those really weird ideas she gets and proposes to us. Here I give you a short list of only the past two days of her ideas:

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Mother-in-law just loves this UHT milk

 

  • Buy several boxes of milk and take them to China. She trusts the milk more here than the one she can buy in the Chinese stores. When we told her the milk will be expired by the time she arrives she said “It will be still better than the Chinese milk”, well, what should I add except of also the difficulty when it comes to the weight of several boxes of milk in her luggage and not to speak of the customs later on…

 

  • Buy a bread knife so she can cut bread back home in China. This one makes again no sense at all since the only bread she ever eats is the one you usually toast so it is already sliced into pieces.

 

  • Buy a spoon measurement set for baking. This could be useful in case she would actually ever bake something.

 

  • Buy a cappuccino foam maker. According to mother in law this is something rich people have. With this she can make cappuccino from now on when her friends are visiting so everything is very classy. Note: she does not ever drink coffee or cappuccino or any other kind of drink like that.

 

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Similar Ikea cabinet she wants to take to China

 

  • Buy some cabinets from Ikea.  Yep, she really believes that you can fold them so they don’t take any space in your luggage and they weigh nothing at all (the set she looked at clocks in at around 25-50 kg) besides that my parents in law don’t even have any tools to drill holes into the wall to fasten them. But no worries mother in law said, her husband will just clue them to the wall or something like that (reminds me of the non-existing DIY skills of many Chinese I have met so far).

 

  • When you take hot shower the baby won’t come out. The temperature will scare the baby and delay the birth and this is why my wife is already a week overdue.

 

  • Small dirty items you can just put into plastic bags and throw them into the microwave. Reminds me very much of last year when she tried to make rice in the microwave which resulted in half melted Tupperware container and lots of acrid smell.

I believe there are still many more ideas but I simply forgot about them due to the high amount. Whenever something crazy happens I try to take note but mostly I simply forget about it. Now the waiting time continues and I hope to get some baby article done next weekend (surely he wants to be out by then, I mean it can’t be that comfortable there, can it?)

 

 

Have you ever experienced such ideas from your parents, family or friends?