Dear All,
I have a bad confinement experience to share too. The confinement lady is called Amy. When we contacted her on the phone, we asked her what was her duties and she said taking care of baby and mother but did not specify further. I didn't have a good feeling but she was recommended by a friend (friend's relative relative) so we went ahead.
When she was helping me with confinement, I told her to use the Avent steriliser and leave it on for 24 hours (mine was a electronic). Her comment: troublesome. other families just sterilise once, and put it into tupperware bottle. Well, if my sterilizer was a 24 hours, wouldn't it be more hygienic? Btw, recommendations by all sterilisers products is that once lid is open, contents may get infected so should re-sterilise.
And she kept asking me to buy tupperware. I absolutely refuse, since I don't need tupperware. This was however, not important to me.
What matters was that baby was well taken care of and since I was perfectly well and could even kneel when I was discharged, I did not need taking care of.
When she 1st came, I was quite impressed with her. She had earlier said that as it was a holiday period, might be difficult for her to come immediately as I had given birth in my 37 week. She however, managed to come down the next day and my husband drove to customs to fetch her. We appreciated that and also because we wanted her to take good care of the baby, we gave her a red packet of $150.
That same night when she arrived, she saw me kneeling and asked (I thought it was out of concern and really touched) if I can do that? It was only later then I realised that if I can move ard, it makes things difficult for her.
Back to taking care of baby:
1. She used too hot water to bathe my child. He turned red upon touching the water and cried loudly. He never did that when we bathe him. In fact, he really enjoys bathing. We even had someone come to teach her but she said under her breath, so troublesome.
2. We did not turn on the air-con for my child's room as she said it was not good for the child though we did tell her she could turn it on if it was too warm. Imagine our surprise when she let our child perspire buckets until the pillow was wet while she turn the fan to blow at herself.
3. She did not know how to feed the baby. My child dislike her from the start and refuse to let her feed and I should have trusted that. So what she did was roughly rub his ears. We never had to do that before she came.
4. She was sleeping when baby cried and woke up only slowly after I had picked up baby. His crying was really loud and I purposely waited for her to wake up and made milk for baby. However, I never saw her walk pass my room and therefore I ended up going to the room. switching on the lights and breastfed baby myself. These actually happened a few times.
5. Changing his diaper. Most of the time, it was done by me. Once, I was quite fed up that I was paying so much for sometime who was practically eating and sleeping off me without doing much work, and way before we asked her to do housework, I let her changed. Baby's backside was still dirty after cleaning up. Another time, out of goodness, I just reminded her that baby sometimes might urinate, so be careful and to cover up with another diaper. She was rather reluctant to change and actually said very loudly rather unhappily for me to hear as I was leaving the room, "oh then baby will urinate on auntie"
After all these, I totally took baby out of her hands, and that was the 1st week.
Taking care of me:
As I mentioned, I was well and moving ard. So she only need to cook and wash for me.
All our clothes are dump into the washing machine so not a big chore right. As for food, turns out she don't know how to cook confinement food. She cooked the same food for me everyday almost every meal but she got lazier and lazier and the ingredients started getting lesser and lesser.
The 1st night, she stir fry pork with black fungus. Even told MIL that she purposely boil black fungus first so it will be tender and sweet. Wow! I was really impressed.
Thereafter, i also had stir fried pork, but without black fungus, not due to lack of black fungus. We had friends who were kind enough to queue in the early morning hours to buy pig livers for her to cook. She threw them to the back of the fridge, same for the fish head. The worse thing was, she just dumped herbs into the food. Basically, to her, confinement is just making sure I had lots of ginger and wine. My baby's jaundice went up so high we were scared we had to hospitalise him and we told her to stop. The moment she heard baby's jaundice fell, she started it again.
Her idea of cooking longan tea was to boil everything in the slow cooker, with lots of herbs also and the slow cooker was never washed.
So what happened was that I was so "Well taken care of" that when I moved 1 step, I sweat buckets. Now that I think about it, I am amazed that my organs were not damaged by her cooking.
I write this because my 2nd confinement, I ordered confinement food and nothing else was different from the 1st and I felt so much better. For the confinement done by her, I was pale and looked rather unhealthy.
Since she was free as I ended up taking care of baby myself, I told her, just help us to mop the floor, put the clothes into the washing machine, iron and hang the clothes. All for $1800 (a few years back). The clothes were all creased after ironing so I ended up ironing while she was having afternoon tea using our money. Btw, she never asked me if I need afternoon tea.
Oh, and she was very liberal with the $ we gave to her to buy ingredients to cook for me. She brought lots of herbs from the herbal shops, and also bought her own special breakfast items like cakes, milo etc. If she had done a gd job, we would have been more than happy to supply her with what she wants to eat.
She made a point of returning us the change but because most of the items had no receipt, we could not find out whether it was correct. All in all, for the 2 weeks she stayed with us, we gave her more than $300 for ingredients for simple dishes everyday and most of the ingredients were already in my fridge before she came.
She became worse as the days goes by and these was all in 2 weeks. She told my husband she wants to watch channel 8 at 9pm while he was watching BBC at 8.30pm. She even specially came to knock on my door while my husband, me and my parents in law were in the room to get my husband to turn on the sound for her (for some reason, the sound was accidentally turned off). She took daily afternoon naps for 3 hours with the air-con switched on. Baby was sleeping with me by then. And she critiscised me for not eating at the dining table.
I was so upset with her I became stressed and had major quarrels with my husband over sacking her because I really wanted her gone from my house. So we paid her 2 weeks plus a additional 1 week. She actually asked why was it not a full month.
Only after she was gone then I realised how lazy she was. She used the same pail of water to mop the house for 2 weeks. I found that out after she left. The bucket of water was left there and it was black like ink. She might have intended taking back a packet of expensive herbs with her We found it hidden in a corner of the kitchen. However, she never had the chance to do it since we watched her packed.
It was like hiring a maid, but a really expensive one. She was in her late 30s then, so likely now she would have been in early 40s.
Btw, the person we spoke to on the phone sounds totally different from her, so it could well be that she had replaced someone else.
