These are some of the seemingly small trivial things that I really wish we had known about before we had our new baby. Hopefully these tidbits are useful to some other new mothers out there!
Hair Tourniquets:
This is one of the most baffling and bizarre baby hazards I’ve encountered and I had NEVER heard of it before it happened to our baby! A hair tourniquet is when a strand of your own adult hair gets wrapped around your babies fingers or toes so tightly that it begins to cut off the circulation. The scene goes like this: You’ll be hanging out with your sweet baby one morning when suddenly you notice that your cheerful child is inexplicably fussing and crying. You check the diaper, offer the breast, try to get a burp out, but nothing works. Now your baby is shrieking and wailing in apparent pain but you can’t figure out what’s wrong. You take off all of their clothes and their diaper and examine them under a good light and it’s only THEN to your horror that you discover that one of their fingers is turning bright red, or worse purple! You can’t initially see what’s causing it so you look even closer and then (like the scary reveal in a horror movie) you can suddenly see the cause. A thin hair from your own head is wrapped so tightly around your precious babies finger that it’s like a gangster garroting a victim with a wire across the throat. So sinister. Now you have to get the hair off and you’re freaking out and your baby is freaking out and the hair is so tight you can’t get a grip on it and it seems inevitable that your kid will be known for the rest of their life as 4 fingers McGee.
It was really like that for me the first time and this scenario happened to us several times when our baby was 2-3 months old and each time it was terrifying. If you type the words Hair Tourniquet into the internet you’ll find horrifying stories of babies who nearly lost a toe, finger or even a penis to this little-known but quite common danger! I think this happens more to very small babies because they keep their hands clenched in little fists all the time and long hairs can get wrapped up and stay stuck around their fingers inside their sweaty little fists. It’s a cruel trick of nature that this hazard coincides with the beginning of a mothers hair loss. I was shedding so much curly hair everywhere constantly and it was nearly impossible to prevent the baby from getting hair in her fists.
WHAT WORKED FOR ME: We instituted a daily finger/toe check where we examined each digit carefully for hairs. I also tried to be conscientious about removing any hairs I saw on the bed or other surfaces where the baby spent time. Any time the baby cried we checked her fingers and toes. If there was a hair tourniquet I used my fingernails to pick and tease it loose (if you don’t have long enough nails try tweezers). It’s hard not to freak out and pull it tighter but luckily hairs can be snapped or cut with finger nails or scissors and you should be able to solve the crisis quickly. I wish that hospital staff warned new parents about this hazard before they discharged you from the hospital!
Baby hands are disgusting:
Yes, like I mentioned above, try unclenching any 10 week old babies hand and you will discover a sweaty armpit of filth. Lint, dirt, breast milk, sand, dog hair, human hair and all sorts of other fuzzy grossness line the creases of those tiny perfect hands. No one ever mentioned needing to clean off a newborn’s hands all the time, but you do.
Respecting Baby:
I found a book at the thrift store called “Baby Knows Best: Raising a confident and resourceful child, the RIE way” by Deborah Carlisle Solomon. This book talks about being responsive and respectful toward your baby and treating them not like a doll or a pet to be dressed and fed and cared for, but with the same dignity that you would offer to any grown person. This book confirmed a lot of my pre-existing ideas and beliefs that babies should be given every opportunity to show their preferences, desires and abilities.
In practice this meant that when I lifted her up I tried to let her know before I did it, like this: “Hey baby, I’m about to pick you up, ready? Here we go!” When I changed her diaper or her clothes I narrated what I was doing like this: “Ok Hazel, I’m about to put this shirt over your head, here we go, over the head! Ok, now I need you to help push your arm through the sleeve. Ready? Push, push, push, push, Ah! Well done! Ok, now the other sleeve…” This became very helpful to us both because she wasn’t taken off guard or surprised and upset by the things I was doing to her. You may think that a tiny baby doesn’t understand what you’re saying to them, and while they probably don’t understand the words at first they certainly understand your tone of reassurance and your confident, calm manner. I noticed that when other people handled my baby they would just suddenly lay her down or pick her up without warning her and she often got upset, whereas if they gave a simple explanation of their actions she was perfectly at ease, "ok I’m going to lay you down now, I’ve got your head, don’t worry!”
My baby has been helping me to help her for months now. She pushes her own hands through her own sleeves and doesn’t protest when I have to change her outfit. Although she squirms and crawls away when I change her diaper I still narrate what I’m doing anyway because I can tell that it helps her to know what I’m up to. She rarely cries unless she bumps her head or gets startled by a loud noise. Our baby might just be calmer than other babies and results may vary, but overall I think that treating a baby with dignity just makes sense. Wouldn’t you rather have a baby who is more like your fellow collaborator? An individual personality with a well developed sense of integrity, trust, and self control? I certainly would!
Gear you don’t need
BABY TOWELS:
Before my baby was born I was gifted a large collection of hand-me-down terrycloth hooded baby towels. You know what I’m talking about, the adorable little yellow ducky towels with the cute ducky hood and the sweet blue puppy dog towel and the green froggie towels. I rolled them all up and dedicated an entire shelf in the bathroom to these cute baby towels. I never used a single one. I tried to use them, I wanted to use them but in actuality these little tiny towels are quite silly and ineffectual. I want to wrap my baby in an warm all enveloping towel embrace when she comes out of the tub. I don’t want her little wet legs dangling and dripping all over me, I don’t want her shoulders to get cold while I’m toweling off her butt. And also the terrycloth didn’t feel as soft as my own towel, it felt rough. My advice is to just save yourself the space and use a normal adult towel.
not my baby https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBphgf5rLmo
BATH TUBS:
Bathing a newborn was stressful for me, she was tiny, floppy, slippery and not happy about being in water. I started out with a hospital issued baby bathtub similar to the one pictured above, but I quickly ditched that because she didn’t like being placed on her back on slippery plastic with water all around her. I can’t blame her, I would feel quite vulnerable too if I wasn’t able to sit up on my own and someone laid me down in a slippery plastic tub full of water. So my solution was to fill the bathtub up for both of us and get in there with her. She relaxed much more if I was using my hands to hold and support her entire body in the water. Later on after she was able to sit up on her own (around 6 .5 months) she started to enjoy being in the tub a lot more and I began to use a plastic gardening tub for her bathtub
