Headbath

I had this lovely post reviewing feeding rooms in Bangalore. However, Blogger decided to eat it up. Shattered, I am attempting to rewrite it but I doubt it will ever be as good as the original one. But then again, it's a review of feeding rooms, how good does it need to be? We shall see. The existence of feeding rooms is not something I ever thought about. I figured they must exist because I've come across a few at airports and malls. The euphemistic symbol of a woman changing a baby signals that there is a room nearby that affords some measure of privacy such that a baby's diaper may be changed. Conveniently, there's a chair in said room presumably, to recover from diaper-tastic shock. Alternatively, a mother may use this chair to feed her baby. Not in image: Chair I wasn't sure if these rooms existed in Bangalore but since E was born in March, I've been pleasantly surprised to find them at the following places: Phoenix Marketcity, Whitefield Forum ...

The concept of babywearing is as old as babies - I have a mental image of a cavewoman foraging near her cave with dogs by her side and a baby on her back. Tribal populations in India continue this practice but for some reason, this isn't very common among us city-dwellers. I've been carrying baby E since she was 5 days old in a purple Flo soft carrier from Mamas and Papas. The Flo and other soft carriers is basically a strip of stretchy cotton jersey fabric - about 30 inches wide and 7 feet long - that you wrap around your body and then stick baby in. It took a few tries to figure out how to use it properly but my sleepy newborn was the perfect test subject - she practically lived in there the first month. There is some contention about the term "babywearing"; RIE practitioners like Janet Lansbury  hate the term because it implies that baby is an item of clothing while the Sears' consider it one of the  seven pillars of attachment parenting . I like the ter...

Two weeks since the last update , and I'm happy to note the following changes: E takes three naps consistently.  I no longer need to do any shushing or rocking but I do occasionally nurse her in bed. Bedtime is not arduous at all - she fusses for a bit and then goes to sleep herself. E has figured out which fingers she likes to suck. Hooray for my nipples! I can actually do things during naptime. Those Internet memes are not going to catch up on themselves. Babies can be real babies about sleeping. If only they'd grow up about it! The Morning Nap The timing of this nap depends on when she wakes up in the morning. I see a variance in her morning wake up time but it's usually somewhere between 6 and 7:30 AM. Accordingly, the morning nap happens anytime between 8 and 9 AM.  E spends her mornings with her father. Once he has to start getting ready for work, we take the dog out and generally expose E to some fresh air and noise (my assumption being that mornin...

Okay. So my last post on baby sleep  happened around a week ago. Since then, I've logged E's sleep and I've also seen (with much delight) how she's "consolidating" her sleep as promised by Dr. Weissbluth. The Sleep Logs Over the last week, I've been logging her daytime sleep in the attempt to convert her from a sneaky in-arms cat napper (30 mins every 60 to 90 mins) to a big girl who takes big naps in her big bed. My husband made me a Google Spreadsheet that I could update on my phone to log sleep start and end times, and also measure the time from when she last awoke to when she went back to sleep. This helped me gauge the times when she gets really sleepy. As of now - she gets really sleepy about an hour after she wakes up (around 8 AM) and then 11:15 AM (yeah, it's that precise) and then around 5 PM (her shortest nap and she doesn't really want to nap but I insist because otherwise it's a nightmare getting her to go to sleep at bedtim...

My baby is 12 weeks old today! She's hurtling out of the newborn phase. In any event, she's outgrown her newborn clothes. In these past weeks, she's had two doses of vaccinations and a surgery. Nothing too serious but frightening for the new parents nonetheless. These past months have been exciting, to say the least. She's moving from being a sleepy (and portable) newborn to a lively girl with clear likes and dislikes. It's been fun taking her out. Last month, we took her to a friend's reception and she just slept in her soft carrier through all the noise. Everyone commented on how cute and calm she was. I'm trying to get her into a daytime nap schedule as well. To this end, I've been reading two books: Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Dr. Marc Weissbluth ; and The No-cry Nap Solution by Elizabeth Pantley The first book contains very little on newborn sleep and just tells me that baby will be consolidating daytime sleep from weeks 12 to 1...