But a handiwipe is not adequate protection against MRSA.
To be fair, it should be pointed out that in Britain (which I believe is where the OP is), parenting and grandparenting classes are far more common than they are here. Part of this is cultural, where us Yanks can’t imagine such a thing. But still, the point I think is valid.
My next door neighbor is a pediatrics nurse. I found her advice invaluable during my daughter’s first year when she was next door and my mom thousands of miles away. I find it hard to believe that someone in that profession wouldn’t already have a storehouse of current knowledge let alone practical experience far greater than your husband’s.
My oldest son nearly died from RSV that led into MRSA pneumonia when he was one month old. With my next two babies, anyone who wanted to touch them in their first four weeks of life was politely asked to wash their hands with hot soapy water first, and if they didn’t want to do so, they could fuck straight off. I don’t care if I was being hypersensitive, overprotective, or a paranoid bitch. Sitting vigil at your infant son’s hospital bed for three weeks straight while he’s got nine different tubes running in and out of his body and you can’t even hold him will have that effect.
Also, with regards to the oft-quoted chestnut that “I did X and I survived just fine” - yeah, great. But when X is something like, say, feeding solid foods too early, the concern isn’t that the baby won’t survive, it’s that the baby’s health will be negatively affected, sometimes in subtle ways that may not be obvious. Saying, “but I did it and I survived” is meaningless.
That being said, I’ll agree with everyone else that the OP’s partner is being more than a smidge unreasonable about letting Grandma watch the new baby.
For Gawds sake don’t tell em about the baby and cats thing!
Well yeah, but the person that helped you out - your mom - was also the grandmother in this situation.
Also - I understand the idea that how things were done “back in my day” might be a source of contention, but if she’s a pediatric nurse I fully do expect that she’d be up to date on “back to sleep” and anything else that has come along in the past 35 years. Otherwise you don’t just have an out of date grandma, you have a nurse giving bad professional advice.
I applaud your mom for taking it in stride and I do wonder if some of the more negative reactions here (including mine) are part of the fact that grandparenting classes are just not much a part of the culture here. It’s more of a “fuck me if you’re going to tell me how to live my life” sort of thing.
For me, though, it’s more of an issue that your husband thinks he can issue an ultimatum rather than what that ultimatum is about. That is what sets me over the edge about the whole exchange.
Man, if I ever had a kid the first thing I’d do would be to run to my mom and ask her how to take care of it!
I’ve never heard of such a thing as a grandparents class and can’t even imagine what could be the point of it. Except maybe to let them know that babys can’t eat honey anymore.
Babies really can’t eat honey anymore…?
I hadn’t heard that. Why?
I did a dads and bubs class when my first child was due, and the most invaluable part of it was learning what to expect - changes to how everyone would feel and behave. New babies put stress on relationships in so many different ways and being forewarned about some of the things I was about to experience was a great help.
I imagine that grandparents class isn’t so much about how to do nappies, but more about how to handle the change in everyones’ lives and walk the line between doing too much and tool little, being too caring and not caring enough, and who will need what space and where.
Along with current thinking on nutrition, SIDS, etc which I think probably has changed over time. The thing is, if the new parents have gone to the ante-natal classes, it’s probably a good idea for the grandparents to be singing from the same hymnbook, so to speak.
We’re very, very happy that The Niece is #2.
She’s a tummy sleeper like I was: if she’d been #1, her parental units would have been totally freaked out, but being #2, the first time she flopped over and started snoring within seconds they just went “oh, ok.”
BACI, the first time I heard that was here, and yeah, it’s Yet Another Ban. Mind you, it’s not that “anybody under the age of 6yo shouldn’t eat honey,” it’s limited to little babies. Frankly, people used to give kidlets all kinds of stuff that they don’t really need and their tummies aren’t equipped for (a classmate of mine was weaned on watered-down wine; we reckoned that his family was proof that “alcohol is bad for children’s development,” as they were all stunted).
My brother’s teething was treated with neat whiskey on the gums - he’s 6’4". Apparently, between his birth and mine, someone decided that whiskey was bad for five month old babies - I’m 5’5".
I’m curious about the question asked earlier - were his parents required to take the same course?
I was gonna say that, but less vividly. Well done.
The OP just made me so bloody sad.
What has happened in this world? Once upon a time, new parents turned to their parents (and other extended family members) for support and advice, and for the most part, the advice worked damned well.
But now the birthing procedure/parenting process has become commodified (how many magazines are there out there nowadays??), and it is in the interests of those who are selling the ‘product’ to ensure that parents are just scared to trust in their own abilities and intuitions: instead the new parents defer to the better knowledge and judgement of the professionals who (of course) have a vested interest in promoting anxiety and uncertainty. :rolleyes:
I’m really cranky now. This just shits me to tears. :mad:
Get down on bended knee, apologise to your mum on behalf of your partner and beg her to spend time/look after your eagerly awaited little-'un for as long as she and you need. It’s the best start in life your kid could ever hope for.
Good luck. 
I would have been lost without my mother’s help for the first month of our son’s life. I was very sick(had congestive heart failure) after he was born. He was home from the hospital almost a week before I was! Heck, he was sleeping with an aunt in a clothes basket the first few days of his life. He survived.
My mother stayed with me for about a month. She was 70 years old at the time. She had raised 6 kids and cared for many of her 11 grandchildren. I think she stayed with just about all of the new grandchildren as a live in helper for a month or more. One sister, 2000 miles away got her for 3 or 4 months with the birth of each of her three kids.
I also had some PPD, and was going wacky from lack of sleep, and without her, or some help I might have lost it.
We pointed out some of the things that had changed in baby rearing in the past few years to her, and she was more than willing to comply.
If you have a cranky colicky baby like I had for the first 4 months, you and your husband will be begging for the help after just a few days, IMO, not weeks!
Good luck on the last few weeks…happy delievery!! 
This sounds ridiculous- no excuse for any factor such as age. Need a class to look after a baby- hells bells.
I already agreed that Dad is overreacting, but let’s keep the facts in mind. Grandma is NOT a pediatric nurse currently. She has out of date training in it (and in pediatrics, standards of practice change more than annually, so that out-of-datedness is severe; when she was trained, we still suggested ipecac for croup and home ice baths for high fevers!) but has been working outside of pediatrics for more than two decades. Her training is so old as to be mostly irrelevant. Not entirely, but mostly.
Honey often contains botulism spores. Botulism is an anaerobic critter that makes a toxin (conveniently named “botulism toxin”) that can cause nerve damage, paralysis, organ failure and death. It’s not a very big deal for older children and adults because our innards have a lot of air in them, and botulism can’t thrive where there’s air; we excrete the botulism spores before they can make any toxin. But babies don’t have air in their guts. The botulism spores become active in the intestines and can cause floppy baby syndrome and death. If you just wait 2 years, then the tyke will have enough air in his system to make botulism spores, and therefore honey, no big deal.
Incidentally, the honey prohibition dates back more than 15 years. Just goes to show you how long it can take for important information to get to everyone who might need it, even with classes and magazines and such.
Yeah, but it’s also an excellent example of the overestimation of risk and of how the advice is about to change again. It is not true that honey often contains botulinum spores. The highest known incudence of botulinum spores in honey was in samples of raw honey produced in California in 1978, at 10% – California is known to have a high rate of botulinum spores in its soil than elsewhere. In Canada the rate is less than 5% (again in raw honey) and in the UK there is no known case of infant botulism traced to honey produced there, raw or pasteurized. There have been cases traced to baby formula, but it hasn’t been banned for infants yet.
Heat destroys botulinum spores. Pasteurized honey doesn’t have any. It’s also why you have to treat your jars the way you do when you put up food. Improperly home canned food has been a source of botulism, in infants and children and adults.
However, of the hundreds of substances tested in 1978 by the California government (it goes back 20 yeaqrs, to this particular study) only honey could be easily controlled. A lot of soil samples tested positive but you can’t keep even babies away from dirt. I am not opposed to not giving honey to babies. But the risk is very low. It has gotten the warning stickers and so on because it is controllable, while dust, say, is not.
Do you have a cite for this? Because this directly contradicts conventional wisdom about botulism, which is often referred to as “extremely heat resistant” and “immune to pasteurization”.
Of course, I’m willing to believe we have more knowledge now, as it’s been my point all thread, but that would be seriously rewriting not just the honey recommendation, but a basic fact about botulism that’s pretty easy to test in the lab.
As I was taught, the precautions in canning are for listeria, e. coli and molds. If you have a botulism problem, you won’t know it until they’re sealed in their oxygen free environment and start producing toxin, making the can bubble or the jar break its seal, at which point you throw the thing away!
TheCDC says so, that was the first reference I saw. It’s under prevention, about halfway down the page. When they say it’s heat resistant, they mean “at normal cooking temps” – the danger for canned foods usually happens in low-acid foods which are not usually processed at high temps, or are but not for long enough.
The thing is, it makes sense: the risk is low. The stakes are high. It isn’t necessary so why run even a small risk?
And botulinum spores are in the water and soil so an open jar of honey can also easily become contaminated, especially in fertile, warm places like California. But so can a pot of jam, it’s just that most people don’t give babies jam but they do give them honey. I would bet that an analysis (if it were possible, in most cases the cause is unknown) would show an increase in infection from other sources, as parents look abotu for something else to put on the pacifier/mix the medicine with/what have you.
[hijack]I hadn’t heard the one about the feet at the bottom of the crib. Why does that make a difference? Ours is still in a bassinet, and he sleeps in the middle. [/hijack]
Some of this may be different here as when my folks had me they were already using disposables and no safety pins.
Some things are different. My folks were fascinated when I described the car seat as he said it sounds much easier than what they recall having.