The confinement nanny provided invaluable support during the first month after Ellysa was born. As first-time parents, we were simply clueless about what to do once we brought Ellysa back home from the hospital. Hence, I believe this article will be insightful if you are also a new parent exploring the option of engaging a confinement nanny.
What is a confinement nanny?
A confinement nanny is a person, typically a woman, who provides support services during the confinement period, generally one month after the birth of a baby. These services encompass baby and mother care, along with basic housekeeping tasks.
What specific services does a confinement nanny provide?
Our main objective in engaging a confinement nanny is to learn how to care for Ellysa. We may have attended an antenatal course, but handling a real baby is a different ball game. Baby doll doesn’t retaliate, but a real baby does! Therefore, we needed someone with experience to show us how to handle a real baby.
Nevertheless, a confinement nanny provides other forms of support beyond simply transferring knowledge.
1. Day and Night Care for Baby
The confinement nanny also helped us care for Ellysa both during the day and night. Babies in their first three to possibly six months cannot differentiate between day and night. That makes the life of new parents extremely exciting! The baby can wake you up anytime during the day or night. In addition to that, newborns need to drink milk every three hours. For us, the confinement nanny was there to help me out. My wife needed to rest after the delivery. I’m generally a very hands-on daddy. But, the workload can be overwhelming to do all by myself. Initially, I didn’t want to engage a confinement nanny, but my wife insisted we did. She was right! For the brave first-time dad out there, if you think you can do everything on your own, think again. 🙂
2. Confinement Food Preparation
In Asian culture, we believe that eating confinement food can help the mother to recover better after childbirth. We follow the same practice, too. The confinement nanny prepared all the meals for Ellysa’s mother.
We do enjoy the confinement food. However, we get bored by the end of the 28-day confinement period.
3. Basic housekeeping
Once you have a baby, the amount of laundry increases significantly. The confinement nanny helped us with the laundry for the baby and us. While this is the last thing we expect from the confinement nanny, it is a good bonus.
How much did we pay to engage a confinement nanny?
So, here comes the less exciting part of engaging a confinement nanny. It is NOT cheap! We had to pay even more as Ellysa was born close to the Chinese New Year. We paid a total sum of SGD 5,080 for 28 days of services. But again, do we have a choice? I don’t think so. As first-time parents, it is unlikely that we will know what and how to care for Ellysa at home. The confinement nanny helped to set up the processes that we can continue after the end of the confinement period.
What should I take note of when engaging a confinement nanny?
One lesson from engaging in confinement nanny is that the nanny tends to be very procedural. That means she would follow the book very closely. A good example would be feeding. The confinement nanny used a mathematical formula to determine how much milk to feed Ellysa on each feed. Ellysa kept crying even after the nanny fed her. I only learnt that Ellysa was still hungry when I carried her and looked into her eyes. Well, it’s probably a dad’s instinct. I decided to continue feeding her until she was satisfied. Since then, we have decided to take cues from Ellysa about how much we should feed her.
Hence, while the confinement nannies may have the experience, it is also crucial for the parents to understand their babies well.
How do you engage a confinement nanny in Singapore?
There are two ways to engage a confinement nanny in Singapore. The first is through word of mouth. These are freelance confinement nannies. The second option is to request one through confinement nanny agencies.
We initially tried contacting freelance confinement nannies who have worked with our friends previously. However, they have assignments or are not keen to work through the Chinese New Year. Therefore, we decided to approach confinement nanny agencies. We discussed the requirements with them and eventually settled on one. In hindsight, that may have been a better solution as we could not afford the freelance confinement nanny not turning up when we brought Ellysa home.
When should you start looking for a confinement nanny?
We started the research on confinement nanny services in the early days of pregnancy. We finally confirmed the engagement with one of the confinement agencies five months before Ellysa was born.
I’m unsure if a confinement nanny will still be available if you wait to book one closer to your delivery date. There were many checkboxes to tick in our to-do list before Ellysa was born, so we decided to get this item out of the way as soon as possible. You may wish to consider acting quickly as well when it comes to engaging a confinement nanny.
Yanto Wong
