Child Matters

If you read the newspapers yesterday, you would have heard about the kidnapping case that went all wrong in Malaysia. The 7-year-old boy who was kidnapped by his own uncle was fed 5 sleeping pills and as a result died of overdose and strangling. The photo of the boy's feet sticking out from the suitcase he was packed into & thrown into the river was a horrifying and heart wrenching sight.

I guess as a mother now, I have a deeper understanding of the loss the parents are probably feeling now. The pain of losing a child to diseases is one thing, but losing him or her to unnatural causes is another dimension altogether. Especially when the child was murdered brutally. I remembered Huang Na. The whole of Singapore mourned together with the mother.

Coincidentally, the past few days, I thought about the issue of feeding sleeping pills to babies. Not that I am thinking of feeding them to joey of course (God forbid!), but I just thought that many people probably thought how good an invention it is if there're special pills for babies that can put them to sound slumber so that they can get some good quality rest. The whole of yesterday, joey was fidgeting and tossing in her sleep. She'd fall asleep in my arms but the moment I put her back in her cot, she'll wake up again 5 minutes later. And it went on like that for the whole day.

Then a scary thought came to my mind. If I leave my baby in the hands of a maid, would she feed my baby sleeping pills just to keep her quiet so that she can get the housework done in peace? I am definitely not prejudiced against maids, don't get me wrong. But I am saying that people can do extreme things when they are caught in a situation. A crying-non-stop baby can cause some degree of distress, especially to outsiders. Parents can still tolerate no matter how bad, but outsiders? That's why personally I will never engage a maid, unless I know there's another family member looking after baby together with the maid.

Life will never be the same again. Everything I do, joey got to be my primary & top consideration. As we have been saying in our family these few days, everything that we do, even if the methods are different, our objective is still the same - that is, to give joey the best and to protect her.