Hi, I'm Melissa.
Welcome back to CloudMom.com.
First video I'm doing in a series on bathing, and this video is about babies and bathing.
And then later in the week I'm going to be tackling toddlers and bathing.
Now, I have some other videos on bathing.
I have some demo videos for a newborn baby, um, with whom you're going to do a sponge
bath, and once your baby's umbilical cord falls off, you can then start to bathe your
baby in a bathing tub in a little bit of water.
So I have demo videos on my website about the sponge bath and about bathing your baby
in an infant tub.
But this video is actually more just about how often should you bathe your baby, and
at what point in the day.
You know, and what did I do.
I just sort of wanted to walk through what my experience had been and invite other moms
to share theirs.
So, the general rule is with babies and bathing, that you do not need to bathe babies every
day.
And in fact, often you'll read or your doctor might tell you that several times a week is
more than enough.
Now, here I have a confession to make, because with my first baby in particular, and then
again with my girls, I did not bathe them for almost a week after coming home from the
hospital, because I was just too intimidated and scared.
I had tiny babies, none were over 7 pounds, and in fact my girls were in the 5 pound range.
And it felt like bathing a cat.
So, I literally waited until my mom was around and could help me bathe the baby, because
I just like didn't even want to do it.
So, I think that's a very normal feeling.
So, please don't worry if you feel that way.
However, as you'll see in my demo video, once you get the habit of doing the sponge bath,
it's actually not so traumatic.
And you'll find that afterwards, your baby smells so fresh and so yummy and delicious
that you might want to bathe your baby more than several times a week.
I actually started bathing my babies daily, and here's why.
When they would wake up, they had such incredibly mucky eyes and a mucky nose, and you know,
that it just was such a nice thing to do.
And what I did is I did it after the first feeding, because when the baby woke up in
the morning, he or she was so hungry, screaming and ready for milk, doing a bath was like
out of the question.
Meanwhile, I couldn't do it at night, because I was just busy.
I was either too tired or I was like busy with my other kids, so it just wasn't good
timing.
So for me what worked the best, was to do the sponge bath, and later the bath in a little
bit of water in an infant tub, right after the first feed of the morning.
So I'd feed the baby, get the baby all set.
I knew the baby was nice and full, burped, da-da-da-da-da.
Do the bath, you know, cream, everything, put the baby in a nice, fresh onesie with
a little undershirt, a side-snap t-shirt or an infant onesie.
And then swaddle the baby up, and pretty soon he or she would go down for their morning
nap, very content often.
And I think the bath helps that.
Um, another thing about bathing that I just want to say is don't be upset if your baby
cries.
This is like so traumatic, and I know studies have been done that when babies cry, our heart
rates just like skyrocket.
Some babies really hate the bath.
One of mine even screamed with every diaper change.
Screamed!
And I would just be like, emotionally exhausted.
The same thing can happen with the bath, especially at the beginning.
They just don't like it.
It's not comfortable for them, but once they're nice and clean I think that they're very happy.
And so it's a nice thing to do if your baby has mucky eyes, a very mucky diaper area or
a lot of like mucus and muckiness in the nose.
This can really help to clean it out.
So anyway, that's just sort of my thoughts on babies and bathing.
I'm going to be talking about toddlers and bathing later in the week.
Weigh in with what you did with your baby, love to hear from you, and thank you so much
for watching CloudMom.