Monitoring Your Baby’s Weight
Once your new baby has arrived, its health is usually the number one priority for parents. As such, the baby’s weight and eating habits should be monitored and planned accordingly to make sure your child is getting the nutrition it needs. Here are some tips to ensure your baby is at a healthy weight.
Monitor Their Growth
Weighing your baby is something you can do yourself between well visits to the doctor. Many pharmacies and drug stores actually provide specially designed scales for weighing babies.
Tools like growth charts and average weekly figures are commonly used to monitor a baby’s weight gain as well. These can map a child’s growth on specially designed graphs, which compare national averages for children of the same age and sex.
Baby Well Visits
Well baby visits provide a perfect opportunity to check how much weight your baby is gaining. Your healthcare provider or pediatrician can provide guidelines for new parents on suggested ages for well baby visits.
Recommended well baby visits occur at one, two, four, six, nine, twelve, and eighteen months, and then visits can be reduced to once a year. As stated above, you can monitor your child’s weight between visits to get a more accurate depiction of their growth increases.
Eating Right
Ensuring your child is getting a healthy diet at this young age is vital for their growth. Many parents are choosing to go organic when it comes to their child’s food to make sure they aren’t ingesting any harmful chemicals or materials.
Another reason to be sure of this is to provide your child with homemade baby food. There are plenty of resources and recipes you can find to make your own healthy food to help your child grow safely.
Signs of Gaining Weight
Without weighing your baby, you can also tell when they are gaining weight at a healthy rate. If you notice your child’s head and length measurements increasing, her clothes and harnesses becoming tighter, and legs, arms, and face “filling out,” your child is most certainly growing!
Good Health Indicators
There are additional signs to show that your child is growing properly and is healthy. The following are indicators of good health: she’s bright and alert, active, plenty of wet diapers, sleeps well, demands regular feeding, and she’s happy and content. Keep in mind, irritability and wakefulness, which are common problems particularly for babies younger than three months, are rarely due to hunger!
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Guest Blog by Karen Barski, BSN, RN, Mother of five, Certified Infant Care Specialist & Instructor, & Inventor of the Woombie Baby Swaddle
Karen has been an RN for 18 years, and has worked in many different nursing roles. As a Certified Infant Care Specialist, Karen counsels thousands of families yearly on a multitude of issues relating to pregnancy and infancy. Also, as a mother of five, she has invaluable experience and tips to share.
Since 2007, Karen’s company, KB Designs, has invented a line of signature baby swaddle products that have helped parents easily transition their new babies from womb to home. There are multiple designs and sizes so that babies can enjoy the comfort and security of the Woombie up until the time they begin to roll.
Each product has been created and designed by Karen because of a need she identified in her life with her five children. With convenience, safety, and fashion in mind, KB Designs has helped over a half million babies and counting!
For more information, visit www.woombie.com.
Interested in writing a guest blog for Sleeping Baby? Send your topic idea to pr@sleepingbaby.com.
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