This badass momis about to pop her second child
Paola Lapid-Custodio wants to become a badass mom.
In many ways, she already is, successfully juggling her time to take care of her three-year-old kid, Jaxon, and being a loving wife to Jin; all while running a start-up social media agency (PEG Social Media Inc.) and helping organize medical missions that her husband’s company participates in.
But while she has seemingly found her groove, her job’s about to get a bit tougher. Paola is about to give birth to their second child, also a boy, this June.
“I am excited to be a mom of two, but nervous as well because I know they will be a handful. I heard balancing time only gets harder when someone becomes a mother and they’re 100 percent right. I thought I was busy when I was single. Boy, was I wrong! Thankfully, over time, I learned to do things faster and multitask as a mother so I can accomplish more of the things I need to do,” Paola said.
Paola tries to wake up early every day so she could accomplish some work before their son wakes up. She makes sure she spends play time with Jaxon, before she heads out for meetings. Most nights, Paola and Jin squeeze an hour of working out together before dinner.
“I made sure to train myself to take care of my son even without the help of a yaya. But we do have one, and I really appreciate the extra time I get because of the help we get. My husband also helps a lot in taking care of Jaxon. It’s a teamwork,” said the 30-year-old mom.
Enjoyable one
The journey to Paola’s first pregnancy was an enjoyable one. She didn’t experience any morning sickness or weird cravings. She continued going to the gym until she was about to pop. She also didn’t have a hard time during delivery (normal delivery), which she hopes would repeat with their second son.
If there was one challenge she had to deal with when she first became a mom was during the breastfeeding stage. She was set on storing and freezing her milk so her baby will have something to drink even when she is away from home.
But she found out that her milk had a soapy smell when defrosted. Jaxon wouldn’t drink it. Paola panicked because she had planned to exclusively breastfeed her baby.
“Thanks to some research, I found out I was not alone and that there is a way to remedy my problem. I just had to scald the milk, which involves putting it on top of a stove, heat it just before boiling point then take off from the heat, before I freeze it. Heating the milk to a scald, apparently, deactivates the lipase and stops the process of fat digestion,” Paola said.
Another thing that scared Paola during her first pregnancy was the fact that her mom died when she was five months pregnant. It was the most heartbreaking part of her first pregnancy, knowing that the closest her mom to meeting her grandson was only through an ultrasound photo.
“I was scared because I did not know what to expect. I did not have the luxury to ask my mom how her pregnancy went or ask her for advice because she was in her advanced stage of Liver Cirrhosis.
Superstitions
There were also lots of superstitions during the wake of mymom. One of them was that I cannot touch her body because I was pregnant. That crushed me!” she said.
While hers was not really the sweet, showy type of family, they do value tradition. She remembers pretending to be a guy, giving her mom a rose for Mother’s Day.
“One thing I regret was not being sweet or showy to my mother when she was still around, so that’s one thing I really want to teach my son. My mother was always supportive of everything I did and I plan to be the same to my son. I will most likely be a stage mother like my mother,” she said in jest.
As for more children, Paola said they’d like to try to have a girl. They just need to work harder so they could afford it. She loves being pregnant, after all. It’s fun for her because everything is the same—except her tummy gets bigger. She loves being a mother even more so, because she gets to share her love to the the most important people in her life.