Cloth Diapering Tips & Baby Talks

Why Do Babies Cry When They Are Born?

sindee — Fri, 14 May 2010 04:56:20 +0000

Parents can be forgiven for smiling when they hear the first sounds of crying from their newborn baby. It signals to them that the new arrival is alive and breathing. But is this crying really necessary? At any other time it is a signal that distresses the parents and makes them anxious about the pain or discomfort they know the baby must be feeling. Is their joy at hearing the audible signs of life from their offspring masking what should perhaps more correctly be their concern about the baby’s panic? Is the traditionally accepted procedure, at the moment of birth, the best from the baby’s point of view?
To find the answer to this question we need to examine what confronts the baby as it emerges into the outside world. It comes from a warm, dark, quiet, soft, all-embracing, liquid world into one of stark contrast. In the old established hospital routine, there are bright lights – for those attending the birth to see clearly what is happening; there is considerable noise as the hospital staff encourage the mother and talk to one another; and, for the baby, there is loss of body contact as the doctor or midwife holds and examines it following delivery. Again, it has been a hallowed tradition for the doctor to slap the baby to encourage it to cry, as a way of initiating breathing. The ever-present fear that the baby may not start breathing quickly enough causes impatience and a deliberately harsh treatment to force the baby to react. Other procedures, such as cutting and clamping the cord, weighing and examining the infant, and washing and clothing it, may all be undertaken without delay as part of this standard medical sequence.
Like the parental smiles at the sound of crying, these hospital activities are easy to understand. The primary concern of the medical staff is that nothing should go wrong and that they should ensure for the parents the delivery of a physically sound and healthy baby. Nobody can blame them for this, but it has recently been suggested that, in their urge to ensure physical well-being, they have perhaps gone too far, treating the newborn as a patient instead of a perfectly healthy new arrival. In rare cases where there are genuine medical problems they are, of course, entirely justified with their speedy, businesslike approach, but in such instances they are today usually well aware of possible dangers before the delivery begins. The warning signs will have shown up during earlier examinations and they can then be ready for them. In the vast majority of cases, however, where both mother and baby are physically strong, healthy and normal, there is something to be said fora gentler, calmer approach to ensure that the baby is given the smallest possible trauma as it first encounters the outside environment.
What should this softer approach be? It is to proceed more gradually, so that the newborn can take on board the inevitable shocks of the outside world little by little, instead of in one dramatic explosion of novel stimulation. Observing the behaviour of newborn babies closely soon reveals ways in which this can be achieved without taking any undue medical risks.
First, there is no need for loud voices. or the clatter of hospital equipment once the baby has started to emerge. Unless something goes wrong with the delivery, the birth room can be kept completely quiet and the baby’s ears can become slowly accustomed to the clamour of the open air.
Second, the bright lights of the typical hospital room can be dimmed considerably without serious risk, especially from the moment that the baby has been successfully delivered. Instead of screwing up its eyes against the glare it can then gradually adjust to this totally new sensory experience.
Third, its panic at loss of body-contact can be much reduced by allowing it to remain in direct touch with its mother’s body as it emerges. It is not held up, away from the mother, but placed gently on her stomach – now conveniently hollow – and left there to lie quietly in contact with her soft, warm skin. At the same time, adult hands can clasp and embrace it, holding it snugly on to the mother’s body. Initially, these can be the hands of the doctor or midwife, but then the mother herself can take over and, for the first time, feel her baby’s tiny shape. The change for the newborn from total contact to loss of contact is made into a gradual process instead of a sudden shock.
Modem doctors introducing this more gentle approach to birth have been rewarded with far less panic-stricken newborn babies. There are no screaming, contorted faces. The new arrivals lie placidly and peacefully in their mother’s arms, calmly resting after their strenuous journey. They may not be totally silent but the expected prolonged screaming is replaced by no more than a few brief cries as they emerge from the birth canal. These cries are the inevitable consequence of the sudden expansion of their small chests as they leave the tight constriction of the vagina. One moment their chests are compressed and the next they are expanded and this encourages the air to rush in. The exhalation that follows produces the brief crying sound, but this is quickly followed by silence if the newborn’s body is kept in contact with the mother and moved gently up to lie on her.
At this point there is a moment of peace and rest for both baby and mother. Instead of hurrying on with the various medical procedures – cutting the cord, washing, weighing and clothing the newborn – it is left in its mother’s embracing hands to adapt to its new world. There really is no urgency at this stage. The cord continues to beat for several minutes after a normal birth and still provides the vital oxygen supply from the mother to her infant. While this is happening the baby will start to breathe with its own lungs, little by little replacing the old system with the new. Hurrying to cut the cord does nothing to help the baby and only forces it to switch to lung breathing with extreme rapidity, once again putting a sudden strain on the newborn. The gradual approach allows the arrival of lung breathing to occur at the baby’s pace, rather than the hospital’s.
As far as washing, weighing and clothing the baby is concerned, this can all wait. The baby’s body is covered in a protective layer of grease beneath which its skin is tender and extremely sensitive. Contact with its mother’s soft stomach and hands is far kinder than with towels and clothing. Again, the slow approach favours the baby and gives it time to settle and adjust.
Something else important is happening, too, and that concerns the mother. Instead of having her newborn whisked away from her immediately, she is able to feel it with her fingers and, in the key moments of her reproductive experience, to relish its presence. This is a climactic moment and she should not be cheated of it by over-efficient professionals – with what could be described as a partus interruptus. A normal birth is not a surgical operation, it is a moment of supreme biological importance during which the medical atmosphere should always be kept in a subordinate role unless an emergency occurs.
In peace and quiet, in a dim light, unhurriedly, the mother can then come to terms with her baby’s existence. Eventually, when the shock of the delivery is past, for both parent and child, the usual procedures can be carried out. Before this is done, however, the baby can be gently shifted up to the mother’s breast where it may start to suck straight away. This move also permits the mother to take a close look at her new arrival as she cradles it in her arms. This is a stage that helps to tighten the bond even more than usual. And it can surely not be an accident that the average umbilical cord is just long enough to permit the newborn to be put to the breast while it is still attached to the placenta.
Unless the delivery has been abnormally exhausting, both mother and baby will be wide awake during the moments that follow. During the first hour of its life the baby’s eyes are nearly always open and the face to face contact that can follow the delivery is something that should not be curtailed for any mother who wants it. Eventually the cleaning-up can begin, but even then the baby should be returned to the mother’s embrace at the earliest possible moment. The traditional hospital regime saw the baby taken away to a remote nursery cot, alongside rows of other babies. Each baby was then taken to its mother every four hours for regular, regimented feeding sessions. This was a totally unnatural procedure and certainly one that no tribal mother (or chimpanzee for that matter) would tolerate. Unless the mother is ill seriously incapacitated in some way, she should be separated as little as possible from her baby during these early days.
It may be argued that this is no more than a call for a romantic ‘return to nature’ and that, in terms of modem child welfare, it has no value. There is convincing evidence against this criticism. Back in the 1970s some astute observers carried out detailed studies of newborn babies with their mothers. One group of mothers experienced the usual hospital routine and a second group were allowed an additional five hours a day of cuddling-contact with their babies. After they had all left the hospital, the observers did some follow-up checks on their later behaviour. They discovered that, one month after the three-day hospital stay, the ‘cuddling-contact’ mothers displayed more body intimacy in dealing with their babies than those that had undergone the traditional hospital routine. They embraced them more warmly when feeding them and indulged in more eye-to-eye contact. A year after the three-day hospital stay, the ‘cuddling-contact’ mothers still showed some differences, remaining closer and more protective whenever their infants showed any signs of discomfort or distress.
Clearly, prolonged contact during the first crucial days of maternity is important in strengthening the parent-offspring bond. It would, howeverll, be foolish to claim that it is essential. Many babies survive weenough without such contact, but if it can be offered to a mother without causing any problems then it seems foolhardy to eliminate it simply because of some longstanding tradition of hospital procedure.
Recently certain French doctors have introduced extreme measures for ‘naturalizing’ the birth of babies, employing near-darkness, almost complete silence and a reverently gentle laying-on of hands with the newborn. The results have been spectacular in terms of newborn calm and comfort, but a new kind of panic can be caused if the process is taken too far. Some of the mothers became alarmed at the almost too-peaceful atmosphere. Having been brought up to expect noise, bustle and clatter at the scene of the birth, they feared that some sort of disaster must have occurred and that their so-quiet babies must be dead or dying. Such is the conditioning to which whole generations have been exposed. In some cases it was hard to convince them that their babies were performing normally and naturally. Clearly there is no advantage in taking the process so far that the panic eliminated from the newborn is switched to the mother. Both should be as calm as possible for the magic of the early bonding between mother and child to take effect. This can be done by a carefully balanced compromise between the expected traditions and the more patient approach of the ‘biological delivery’.
The presence of fathers during and after the birth has a similar bonding effect. If they take time to hold, cuddle and rock their babies during the first few hours after birth, they too remain closer to them later on. It is no accident that human babies remain awake during the first hour or so of’ their lives, before falling into a long, deep slumber. During this waking period they are more alert than they will be for several days and this special level of activity may have evolved quite specifically as a ‘bonding time’, the active baby transmitting signals of enormous appeal to its parents at a time when they themselves are in a highly emotional condition. This powerful combination, it would seem, plants deep roots of love into the family unit.

How Do Babies Enter The World?

sindee — Fri, 14 May 2010 04:46:59 +0000

Often with great difficulty, as many women can testify. But why should human birth be such an effort, when so many other animals appear to produce their offspring with so little trouble? There is no ambulance to rush a mother giraffe to hospital when she is about to produce her six-foot tall calf. Despite its ungainly shape, the newborn giraffe simply slides out of its mother’s body, crashes to the ground and then quickly staggers to its feet. There are no doctors or midwives to assist an orang-utan mother as her baby edges its way into the outside world. Again the whole procedure seems remarkably relaxed and simple. When the family cat hides away to deliver her litter of mewing kittens she does not appear to be racked with pain. She goes through birth after birth with quiet efficiency and little fuss. So why has the human baby’s entry into the world become a time of such high drama and concerned medical supervision? Has our species become somehow inefficient at giving birth and if so, why?
It is often argued that the frequent agonies of giving birth are the result of the fact that human beings, uniquely, spend their lives walking around on their hind legs. This bipedal position certainly puts some conflicting demands on the female pelvic girdle, which must be both a vertical locomotion support and a birth passage. The baby has to emerge through a ring of bone that must, of necessity, be a compromise between its two main functions. But although this factor may playa part in making human birth more difficult than birth in other species, it cannot be the whole answer for one very simple reason: primitive women did not have ante-natal clinics, hospitals, drugs, anaesthetics and obstetricians for expectant mothers. The primeval human female had to produce her babies under simple, tribal conditions without any modem technology to help her and she had to continue to do this for thousands upon thousands of years for our species to succeed. And succeed it did, on a global scale.
If primitive mothers could manage without any specialized help, why can we not do the same? A favourite answer is that
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the tribal mothers were working ‘in the fields’ all day, and this made their bodies more muscular and stronger, so that they could give birth more easily. Bearing in mind how well fed we are today and how fit young women keep themselves, this explanation no longer seems very persuasive. It may have applied in epochs and cultures where women were made soft by being forbidden to do physical work, but even there it is hard to accept it as an important factor.
Looking at the evidence from ancient societies and from modem tribal societies in remote parts of the world, it seems that there are two major differences between their simple births and our more painful ones. These differences concern the place where the mother gives birth and the position in which she does it. We have altered these two aspects of delivery and, in doing so, have created unnatural obstacles to easy childbirth.
This may sound strange, but consider the facts. The tribal mother-to-be gives birth in a familiar place, soothed and helped by familiar female friends. She is not rushed off to a strange and rather daunting location, to be attended by strangers. The modem mother-to-be is not ill, but she is taken to a hospital – a place that we all automatically associate with sickness, injury and pain. This removal to an unfamiliar place with alarming associations makes her anxious. Consciously, she knows that everything is being done to help her, but at a deeper, subconscious level, she feels the unease we all sense as we approach a hospital building.
This anxiety has a quite specific effect on her, and to understand it it helps to look at the behaviour of certain other pregnant females. Among horses, the pregnant mare is capable of holding back her moment of delivery until she feels completely secure. Nine out of ten foals are born in the middle of the night. This is no accident, this is the result of the mares controlling the timing of their contractions. They wait and wait, until they are alone and all is quiet. Only then will they give birth. This is not something they learn. It is an instinctive ability and it helps the mother to make one of her most vulnerable moments also one of her most private.
This same mechanism is at work in humans. If the expectant mother is fearful or anxious, this mood automatically delays her labour. A specific chemical (epinephrine) is released into the mother’s system and this has the effect of delaying the birth. The biological function of this postponement is, of course, to allow the mother to wait fora more relaxed, less intimidating moment before she becomes vulnerable. In primeval conditions this makes a great deal of sense. It helps her to avoid dangers. She can time her delivery to safer moments. But for the modern female it is no advantage at all. It is a nuisance. What is worse, the prolonging of the delivery makes her even more anxious and fearful and this in turn prolongs it still further. It is a vicious circle that sees many of today’s mothers undergoing periods of labour many times longer than normal for our species.
This could be avoided if the mother felt entirely relaxed and ‘among friends’. The less apprehension, the less pain. If mothers must be moved to maternity hospitals to give birth, for reasons of hygiene and access to medical emergency treatment, then those hospitals should be made as familiar and friendly as possible.
It has recently become fashionable for the father to be present at the birth. Although this is usually said to be a return to a ‘natural’ condition of parental sharing, with the father’s presence acting as a bonding device, the truth is that fathers do not seem to have been particularly prominent in the birth customs of ancient or tribal peoples. The supportive friends have almost always been exclusively female. Females who have previously given birth themselves seem to have been more calming in their influence than males. An ‘expectant father’ may be even more anxious than the mother and risk transmitting his fears to her, worsening her state of mind instead of improving it. In other cases, however, the father is the only ‘body-intimate’ a woman has today and so, in some instances, if he is calm and relaxed himself, he can provide the familiarity that she needs. It clearly depends on the individuals in each case.
From this argument it could be concluded that giving birth at home would be better. The mother would feel more at ease and the delivery would not therefore be delayed by internal chemical reactions to anxiety. This would be true if the home could be made hygienic enough and if the mother had around her expert, but familiar help. The problem for the modem female, however, is that she has been so firmly indoctrinated with the idea that it is only safe to go to hospital to give birth, that remaining at home might itself become a cause for anxiety. She is trapped between two alternatives, both of which have their own built-in anxiety factors: the hospital is strange and clinical, the home is lacking in expert technology. The solution must always be to choose the course of action that makes the individual mother feel most secure and relaxed. Then she will not suffer the automatic ‘protection device’ that is built in to her system and which keeps holding her baby back, no matter how hard she struggles to deliver it.
In addition to finding the right place to give birth, there is also the question of adopting the right posture for the delivery. If, again, we look at ancient and tribal societies, it is clear that lying down on your back to give birth is not the favoured position. In fact, looked at logically, it is rather ridiculous, because it makes no use of gravity. Instead of ‘dropping’ her baby, the mother has to be urged to ‘push, push’. She must force the infant out horizontally. Again, this seems a strangelymedical procedure that has no place at a ‘natural’ event. It is as if the mother, having been shipped to hospital, is now being treated as though she really is ill. She is placed in a bed, like a patient, and attended by medical staff, as though there is something wrong with her – when in reality there is something wonderfully right with her. It seems as though this medically dominated atmosphere has been accepted as the inevitable norm for human mothers, but the. truth is that it is no more than a modern fashion.
A survey of birth postures in tribal and ancient societies reveals that squatting, not lying, is the natural delivery position for our species. Even the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic for ‘birth’ shows a squatting woman with a baby’s head emerging from below her body. The same is true in ancient Babylon, Greece and in the Pre-Colombian peoples of Central America. In ancient Rome they made use of special birth chairs. These chairs had cut-away seats that permitted the baby to emerge downwards while the mother clung on to handles fixed to the front of the chair arms. These devices remained popular in Europe for centuries and were still in use in some regions right up to the beginning of the twentieth century.
Giving birth in this way is easier, as we know from careful modern studies by anthropologists in New Guinea and elsewhere. Their observations of the few remaining tribal societies that have not yet been ‘helped’ by advanced cultures, show that the primeval squatting position greatly reduces the effort needed to deliver the baby. There may still be contorted facial expressions and moments of inevitable discomfort and even pain, but the whole process is quicker and more efficient.
We need to re-learn some old lessons when bringing babies into the world. Providing mothers are healthy and there are no signs of complications, we could do well to reconsider both the place and the position for delivery. Birth is a natural process and we should give biology as well as medicine due consideration when planning it.

extracted from ” Baby Watching” by Desmond Morris

How to make your snap/button cloth diaper more papa-friendly for wriggle baby?

sindee — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 06:01:58 +0000

Many parents dread not to choose snap simply because snap diaper is said to be “difficult” for wriggle baby. This appear even harder for Daddy or Grandparents who are not so familiar with cloth diaper too. Well, as matter of fact, actually wearing wriggle baby with snap diaper is really EASY…just snap on the left side of the diaper before your wear your baby, then slot in your baby left leg in it just like he is wearing pant, then only snap on the right side. The whole process is like wearing pants.

Alternatively, if you are wearing pocket diapers (not fitted diaper due to the thickness), you can also snap both sides, after you have already knew about the correct snap sizing for your little one. Then wear your baby just like wearing a pant. Da…da…you are done.

How we started washing clothes without detergent?

sindee — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 03:12:04 +0000

We have not been using detergent even our own household for a long long time . It is like going back to the olden days where the mothers will be using pure river water to wash clothes, without contaminating the water system.

I cant obviously claim myself to be a doc, but being a mother of 2 eczema kids and hubby with skin problem and myself sinusitis, I have gone through this.

I did apply many types of prescribed doctor’s cream to my elder girl and later stage in her life, she is 8 now, I could noticed that she has rather poor healing in skin. I didn’t like the dacacort effect coz the moment I apply tonight, all the rashes were gone the next morning…. Effect too vast.

I mean if we try not to expose our kids to chemicals in daily life, why should we put in chemical purposedly in their skin? I regretted using them on my first girl, I should have treated the root of the eczema problem.

With my no.2 girl, I didn’t go back to any western medicine for fear of the steroid effect (which is always working on surpressing, instead of long term treatment). I opted for Homeopathy, a natural healing method.

At the same time, like all mothers, I have searched around for the best solution to solve this problem.

I have started out with our Eco Laundry Ball for all our laundry ball.

And true enough, all the skin problems that I used to see ‘disappear’.

Well, you may say that it was Homeopathy that save the day. But in all the cases I have seen around, many people may continuously see skin eruption problems they ignore their own role in taking care of their diet, household, etc.

As for myself, I have certainly liked the idea of getting fresh curtain out of the washing machine, instead of getting a piece of FRAGRANCE-LOADED fabric off the machine. Washing curstains has always been a problem for a sinusitis like me…. It will be full of ATISHOO! ATISHOO! and ATISHOO! if you really understand what I mean by swelling nose and extensive nose block. So with this eco laundry ball, washing curtains means — A BREEZE, coz they just smell AS FRESH!

More info in the ECO LAUNDRY BALL.

How to overcome detergent build up in cloth diaper problem?

sindee — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 02:56:20 +0000

Have you ever wonder ever since you started with cloth diapering you have detergent build up problem in your cloth diapers?

Have you ever tried to reduce the amount of the detergent but still you will have leaky diapers?

I understand fully how frustrated it is as I have personally gone through this MYSELF.

I have hair standing up, waking up in the middle of the night to have a night change on my baby wetting my bed. Ouch! That’s really disturbing, especially when I was just in the middle of my sweetest dream after a tiring day.

Here is I solve this problem, once and for all:

ECO LAUNDRY BALL —- YES! this is how i substitute all my laundry detergent!

Now with this laundry solution I don’t have to worry about detergent build up problem again!

And the diapers — DONT SMELL at all!

What i need to do is just to soak the laundry balls with water and the stinky inserts , but not the diapers, coz diapers has the elastic part. Soaking diapers like in the wet pail method will make its life span shorter. I usually soak them in a separate pail. But you may soak them in the washing machine if you like it this way.

After 1-2 hours, or overnight, if you like it, just toss all the diapers in and washed together with the inserts and the laundry balls.

Immediately after the wash, you can spot the difference — the diapers and inserts are as clean and fresh! Plus NO FRAGRANCE (A.K.A. Chemicals) from the detergent!

More info in the ECO LAUNDRY BALL.

How I Toilet Train My Toddler? — Part 2

sindee — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 23:52:44 +0000

Now that the girls are ready for poo-poo training, I am more ready to go for pee-pee training.

By the time they reached 1 year plus and started to walk, i would always bring them to potty to pee, every 30-45 minutes or so.

If they don’t pee, it was always ok, and if they don’t pee and pee on the nappy only after they were just out from the potty, it was always ok too.

Eventually when I noticed that they would try to walk to potty to pee themselves when they have the urge to pee, i would change them to pant, not training pants, but just normal pant, coz this will help them to pull down their pants easily to pee.

It’s so cute to see them puling down pants. At first the timing is out — they pull the pant but pee-pee already overflow, but it was already a great attempt! Bravo!

Then, they learnt to pull down their pants and sit on potty to pee.

Once day time pee-pee training is done, this is consider as day time diaper off, except for night time.

Night time toilet train is as easy too. Usually by the time they reach about 2 years old, they would know how to mumble words to show that they were comfortable with the cloth diapers or not. If not, I would also help them to walk through this process. As usual, i would still empty the bowel before putting on the diapers, but to add on to that, i would adventurously take off one insert, and left with only 1 insert. About 1-2 hours after the girl fell asleep, i would say in her ears ” Mummy is going to pee you ya.” And slowly pull down her pyjamas and brought her to the potty which was just beside the bed. For the first few nights she may crying, but after that she will settle into that routine. With that pee which is going to empty her bowel again, she can last for the whole night already.

But since she was already used to peeing in the early morning, she would do that when she opened her eyes.

And that’s how the whole process of toilet training of my toddler.

One Size Pocket Diaper

Training Pant

How I Toilet Trained My Toddler? — Part 1

sindee — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 10:26:06 +0000

When my 2 girlies were small, as small as 4-5 months old, i would always wore them with traditional nappy during day time and night time with cloth diaper.

This being that i had always soaked the whole pail of nappy and waited till the end of the day then only i started washing all of them in one short….using the washing machine la, of course, else i will be full-dead. Washing in this mode is already half dead, haha!

During night time, before they were changed to cloth diaper, I would always pee them in the potty so that they would learn to empty their bowel before putting on cloth diaper. Then immediately they woke up in the early morning, i would put them on the potty again to pee. Never, never, let them play in the baby cot and pee one large amount of urine in the diaper ….coz that will end up being a HEAVY WETTER, as we always put it.

During the second month, I would always say ‘ngggg’ (a long one…to resemble the sound of making poo-poo, while lifting the baby’s legs. This is done with my baby lying down. Poo poo always came out at a ‘shootting style. haha! Sometimes ‘spraying’ on my clothes!

But this didn’t went long, coz by 3-4 months, I will be holding little one and let them poo on the little S size potty.

That way, little baby would learn to poo only on potty and eliminate the chance of messing the nappies. Though on some occasions, they did, when bowel calling was too strong and mummy just too slow to bring the potty. haha!

But soon after that, before 1 year old, smart little ones would know that, potty is for poo-poo and poo-poo on nappy is a no-no.

Not that anyone would scold them, but they just disliked the feeling of getting mess all around….just like we adults.