Baby Essential Education

02/05/2023

I would highly recommend Your Private Midwife. Meet & Greet 8/5/23

📣 Hey everyone! We're excited to invite you all to a meet and greet event 🤝 happening next Monday! 🗓️ 8th May 10am-12pm

📍 The event will be held at the first playground as you come over the Marina Bridge

👥 We can't wait to see all of your smiling faces there, to answer your questions about pregnancy, birth, baby, and to get to know you better!

🧘‍♀️ Courtney from will introduce us to body awareness and movement for pregnancy. So, bring your friends along too! 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Let's get together as fellow empowered women! 🎉 🥰

08/05/2022

😂😂

Yes, he can!

28/01/2022

I haven’t posted for a while but thought this was worth sharing

28/05/2021

FYI

06/04/2021

A few years ago Victoria Harries and I did some research into the impact of baby care books that suggest parents should put their baby in a strict routine. We were particularly interested in whether parents felt these books worked, how they made parents feel and if they impacted upon interactions with their baby.

As part of this we found that some books were telling parents not to always respond to their baby or to reduce the interactions that they had with them.

We found that about a quarter of parents said that the books led them to delay responding to their baby when they cried or when their baby indicated they needed something.

Around one in six parents also said that the information led to them not always picking up or cuddling their baby when they wanted to.

Now, if a parent makes an informed decision that they want to minimise contact with their baby that is one thing. But, many of the parents who attempted to do this were then saying that they felt terrible for doing so. Trying to ignore and avoid their baby’s cries left them feeling anxious and guilty. When many of them invariably ‘cracked’ and went to their baby, they then felt like failures.

Babies are pretty much tiny helpless mammals. They are born needing everything done for them and have a huge survival instinct to stay close to you. When they cry, it’s their main way of communication. They cry when they need something – whether that is food, comfort, connection or simply ‘it’s a bit scary on my own’. They’re incapable of trying to ‘manipulate’ or to drag you out of bed simply for kicks.

So much research shows that responding to babies helps them feel more secure and confident. It teaches them that when they need something, their needs will be met. And that is a very good thing in helping them see the world as a good place.

Never, ever feel bad for responding to your baby. Never let a book override your instincts. No one lies on their death bed going ‘you know what, I really wish I hadn’t cuddled my baby so much’. You are the expert in your baby. Listen to you.

Research paper here

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/mcn.12858

23/12/2020

FYI

URGENT MEDICINE RECALL
Infants friend

01/12/2020

Attention Queenslanders 👋 We're in for some warm days. Let this be an important reminder that the temperature under the canopy of an enclosed pram can be up to 15 degrees hotter than outside 🌡️ ☀️ Keep your baby cool and seek shade.

23/11/2020

WARNING: The temperature under the canopy of an enclosed pram can be up to 15 degrees hotter than outside 🌡️ ☀️ Keep your baby cool and in the shade as much as possible. ☂️ 🌴

16/11/2020

Human breastmilk is teeming with bacteria. One of the recently appreciated benefits of breastmilk are that the mother directly passes her gut microbes to the child.

The breastmilk microbiome is packaged to design the newborns oral-gut and entire microbiome.

When I see dental issues in children today, I now think back to issues they may have experienced in the womb.

During pregnancy a Mother experiences increasing intestinal permeability. Pregnancy seems to induce a degree of leaky gut. Transporting gut bacteria to the mother’s blood stream is necessary. From here they travel in special immune system packages to the mammary gland.

The milk microbiome is extremely diverse. The mother’s body orchestrates the packaging of microbes in breastmilk. It also profoundly changes during lactation.

The reality is that parents pass on their own microbial and immune legacy to our children.

In the mother, special immune cells carry microbes from the gut to the mammary glands. They are like a taskforce that handpick the microbes that will begin the ‘discussion’ with the newborn child’s mouth.

During the first few months of life, the newborn oral and gut microbiome are uncolonized from the outside world.

The oral microbiome is the first to be colonized, which then seeds the gut microbiome. Later these microbes become the child’s immune system.

Breastmilk provides the blueprint of microbes that will impression a child’s immune system.

Research is now linking changes in the newborn microbiome to allergies, obesity and type II diabetes.

If there is one thing I’m talking to parents about these days, is the profound impact your own health has on your child’s health.

A family share an entire microbiome and with it, a strong immune system, or a susceptibility to sickness.

A mother’s microbiome critically shapes the oral flora of a newborn. One of your first priorities for healthy kids is to care for the gut microbiome.

Did you notice gut issues during pregnancy? What about child dental issues?

14/09/2020

22/08/2020

It is National Rainbow Baby Day.

A rainbow baby is a baby born after the loss of a child. Rainbows are a symbol of promise and hope, a gift of light and beauty. Rainbow babies aren’t replacing their older sibling(s) that have died (including miscarriage, stillbirth, and other causes of death of a child) and their presence does not erase the impact of the storm before them. We can enjoy and celebrate the rainbow baby while still honoring the storm that came before.

Do you have a Rainbow Baby?

If you are pregnant after loss we recommend the support of Pregnancy After Loss Support, pregnancyafterlosssupport.org.