A senior midwife guides you step by step through bathing your baby. She shows you how to test the water temperature, techniques
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for safely handling baby, washing hair and properly drying the baby.
Tags:how to bathe a baby,baby bathing techniques,bathing a baby,parenting tips,simplymediatv
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Marry Ballam Davies: You fill the bath. You need to check that you put cold water in first, because you don't want to heat the plastic bowel, so that the bath stays at nice temperature. Then you add your hot water and then you just keep testing with your elbow to make sure you get a good bath temperature. The reason you use your elbow is your hands are used to picking up hot objects, so they are much more insensitive to heat than your elbow. So if it feels hot in your elbow, it's going to be hot on baby.
For most of the babies, most of ones like a little bit of baby bubble bath just so that they smell nice and what it means is that you don't have to use soap, because if you use soap, babies just get very slippery. So most moms these days use sort of baby bubble bath. So you put a little bit of that in the water. They only need a tiny little amount.
Then what I usually do is I turn corners of the towel out, or one of the hooded towels you can turn the corner down or just like three inches of the towel, strip the baby, leave his nappy on, and wrap the baby up in the towel. Then you can sort of tuck the baby under your arm in a nice sort of firm hold, lock her up rugby ball, put your hand on the back of baby's head and then you can just scope the water onto the baby's head and you can see baby's face to make sure the water doesn't go on its face.
Because the baby feels quite secure, they don't mind having the hair wash quite so much. Then you just gently wash away the hair. Then once the hair is washed, you can just pull three inches of towel, little bit of towel you have folded back, up over their head and just gently dry it and then put the baby down, take the nappy off, and then pick up the baby and just gently lower him into the bath.
The thing with babies is that they like to be held reasonably securely. If a baby feels he is being held securely, they tend to settle quicker in the bath and as long as their head stay out of the water, they usually calm down, because they like being in the warm water and then you have got your other hand free and then when they are finished with the bath, you can just pick them up, by their legs, holding their legs and the bottom, just give them a quick drip-dry and then pop them on the towel.
Then you need to dry them taking special care of their creases, under their chin, their arms, and then the groins. Because this baby is so new, it's still covered in the white vernix and it help to protect the baby when it's in the womb. And we don't routinely rub that all, because that vernix is reabsorbed by the body. So that's the white stuff you saw while I was drying the baby. I didn't rub at it, and so that will disappear over the next days or so.
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