DAY 7

YOUR BABY

Your baby’s size at birth usually doesn’t help in predicting what his size will be as a child, a teen, or an adult. Petite babies can sprout into huge basketball players, and huge babies may turn out to be small or normal-sized eight-year-olds. But breastfeeding may lower the risk of your baby becoming overweight later.

Rather than gaining weight after birth, most babies lose between 5 to 7 percent of their original birth weight during the first three to four days after birth, and some babies lose even more than that. Most of the weight loss has to do with waiting for your milk supply to be established for your baby and your baby’s transformation from a swollen water creature into a drier, gravity-heavy one.

Within the next two weeks your baby will gradually gain enough to return to his original birth weight. An ill or premature baby will take longer to make up for lost birth weight. Then, your baby will probably start gaining weight and growing by leaps and bounds. He can be expected to double his birth weight over the next 5 to 6 months, gaining about 5 to 7 ounces per week. He’ll also grow about an inch a month over the first half year. By the time he reaches his first year, he will have tripled his weight.

Your baby’s pediatrician will use standardized growth charts to judge whether your baby’s weight, height, and head dimensions are proceeding as expected. The purpose of comparing your baby to the charts is to verify that your baby, whether large, small, or in-between, continues to grow at a steady rate. (You can view the growth charts yourself by going to http://www.cdc.gov/growthcharts.)

Genetic inheritance plays a major part in your baby’s size. If you and your partner are petite, your baby may be smaller than average, too. In that case, his size will appear at the lower end (lowest percentile) of your doctor’s growth charts. But if you or your partner is large-boned and tall, you may have a larger-than-normal baby who will be said to be in the top percentile for weight and length. As long as your baby keeps growing, it won’t matter if his growth is in the lower twenty-fifth percentile (in the group of the smallest babies) or the upper ninetieth (the largest 10 percent of babies).

Factors during your pregnancy can affect your baby’s size, too. A mother who has had gum disease, has smoked, has had poor nutrition, or high blood pressure is more likely to give birth to a smaller-than-average baby. A mother’s illnesses and medications during pregnancy can also affect her baby’s size. A mom with poorly controlled diabetes may deliver a heavier-than-average baby. And, if your baby was born prematurely, is ill, or has genetic problems, he is likely to start out very small and remain developmentally behind his peers.

If a baby remains small and fails to grow after the period of newborn weight loss is over, he may be said to have growth failure, or failure to thrive (FTT). Babies who have physical or digestive problems, or who are neglected, may not gain weight as expected. If FTT is suspected, your baby’s health-care provider will do a thorough exam and may run tests to try to diagnose the cause of your baby’s slowed growth in order to decide how to help.

YOU

This is the end of your first week with baby, and it may well have been one of the longest weeks in your life! Out of necessity, you’ve learned a lot of new skills in a very short period of time, such as how to manage everything, including eating, with one hand.

You and your baby’s main activities still consist of napping, crying (sometimes your baby, sometimes you), establishing breastfeeding, avoiding the telephone, and taking frequent breaks for diaper (and ultra-maxi-pad) changes.

 

“Don’t call work to see how people are doing in your absence, unless you want to hear them complain or start asking you to do stuff. This is your time to rest. Let everything else go.”

All about SIDS

Most parents worry about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). When SIDS strikes, in most cases, a seemingly healthy baby is put down to sleep and silently dies. Usually, the baby was last seen asleep and there had been no sign of struggle or suffering.

SIDS accounts for approximately 3,000 baby deaths per year and remains the leading cause of baby death between four weeks and one year of age in the United States, second only to congenital anomalies as the leading overall cause of death for all infants less than a year of age.

Ninety percent of all SIDS deaths occur in babies that are less than six months of age. The most vulnerable age is between two to four months, with two-and-a-half months being the average. Boys are more vulnerable, with 60 percent of SIDS deaths being boys and 40 percent girls. Two-thirds of deaths occur in the winter months.

   Doing the baby boogie

Even at this young age, babies can sense tension in their parents’ bodies. If you’re feeling emotionally stressed, chances are you’re handling your baby too abruptly, or breathing rapidly, and your arm muscles may be tight. Your baby is sensitive to these body signals and will likely become tenser himself. On the other hand, if you consciously breathe deeply, and relax your arm muscles to the point of nearly melting around your baby, no matter how you’re feeling inside, your baby will probably relax.

When babies cry, panicked new parents often jump from one soothing strategy to another. It doesn’t matter so much what you do to soothe your baby as long as you do it long enough for your baby to become bored. Think 5 to 10 minutes, not just 2 or 3, and make sure the baby’s really asleep before you try to put him down—waiting a few minutes is easier than starting the whole routine all over again.

Grandmothers in days of yore had a very special baby dance that made even the most inconsolable baby relax and nod off.

Here’s how to do it:

Stand up. Use your arms and hands to mold your baby into a tight little cocoon against your chest so that his whole body, including his arms and legs, are pulled in close to you.

Begin a rhythmical dance. Move forward and backward one step at a time so that your chest gently rocks your baby. While you’re doing the baby two-step, make a deep hum or groaning sounds with every second or third step. Just keep doing the dance and repeating your chesty noises until you feel your baby’s body relax.

Keep it going. Whatever you do, don’t interrupt the soothing and pull the baby away from your chest just because you want to see how he’s doing. That will just make him tense up again. Gradually taper off your sounds when you hear your baby make the shuttering sound of relaxation, and a mirror shows that your baby’s eyes have fluttered closed.

Remember: If your baby’s hungry or in pain, no amount of baby dancing or any other soothing technique, regardless of how skillfully it’s executed will make much of a difference for very long.

Although the causes of SIDS are still not completely understood, babies are more at risk of dying if their mothers smoked during pregnancy or if they are formula fed, put to sleep on their stomachs, or born to moms younger than 20. Pacifier use, back sleeping, co-sleeping, and breastfeeding all appear to reduce the risk.

Theories are that SIDS is related to subtle immaturity in the baby’s nervous system, metabolic problems, infections, or possibly a heart defect. Present studies suggest there may be a defect in the part of the victim’s brain that regulates breathing and arousal during sleep that affects the brain’s ability to sense carbon dioxide.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (USCPS) (www.cpsc.gov) has mounted a “back to sleep” campaign to encourage parents to always place their babies faceup for sleep in order to help prevent SIDS. Public awareness campaigns to promote back sleeping have helped cut the SIDS rate in the United States by more than 50 percent over the past decade.

Giving your baby tummy time when he’s awake is important to help keep his skull from flattening and to develop his neck, shoulder, and back strength. (For ideas about how to do that, see in this chapter.)