Yikes! There are a couple of problems there. One is that you’re not supposed to “dig around it with a Q-Tip”. You just keep it clean and dry. If you’re bathing baby, you can use mild soap and water, same as the rest of the skin, and then a dry cloth held gently around the stump to dry it.
Second is that “smelly yellow gunk” is not normal, and is a sign of infection that should be checked out by the doctor ASAP. The umbilical stump is very near the bloodstream at first, and an infection there can travel to the heart PDQ.
There may be some gooey or crystalline clear or yellowish stuff, pbbth, but if it’s smelly, it’s not normal.
One tip: if the diaper covers the umbilical stump, then fold it like thisbefore you tape it so the diaper doesn’t cover it. Clean and dry is the rule for umbilical stumps, and diapers aren’t either for long.
Well, to be honest, she was saying it was gross and I may have just imagined it was smelling! It looked like it should smell…its a drying up scab! I’m not sure she actually said it, and I wasn’t that close. By “digging around” she was wiping around the edges with the Q-tip after the bath, to dry it I guess. SIL is a midwife (a real one, 4 years university degree and provincial regulation as a medical professional affiliated with birthing centres and a hospital…yes, I’m aware of the other threads here :D) and MIL was right next to her and is a GP, so I assume they have a pretty good sense of whether or not this is normal, and honestly, I felt so queasy I think everything seemed worse than it was.
Did I mention I have a profound phobia of navels/belly buttons and a complete irrational fear of anything going in and out through them? Because my recollection was probably totally exaggerated by that! She was folding the diaper down away from the stump, but thankfully (from my POV) the kid was wearing a one-piece the rest of the day!
So if/when I have kids, hubby gets the task of any cleaning/touching/handling of the stump, because I probably will panic and faint! :smack:
Heh. I’m like that about eyeballs. I have to hand the eye drops to anyone else to put them in the kid. I can do it for patients, but not my kids. Thank gods they’ve only gotten pinkeye once apiece.
Accept help when offered. We had two friends over yesterday. They wanted to hold my eight week old baby as much as possible. They got to coo over a small baby and I got a few hours to let my arms rest.
Sleep when the baby sleeps.
Vaccinate. More importantly don’t worry about vaccines. Worry more about measles and whooping cough – both of which are epidemic right now in the United States. Even if your child has a vaccine reaction it doesn’t mean you can’t ever get her vaccinated. My eight year old had one at two months. According to today’s report card she’s in the 96th percentile for math and the 98th for reading. *
*You are allowed to brag about your kid as long as you don’t bore everyone else.
I wish I’d known that kids’ illnesses don’t get any less scary as they get older. They can definitely tell you about it more, but I assumed wrongly that that knot in my throat would go away as they got older and caught whatever cold/infection/bug. Not so.
Even remembering going through the exact same types of illnesses in my lifetime and even having lived through my children’s version of those illnesses, every damn time they get sick it makes me nervous.
In fact, sometimes it’s even scarier when they can tell you about it because they often don’t know quite how to express it, so you can’t tell if they’ve got a problem in their lungs or their stomach or their heart or wherever other equally terrifying possibility is available.
I also would never have believed that I’d sit in the bathtub, patiently comforting my kid while they vomited all over me.
Can you tell that I’m home with my son today after he was sick last night? God help me, it’s not hyperbole at all to say that I’d rather have the illness myself than experience the alarm I felt walking in to hold my burning hot, shaking, barfing kid.
The first month is really hard, but the mom has mommy hormones that make lack of sleep easier to cope with than it is under normal circumstances. Those hormones keep going, making getting up in the middle of the night not such a big deal, until about eight weeks. Then they quit full stop and you’re screwed.
But always make sure you have at least 4 diapers and 2 changes of clothes for the little one before about a year. If baby soils one with a diaper blowout, you can rest assured that the poor thing will vomit all over the outfit you put baby in when you’re done cleaning baby up from diaper blowout. Also, plastic baggies. They take up very little space, and you desperately need to have somewhere to put the resulting diaper-blow-out mess, if you aren’t intending to throw away outfits willy-nilly.
Also, cloth diapers, gerber style. They’re practically useless for diapering unless you’re desperate, but they’re lint free. They make amazing monitor cloths, napkins, tissues, random minor spill cleaners, placemats, dolly blankets, in-a-pinch toy, dustrag, and anything else. Much like the passel of white washcloths you’ve already heard about, but good for windows, tv screens, and anything else you want lintball free. Don’t get the folded ones, unless you’re planning on using them to sop up bigger spills.
At your baby shower(s), you’re going to receive approximately 493 “onsies” and/or sleepers, 98% of which will be the wrong season or newborn size. You’ll also get half a dozen “receiving blankets”, which you will look at and go, “WTF am I going to do with those?!” Take back half the onsies/sleepers and exchange them for more receiving blankets.
Receiving blankets are good for burping, swaddling, wiping up spills, washing and drying babies (and you), make great temporary slings, line car seats, act as wedges for positioning if you roll them or fold them, make replacement sheets when the kiddo has soaked through all your real sheets in one night. They cover your mother-in-law’s couch so you can lay the baby down without drowning him in cat hair and they’re perfectly sized doll blankies when the kiddo is old enough to play with dolls and make awesome lint free dustrags. Oh, and they’re compact, easy to carry blankets for the baby, too, I guess.
Seriously, receiving blankets are to infant care what towels are to Douglas Adams.
Do you still live in WaHi? If so, there are tons of resources for parents of young kids up here.
Random people are strange. People on the street would walk up and try to touch my son when he was a newborn. It’s not that we are germ fanatics, just that we have some vague sense of boundaries. Some perfectly normal-looking dude harangued my wife in the Whole Foods on the upper west side about breastfeeding just because he saw she was with a baby. Babies invite unwanted opinions from complete strangers, unwanted conversations on the subway, and all sorts of casual weirdness.
They do bring out genuine kindness, too. But you probably don’t need to be warned about that.
If you haven’t chosen a hospital yet and have access to wheels, I really recommend getting out of the city for your spawning. We did our thing up at White Plains, a 20-minute or so drive from us. It worked out marvelously.
One fine day they will learn to stand up in their crib, but cry and cry because they get stuck there no knowing how to sit down. This is a short-lived phase, but maddening because you have to go bail them out over and over.
Another fine day they will derive amusement from jumping up and down in the crib for hours, holding onto the edge of the crib, and bust the thing before they’re ready for a regular bed.
There will be a night-time routine - read a story, kiss the stuffed animals goodnight, say nighty night, don’t let the bedbugs bite, say prayers. Then it will be, “one more story?” and you have to kiss additional stuffed animals, and “you forgot to say nighty night, don’t let the bedbugs bite!”. Drink. Potty. Things will spiral out of control, and these delaying tactics cost the exhausted parent a precious half hour of ‘putting the kid to bed’.
I was a week overdue giving birth, and to kill time, I went to the fabric store and bought flannel and made two big receiving blankets, hemming them into squares. They were used a LOT.
I completely agree on the plastic bags, but the flip side of the quote above is that, really, onesies and underpants and a lot of other infant clothes are CHEAP. There will be times when it is perfectly acceptable to say, “I would rather throw away this $3 onesie (which the baby will outgrow in 2 weeks anyway) than try to get all of the poop out of it.”
I’m not saying that infant clothes are completely disposable, but… there are times when your sanity is more important, y’know?
Thinking about some more things, since the newborn experience is fresh in my mind…
Wipe off the corners of the baby’s eyes with a warm, wet washcloth once a day. This helps prevent blocked tear ducts. I heard this exactly once, in a newborn care class we took, and haven’t seen it anywhere else.
People talked about neck creases. Also make an extra effort to clean under their arms and in all the creases at the tops of the legs… they’re numerous and deep. Also, be prepared for the baby to get mysterious pucks of dirt between its fingers and toes.
Get the special baby safety swabs for cleaning out their ears.
Diapers are cheap from Amazon Mom, and you get free two-day shipping on ALL items shipped by Amazon for a while when you sign up. This is life-saving in the first month.
Swaddle. You can try the swaddle blankets (we did), but if those don’t stay done up (ours didn’t) I recommend a SwaddleMe. With that and a pacifier our daughter was sleeping ten-hour stretches overnight by ten weeks old.
The first month is about raw survival. Your relationship will be stressed, you’ll both be scared and exhausted. Keep telling yourself you just have to get THROUGH it. Every week is easier than the week before. Life won’t always be like that. And by the time the baby’s six weeks old… oh my GOD will it be cute. And fun. SO much fun.
Don’t know if this has been mentioned yet - but plan on becoming friends with people you’d never usually want to spend time with, only because you have children the same age that go to the same daycare/school/ballet class/etc. All you will have in common with these people are your babies, and their kids are usually a nightmare.
