Do you understand why your baby is crying?

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The first thing that parents need to understand is why the baby is crying, what the baby needs right now, what is disturbing the baby right now. Of course, it’s not a pleasure when your baby starts crying, but for your baby this is the only way to tell you that he or she is unhappy. Babies don’t cry for no reason, and you need to try to understand what’s going on and if possible, satisfy those needs immediately.

Some people say that you need to teach your baby to be patient, that you should explain that nothing can be done immediately and that they have to wait and respect your needs as well. Believe me, your child will learn all about that later. But right now, you should not torment your baby, who is totally dependent on you.

 You may think at first that when your baby starts crying, it might be hunger. In the beginning, this can be confusing, but after a few days, you will find out that your baby almost always gets hungry at regular intervals. If you feed your baby formula, it can be beneficial every day to write down the time of feeding, how long and how much the baby ate. I could almost know what time it was each time my daughter asked to feed her. She was like an alarm clock and would start crying precisely every 3 hours 5-6 times a day, asking for milk. 

 If your baby doesn’t want to eat, then perhaps he or she is thirsty. Keep bottles with water in every room next to the baby’s bed. Each time your baby starts crying give water first, because it could be thirst very often from the very first days. I was told that you should not give a baby water until a certain age, especially if you are breastfeeding. For the first days of your baby’s life each time your baby cries you need to nurse them frequently to increase breast milk supply and not give either a bottle or pacifier. As it is easier for a baby to drink formula from a bottle rather than milk from the breast, your baby will prefer what is easier. That’s why mothers don’t want to give baby a bottle with either formula or water during the first weeks of the baby’s life. Your baby doesn’t want water or anything else in the mouth except the mother’s breast. It becomes impossible to soothe the baby by giving a pacifier or a bottle with water or formula and thus baby hangs onto the mother’s breast 24 hours a day.

 Breast milk is the best and most natural food you can give your baby. But maybe there is no need to be so dogmatic. Nothing terrible will happen if the baby gets a pacifier and a bottle of water in the first days of life and you and your baby are less stressed. Everyone needs water and babies are no exception. Besides, a baby bottle with water will help prevent tantrums in the future. So even if the humidity and air temperature in the room are within the recommended norm and it’s not hot and dry, give water to your baby anyway. This should become a good, and in fact, extremely useful habit.

 Your baby may simply cry because he or she needs you. When you leave your baby alone, he/she starts crying  because baby instinctively understands that he/she is not viable without you. It is better not to leave your baby alone in a room. Make a space in every room where you can lay your baby down. Every time you move from one room to another, take your baby with you. That way your baby will never cry from fear and loneliness, which reduces your list of reasons behind the crying. It is difficult to understand how a baby feels when alone, but it must be not much fun. If the baby cries, and after you take him or her in your arms for a cuddle and baby stops crying, you can strike all other reasons off the list. The baby was crying because he/she missed you and needed your attention.

 Babies cry if they want to sleep but cannot fall asleep. This could be due to emotional stress and exhaustion, or something is bothering or annoying them. However, a very common situation is when the baby is falling asleep in your arms, and is laid down in bed, he/she wakes up and cry. So, train your baby to fall asleep anywhere except in your arms from the first days of the baby’s life. If you manage this, it will make your life much easier.

 One of your baby’s most natural reflexes is the sucking reflex, which permits sucking and swallowing milk. The sucking process gives pleasure and soothes your baby. When the baby is full of milk, feel free to give a pacifier, which helps the baby to relax and fall asleep easier. Sometimes it can be your only salvation! Although paediatricians advise you not to do this, don’t hesitate to give your baby a pacifier to make your life less stressful.

 Your baby will fall asleep easier if you are nearby. It helps if you read a book in a low monotonous voice. It doesn’t have to be a children’s book. You can read your favourite book, a newspaper or whatever else; you can even talk quietly on the phone. The baby will see you and hear your voice. That is enough for him or her to feel safe and fall asleep in most cases.

 Of course, it is more convenient for you if your baby falls asleep at the same time every day. If it was easy to train your baby to do so, you are one of the lucky ones. If not, leave it as it is, let the baby fall asleep when and where he/she does. There is no need to move your baby to his/her room or bed. 

 I have heard many people say that babies should always sleep at the same time and in the same place. So when the baby’s bedtime arrives, you should put the baby in their room, into the bed and leave. Even if the baby cries, you should not go in. After 20 minutes the baby will calm down and fall asleep and in a few days your baby will obey this rule!

Methods like these are often practiced in orphanages, where children come to realize over time that no one cares about them so they eventually stop crying. I was taught such an «excellent» method at the hospital where I spent the first days after my baby’s birth. I don’t understand why we need to complicate our lives so much and follow advice clearly invented by someone who did not really like children and women. Make your entire apartment into a baby’s room and let the baby fall asleep whenever and wherever he/she wants to. Make it natural and you will see a big difference.

 If your baby is tired but can’t fall asleep, try to figure out why. Maybe he/she is feeling hot or cold. Perhaps the baby was bitten by a mosquito and it itches and is causing discomfort, so you will need to smear on an ointment.

Clothing too may cause discomfort. The fabric and the seams, may be rough and chafe the baby’s delicate skin. The outfit could be too small even if it doesn’t appear to be. When the diaper is clean, the bodies or pyjama fits well, but when the diaper is full, the clothes stretch tightly, and the baby feels uncomfortable. If the clothes press the diaper too tightly to the skin, the baby can develop diaper rash. It is preferable to choose knitted cotton without collars and pockets, which are one to two sizes larger and outerwear three sizes larger. Until your baby starts crawling, larger clothes will not feel uncomfortable. Any clothing that fits close to the body should be white or neutral coloured because dyes can cause allergies. Also choose clothes without any embroidery, which could be rough on the skin.

 If all physical needs are satisfied, and the baby is not hungry or thirsty, is dry and clean, is feeling neither hot nor cold and you take the baby in your arms for a hug but he or she cries anyway, then it could be pain or some other kind of discomfort. The most common cause is that the baby has a stomach-ache. If the stomach is hard, the cause of crying could indeed be discomfort in the abdomen. Perhaps the baby overate. Maybe your baby hasn’t had a bowel movement in a while. If constipation is why the baby is crying, you should use a suppository recommended by your paediatrician.

 Even the slightest pain and discomfort can prevent your baby from falling asleep. As people fall asleep, they start to feel what they could not feel during the day when there were many things around to divert their attention. This is true for the baby also.

 Often the baby can wake up crying at night and whatever you do, you cannot help. If your baby is neither sick nor hungry, feels no discomfort, and you have been through all the possible causes for the crying and cannot comfort your baby, try to divert his/her attention. For example, turn on the table lamp, turn on a cartoon show, or hold up a picture or a book or something your baby can look at and get interested in and stop crying and then your baby will fall asleep again. Most of the time this helps.

 Does your baby cry and not want to take a bath? Even if the water is warm and comfortable enough, the baby is crying and you cannot understand what’s wrong. Perhaps the light in the bathroom is too bright and the empty white ceiling in front of the baby’s eyes is frightening. Create a comfortable atmosphere in the bathroom: turn off the lamps, light candles and turn on soothing music. Try to look at everything around you through your baby’s eyes and modify or move away anything that could create fear and negative emotions. 

 Over time you will understand what is making your baby cry and you will be able to interpret each intonation of voice and help your baby immediately so your little one will smile again and make you happy.

Do you sleep enough ?

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As soon as your baby begins to sleep through the night and falls asleep at about the same time every evening, you can try to set up one more good habit. There is nothing easier than training yourself to go to bed early. I myself tried to do this about one hundred times.

 

What was it like before? When my daughter was about 4 months old, she began to sleep through the night, falling asleep at 11 p.m. and waking up at 8 a.m. After a bustling day when I had finished my household chores, I wanted a little time for myself with a cup of tea in front of the TV or in an armchair with a book.

At around midnight I was taking a shower, putting on my pyjamas, looking in the fridge one more time for some delicious pies to snack on, and did some other unnecessary routine job.

Finally, at 12:30 am, I would go to bed, take one last look at my phone to quickly see what had happened in the world over the past day and fall asleep about 30 minutes later with the phone on my chest. So, I was sleeping 6-7 hours a night for a long time, instead of the recommended 8 hours. Of course, the next day was joyless. I was tired, lazy and apathetic. 

Apparently, many women face similar problems. If you are one of them, I suggest you try my way.

For example, if you need to get up at 7 a.m., to sleep 8 hours, you need to fall asleep at 11 p.m. So, every evening (if you want, you can make an exception for the weekend) set 3 alarm clocks:

— the first one is for 9.30 pm. It reminds you that you need to finish all household and urgent chores, take a shower and put on your pyjamas.

— the second one is for 10.30 pm. By this time, you need to put the baby to bed and go to bed with a book, not with the phone or a movie, TV, etc. When you read a book, you relax and fall asleep more easily. If you need to check something on your phone, try to do it before getting into bed.

— the third one is for 10.45 pm. You should be falling asleep, although the time is approximate. You may not even need to set the alarm clock.

 I’m sure you’re tired enough after a busy day. As soon as you start reading, your eyelids will get heavier, you’ll close your eyes, sleep tight all night, and wake up early in the morning, even before your baby wakes up and you’ll have an extra hour of free time.

It is impossible to change everything in one day — habits, especially good ones, develop over the years. But if you make small changes to your life once a week, even insignificant ones, in a year you’ll be surprised by how much you will have changed for the better.

You must be in good shape.

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If you had been working out before pregnancy and doing exercises during pregnancy, then after childbirth it should not be too hard for you to get back into shape. If, however, you are like me and have never worked out, or did so only from time to time, then daily exercises should become obligatory for you after your baby’s birth. Even if you think you are in good shape and strong enough, taking care of a baby, bringing them up and participating in their games requires a lot of energy and physical strength.

 Therefore, you really need to get back to your normal weight, have strong muscles, a healthy back and knees, strong arms and a clear head. 

 Before you go further with this, think about whether you sleep enough, in what conditions you live and what your lifestyle is.

 Sleep, sound environment, comfortable living conditions and good habits are the essential components that determine whether you can be healthy or not. If you do not sleep enough, if you have a very uncomfortable bed, if it is hot, dry, dusty or vice versa too cold, humid and damp in the room or there is noise from the street or the neighbours, if you do not drink enough water, eat mainly junk food, are frequently constipated, have headaches, and often get viral diseases, exercising is still in any case good for you, however it is unlikely that you will have a desire to work out if you have chronic fatigue and irritation.

 First, you need to create a healthy atmosphere around you. If you sleep enough, live in comfortable conditions, have friendly relationships with your family, then as soon as you feel good enough after your baby’s birth and your doctor has not imposed any restrictions on you, little by little you can start to exercise.

 To begin with, you need to strengthen your back, which carried a heavy load during your pregnancy, especially for the last months. For the moment, your baby is not heavy and weighs about four kilos, so, the load for your back is not too heavy. But even so, now you need to hold the baby in your arms over long periods, often bending over with the baby in your arms, or standing in an inclined position and not getting enough rest.

 In addition, with weak muscles, you will get tired faster, have backache more and more often and, as a result, probably start regularly taking painkillers. Try to take these pills as rarely as you can. If you have a backache, lie down on a hard mattress with a small pillow under your neck and a large pillow or rolled up blanket under your knees. Rest well in this position for ten minutes and you will feel much better.

When your child weighs from ten to fifteen kilos, he/she is still a child and you will still be carrying him/her in your arms, and playing together doing “acrobatic stunts”, straining your back for a long time and often being in uncomfortable positions. Therefore, striving for a healthy back is your basic initial task, followed by your knees, neck, shoulders and arms, and then everything else. 

The best and most enjoyable way to strengthen the muscles of the back and the whole body is by swimming.

 However, if you can only workout at home, choose three, five, seven, ten exercises that you like. You do not need to choose exercises which are too complicated, too fashionable, and too effective. The simplest exercises, such as standing up and doing forward and side bends, squats, twisting the shoulders from side to side, turning your head in different directions, raising your arms and legs, twisting, push ups, sit-ups and any other exercises which are COMFORTABLE for you to do and during which you feel your muscles work and how these muscles are filled with heat. These simple and comfortable exercises will certainly be effective since your muscles work and enrich the blood with oxygen. Do not forget to breathe right, exhaling when you make an effort. 

 So, you have chosen several exercises, for example, five. You need to do as many reps of each of these exercises as you can. If you can do only ten reps of each exercise, that’s great. If it seems to you that this is not enough, do the math — five exercises ten times each is fifty movements. Not bad for the beginning!

 But you must work out every day, even if you haven’t slept enough, are in a bad mood or in a hurry. You need to mark each day in your diary when you did your work out and then if you miss one day, the next day, do two sets of each exercise. If you missed two days, you have to do two sets for two days, and so on. Follow this plan for thirty days. Thirty days later, do each exercise not ten times but twenty times, resulting in a hundred movements. Every thirty days, add ten more reps to each exercise.

 When your child is about one year old, you will be doing five exercises one hundred times each, which in total is five hundred movements. Believe me, you will feel much better than if you do not do any. 

 If you do your exercises every day for several months, it will become a habit, and you will no longer wish to deny yourself the pleasure of feeling great. It will become a part of your pleasant daily routine.

 Your child is growing up, demanding more and more of your attention. Kids don’t like it if mom is doing something else instead of playing with them. It may become more difficult for you to do even a few exercises over time. But do not stop working out! If you can’t do all the exercises at once, do a few throughout the day. Your task is to do that minimum of movements that you have decided to do, every day. The more varied exercises you can do, the better for you.

Baby’s clothes.

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 When I was pregnant, a friend of mine told me how lucky I was to be having a baby girl because the choice of clothes for girls is much more fun than for boys. When my new-born daughter was lying on the bed, right next to her was a mountain of clothes we had received — presents from relatives and friends: dresses with several layers of fluffy skirts, with bows and lace, collars and cuffs, clothes with embroidered rabbits and cats, jeans and blouses for baby from zero to six months old, I did not understand how to put these clothes on such a delicate little baby who could hardly straighten her arms and legs and whose neck was almost invisible!

So, I never dressed her up in those beautiful clothes. 

When you buy clothes, especially if it is your first child and you have never looked after a baby before, you need to think about practicality. Will the clothes cause discomfort when you hold the baby in your arms? Will dressing, undressing, feeding or changing diapers be easy? Will your baby have freedom of movement in these clothes? Will the baby feel comfortable lying on his/her back?

Your baby may cry for what seems to be no apparent reason at first. Still, it may turn out that the clothes feel uncomfortable: buttons pressing on the back, the collar cutting into the neck, the fabric is rough, the embroidery is irritating baby’s soft skin or something else that can annoy the baby.

 Before you go and make purchases at the baby store, make a list of what you are really going to need and try and stick to the list. For example, avoid buying unnecessary clothes just because they’re adorable. Don’t worry, you will more than likely get a lot of super cute clothes as gifts from your relatives and friends. Of course, you can buy anything you want and everything you like, but remember that you would be doing this for yourself and not for your baby.

Choose clothes in white or light neutral colours preferably. Firstly, the less dye clothing has, the better it is for the baby’s skin. Secondly, it’s easier to wash everything together and not have to sort whites from coloured.

 The best fabric for babies’ clothes is cotton knit. It is good for both underwear and outerwear, is one hundred percent hypoallergenic, does not constrain movement, is soft and does not wrinkle.

I have included a list of clothes you will need and they are enough to begin.

— Bodies and Pyjamas: all you really need are bodies with long and/or short sleeves, pyjamas and socks, five to ten of each. The easiest pieces of clothing to put on the baby are bodies and pyjamas which are easily undone with snaps from top to bottom. It’s better if the snaps are in front and slightly to the side. Then you can undo the bodies or pyjama, lay it open on the bed or changing table, put the baby on it and easily slip the baby’s arms into the sleeves and button up the snaps. 

You don’t need to torment your baby and yourself by pulling clothes over the baby’s head or sticking tiny half-bent legs into pants.

— Cardigans: 2 cardigans: one without a hood if it is a little cool in your home, one with a hood for outdoors, plus one or two hats to go out in.

It is better to buy the bodies and pyjamas one or two sizes bigger. For new-borns, you can buy bodies and pyjamas for three to six months old, cardigans and socks six to nine months. When a diaper fills up, bodies and pyjamas that fit too snugly press the diaper tightly to the skin, causing the baby to cry. This can be one of the causes of skin irritation under the diaper.

Babies grow very fast and, by buying clothes in a larger size than for a new-born baby, you will be able to use them for the first two or three months.

You will also need a sleeping bag. Again, this is best with snaps on the shoulders and a zipper or snaps in a circle. This allows you to undo the sleeping bag, fold back the top, put the baby inside and, without making any unnecessary movements that can wake your baby up, cover him or her up and fasten the zipper. Your baby won’t be sleeping in there for a long time. At six or seven months old, the baby will begin to turn over actively and will find it uncomfortable to sleep in the sleeping bag. Some babies prefer to sleep in a sleeping bag until one and even two years old. If such is the case, buy two sleeping bags as big as possible.

If your baby is born in the winter and you live in a very cold region, you will also need warm overalls, again two or three sizes bigger so it will be easier to put your baby in.

If you live in a region with a temperate climate, then a woollen overall and warm blanket are good enough for outdoors.

If you do not like bodies and pyjamas, you can buy sweaters, T-shirts, pants or rompers. Pants should have elastic at the top that does not squeeze the belly. 

T-shirts have one drawback: when you take your baby in your arms, the T-shirt rides up and exposes the back and stomach of the baby and you will constantly be pulling it down.

So that’s basically all that you will need for the first few months. 

To tell you the truth, until your baby starts to toddle, these will be the most comfortable clothes that he or she will need for every day. 

Don’t buy too many clothes of the same size. You will need to buy bigger clothes every few months, so regular shopping is guaranteed!

Baby’s room

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When it comes to questions of comfort and cosiness in her house, every woman will always be a woman. A pregnant woman especially, who is looking forward to her baby’s birth, dreams (or plans, depending on her lifestyle and opportunities) of a cosy baby’s room, either luxurious and exquisite or simple and cute. It is a room which has a nicely decorated bed, curtains with lace, a changing table where all the necessary items will be found in perfect order, a cosy chair, chest of drawers or wardrobe where everything will be folded with care or hung up — pyjamas and jackets, dresses or overalls and pants.

Everything will be pink or blue. There will be a bunch of fresh flowers on the table and cute rabbits and bears everywhere.

 It will be a room where Mommy is gently lulling her baby to sleep, putting them to bed, switching on relaxing music and a night light which projects stars on the ceiling, and after saying good night at nine o ‘clock in the evening, she will leave the room, closing the door behind her.

It all sounds very nice but, unfortunately, such a stereotype image, in most cases, is promoted in advertisements (which, no matter what, I treat with respect and gratitude). One should not forget that reality is not always so serenely pink and blue. Now you have a baby who needs you all the time and soon you come to realize that the whole apartment will become a baby’s room.