Dian Brathwaite is enjoying the wonders of motherhood so much that she wants two more children as siblings for her now four-month old daughter Danica. Watching her cooing and rubbing noses with Danica, who started fussing for her bottle, Dian looks like a pro at mothering.
Her pregnancy came at a time last year when she was making big plans for herself – she had just bought her first house with her then-finace Danny and they were getting married in two months when they found out.
“I was happy. But Danny [now husband] was a lot more excited than me. He always wanted kids as he is from a large family. I was more thinking ahead about how we were going to balance out all this – the mortgage and the wedding.”
Dian’s pregnancy included short periods of morning sickness but she suffers from hypertension and so had a high-risk pregnancy.
“l was constantly being monitored from the time I discovered I was pregnant. But apart from that, I had a good run.”
Like all mums, she debated whether to learn the sex of her baby and she and her husband decided to wait – but on the day of the ultrasound they found out it was a girl. “My curiosity got the better of me”, Dian said, smirking.
Dad Danny and mum Dian have been together for a while. They met when he was a summer intern at her job while he was on holiday from studying engineering at the University of the West Indies’ St Augustine campus in Trinidad.
Danny is a “hands-on dad” and Dian said he was daddy and muumy a couple weeks ago when she felt under the weather.
But there is nothing more special than a mother-and-daughter bond and Dian says she strikes the working-mum balance by leaving work at work, so home time is for Danica.
Her first day back at work last month was a mixture of emotions. “I was tired because at that time Danica was not sleeping through the night as yet, so she would get up every two hours.”
She relates how she had jitters also about Danica’s first day at nursery:?“Trying to get her prepared for day care was my biggest challenge to date.
“I was exclusively breastfeeding her from birth and it was quite challenging getting her to bottle-feed. I was worried that she wouldn’t take the bottle and I would have to be called back to the nursery to breastfeed her.”
That didn’t happen. Danica has settled down at day care and the family has perfected the ritual of early morning wake-ups and getting ready for the trip from St Philip to Belleville to drop off Danica, then off to work, then back at five in the evening for Danica and heading home to prepare dinner.
Dian has put her love of socializing on the back burner and still hasn’t found any time for “me” as yet and laments missing out on her great love – watching football.
“We live far away from family but I try every weekend to go by my mum. She has passed on some recipes to me but nothing is better than her cou-cou every Saturday.”
Danica is now in a semi-routine of bedtime between seven and 8:30 p.m. and while she bottle-feeds at the nursery, “when we’re together, she breastfeeds as it is more convenient.”
While Danica sucks contently on her thumb during the photoshoot and drops off to sleep, Dian says her biggest fear is that she won’t get to see her grow up so she is looking forward to every moment she gets with her. She wants to instil the same values her parents taught her – being respectful and knowing Christ.
Dian has put her studies at the University of the West Indies on hold while she works and raises her daughter.
What do you love most about being a mummy to Danica?
“I like when she looks at me and laughs. I love every moment of it.”
