Care of the Baby

How do you tell if your baby is too hot or too cold?

How you feel, if it is summer and it is very hot-and your                                             sweating, do not wrap up your baby in tons of blankets!                                         You can over heat your baby, and cause death or brain                                            damage.

If your baby is hot, a light t-shirt or even just in the                                                 diaper, on a light blanket or sheet is fine. Ovoid large drafts, strong fans unless it is extremely muggy, hot, high humidity.

The common places for the heat rash to occur are on the face, in the arm pits, neck, chest and back. often the legs and feet area do not have any signs of heat rash, but they can.

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Baths

Your baby should not be bathed for at least 48 hours except for the herbal                baths. Give your baby time for his/her skin to adjust to being out here in ‘the air’. You should ask your midwife to do a demonstration bath if you have never bathed a baby.

Also remember that there is protective stuff all over the baby, such as vernix etc. This protects your baby. You should not wash this stuff off.

Your baby does not need to be bathed daily. They do not get that dirty. The genitals, face and neck area are the only areas that may need to be washed daily.

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Baby/ Stools

Day 1-2  –will have between 1-2 stools a day on average, but may have many more than that. May be meconium or changing to green in color

Day 3-4  —will have between 2-3 stools a day, but may have many more than that. Stool can be from meconium to the green in color. Stools may change to yellow -breast feeding stools

Day 5-7 —will not have as large of stools, usually the baby will go just a little bit in each diaper.  But the baby may only go a few times a day too. If the bay has had some jaundice, then the stool will be watery and yellow. Very normal, and this is not diarrhea.

Week 2-3 —- will still have frequent stools, and by now often the babies stool habits will be the same each day.

Week 3-4  — Often the baby                                                                                               will begin to have stools just                                                                                           a few times a day

Week 5-6  If it has not                                                                                                   happened already, by now                                                                                            the baby may be having stools                                                                                          a few times a day only.

 

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Crying

If your baby cries, first check if they baby is cold, hungry, wet or had a BM. If not, they maybe the baby is just lonely. Remember that this child has been growing under your heart for 9 months, and is use to you as the mother. When you are not right there, the baby knows this. Try the following: offer the baby a feeding, offer the baby something to suck, rock the baby, swaddle the baby, hold the baby, walk with the baby, talk to the baby, just spend some time with the baby. If you have done all of these and the baby is still crying, sometimes the baby needs to cry. (as adults we sometimes need to cry) But that does not mean that you just lay the baby down and walk away! Remember, you as an adult will need to ‘vent’ and older children also need to ‘vent, ’ well so do babies! Some times they just cry for no reason! They are a baby and this is the only way they have to communicate!  I do NOT think that it is ok to allow your babies to “cry it out”.

 

           

Week 3-4

If they are not sleeping well at night, this is often when they will begin to sleep better during the night.

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