Is it Normal for Babies to Be Bow Legged?


If you notice your baby having bowed legs, the question is, should you be alarmed? The answer is a NO. Newborns have bowed legs and in-turned feet due to the position that they lay in the womb. Because no "standing room" exists in your womb, your baby naturally draws his legs up over his stomach and arches his feet inward. This position makes the leg bones to be twisted inward, resulting in the combination of bowed legs and in-turned feet. These curves virtually always correct themselves. On the first year your pediatrician would check your baby's leg growth to make certain these curvatures are straightening out normally. You could help your baby's feet and legs straighten out by discouraging sleep in the fetal position. Babies love to sleep on their tummies with their feet and legs curled underneath them as they did in the womb. By repeatedly drawing out his feet from under him while sleeping, you'll help your baby stop this habit. Besides these normal, self-correcting bone curvatures, one or both feet may be turned in since the front of the foot is curved inwards in relation to the back of the foot, a condition known as forefoot adduction. Your doctor would talk about this type of foot problem on your baby's first checkup. If, without a good deal of force, you can stretch the front of the foot in line with the back of the foot, only a small problem exists. This problem is readily treated by periodic stretching exercises which your doctor will present to you. When you stroke the skin on the outside of your infant's foot and he voluntarily unbends his foot, no deformity exists and no treatment is needed. If his foot is not straightening out normally on the first few months, your doctor may recommend orthopedic treatment.

© 2011 Athena Goodlight

Holiday Wreaths for Decorating The Front Door

Decorations on the front door are the first impressions you give to guests throughout the holidays. There are a lot of people who display a simple wreath or pine branches even before Thanksgiving weekend. It's easy to make a mood and feeling with anything from a couple of branches of greens tied using a bow to a very ornately adorned wreath. To make your own wreath, you'll find the frames and all the fixings in a well-supplied garden center. Here are a few ideas you might pick up on.

Simply Stated
Bundle branches of winterberry and white pine and tie them together using raffia or a red ribbon having gold edges.

A Welcome Garland
Dried flowers of all types are available at garden centers and can from time to time be found in the supermarket. It's easy to handcraft a garland from pink straw flowers, wheat,  lemon leaves, cockscomb, bay leaves, lavender, rosebuds, and moss. Put this to the front door or hang it on the fireplace mantel. To create a garland you'll need: heavy grade string cut to required length of garland, florist's tie wire, florist's picks,  clippers, sprigs of greenery,  green florist's tape, and decorative accessories like pods, berries, pinecones,  and dried fruit.
1. Cut a bundle of greens about ten inches long. Hold them against the twine then wrap with florist's tape.
2. Keep on adding and wrapping greens so each bundle overlaps the previous stems.
3. Tie some wire to the pinecones and attach. Use the picks to set berries and small bunches of dried flowers. Push the picks under the green tape.

Cinnamon Bundle
Use long cinnamon sticks and pink pepperberry to make a bundle the size of a small log. Wrap jute around the center to hold them together, then hang on the door for a fragrant and simple decor.

Simply Stated
Tie a couple of pine branches together using wire and wrap with wide, taffeta ribbon, kook for ribbon that has wired edges. Deep hunter green  or burgundy ribbon edged with gold is ideal. Make a fat bow. The wire edges would keep the shape of the bow intact. Cut the ends of the ribbons a bit long to have two streamers. Ruffle them into soft ripples hanging down over the pine needles. You might want to add a few small golden glass balls spread out on the pine branches for a lovely, elegant door decoration.

For the Birds
Make use of a straw ring frame to form the base of your wreath. You will need florist's wire and clippers to bind twigs and branches, a raffia bow, small birdhouse,  artificial birds, bundles of birdseed covered in gauze, and a bird's nest inserted into the twigs and branches. Fill with birdseed if you wish to draw in the birds.

For the Cook
To create this simple door decoration, accumulate a bunch of fragrant sprigs of bay leaves, rosemary, and pepper berries and tie using raffia for hanging. If you don't have an overhang or your front door is not protected, consider using this decoration to hang in your kitchen alternatively.

Fruity and Fancy
Start with a balsam fir wreath. Add up bits and pieces of bark, twigs, slices of fruit, nuts, and leaves. You'll find these in craft stores and garden centers, if not around your own home. Secure them using florist's wire or a hot glue gun. Add a red plaid flannel bow for a different touch.

Seashell Wreath
You could use whatever shells for this one, but deep blue mussel shells achieve the prettiest simple wreath. Use a Bristol board or flat Styrofoam wreath frame and hot-glue the mussel shells in concentric pattern around the wreath. Furnish a simple bow fashioned from netting, or leave as it is.

Brass Band
If you have a brass knocker on your front door, apply it as part of your wreath decoration. Wire tiny golden balls to an evergreen wreath and place it on the door putting the knocker in the center.

Woodland Wreath     
Start out using a fir wreath from the garden shop and make it more interesting via wiring boughs of eucalyptus, long needle pines, and cedar throughout. Add a wired white organdy bow to exquisitely top if off.


Personalized Wreath
It's easy to personalize a wreath with wooden letters. These are available in craft stores together with different wooden shapes like candy canes, stockings, stars, trees, and hearts. Paint them with bright colors and hot-glue them around a wreath frame. The letters could spell out your family name or the names of your children.

Hydrangeas
In New England, the hydrangea bushes are wonderful for wreath-making. Depending on the soil, the blossoms could be deep or pale blue, yellowish green, pale pink, or deep cranberry. These round fat bundles of blossoms are fixed to a straw or foam wreath frame with florist pins so they are bunched up and blanket the frame. This is a wreath for indoors because moisture would destroy it. Provide a bow in a color to match the flowers and you'll have one of the prettiest displays for your windows or hall.

Ribbon Wreath
Make a wreath entirely from ribbons for your entryway. You'll need a ten-inch heavy wire or brass ring and a fifty-yard spool of half-inch decorative ribbon. Cut the ribbon into ten-inch lengths and tie-up each length into a bow on the ring. Fill the ring with bows bunched up so the wreath is quite full. Keep on tying bows on the ring till you can no longer fit any more and the wreath is pleasingly plump.

Golden Greetings
Spray-paint bay leaves using gold, then mix them with unpainted leaves to create a green and gilded wreath. Using a hot glue gun, put a layer of alternating leaves on a grapevine wreath form, overlapping as you glue the leaves in place. Use gold-mesh French wire ribbon to make a bow for the top and leave the ends of the ribbons to hang down over the wreath. The gold and green of the leaves slightly shimmers.

More on Wreath Making:

How to Make a Harvest Wreath
How to Wire Flowers for a Wreath 
How to Wire Pine Cones for Christmas Ornaments and Decorations




© 2011 Athena Goodlight
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Traditional Thanksgiving Decorations


If tradition is what you're after, here are a few ideas picked from many decorating sources.
 
1. Blanket the center of the table using a bed of bay leaves. Set up pinecones, lemons, clove-studded oranges, and limes on top. Tie bunches of cinnamon sticks using gold ribbon and place here and there.
2. Fill up a large wooden salad bowl with fruit and nuts, and tuck sprigs of rosemary.
3. Pears create a nice centerpiece. Set them up on a bed of ivy, moss, or wood chips.
4. A raw wreath of pinecones and seed pods is a great centerpiece. Put a bowl in the middle of the wreath and fill with a flower arrangement.
5. Create a table decoration using a moistened ring of florist's foam. Cover the ring by sticking in lengths of boxwood, then add up white tapers equally spaced around. Fill the center with a bowl of cranberries, and sneak in sprigs of greens. This centerpiece would last through Christmas when you put it on a tray and maintain it damp. Supply colorful ribbon bows to the base of every candle for the holidays.
6. An all-white-and-green theme is refreshingly formal. A simple flower arrangement using white tulips or roses loosely set up in a white bowl or clear glass vase is adorable. Set the table using a white linen cloth and use deep green napkins. When you only have white, tie the napkins using green ribbons and slip in a sprig of fresh-smelling herbs.
7. Three miniature topiary trees, terra-cotta pots of herbs, ornamental flowerpots, spray-painted gold paper paint buckets are all suggestions for centerpieces.

Not Bound by Tradition?

If it's actually the last minute and you do not want to fuss, mix and match everything you've got for a colorful melangé. You don’t have to be bound by tradition. Use unusual containers and items to set a creative table. For instance, fill a basket with balls of yarn in fall colors, scoop up holes in the tops of fruit for candleholders, fill a punch bowl using twinkling Christmas tree lights, float flower heads in a silver bowl full of water, or employ a champagne bucket as a vase.




How to Roast a Turkey and Other Poultry The Fastest Way

Alternatives to Turkey: Recipes for Vegetarian Thanksgiving Dinners

By Athena Goodlight


MyFreeCopyright.com Registered & Protected

Older Pregnancies and Risk of Having Down's Syndrome Babies

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Having a baby at an older age increases the risk of having a baby with Down's syndrome. Should you worry? The answer to this is NO. Too much anxiety is produced because misleading info is given to older parents who are having babies; when the mother is between thirty-five and forty years of age, the chances of having a baby with Down's syndrome is approximately one percent. This implies that you have a ninety-nine percent chance of having a baby without Down's syndrome.

Lawfully, your doctor should inform you that there is a test known as amniocentesis, which would discover whether or not your baby has Down's syndrome. This process is performed around the fourteenth or fifteenth week of pregnancy. You doctor sticks in a needle through your abdomen into the amniotic cavity and gets some amniotic fluid. This fluid is examined for abnormalities in fetal chromosomes, the sex of the baby, and specific chemical information that might suggest the presence of particular diseases. Amniocentesis is normally a safe procedure, but it is not without risks. The risk of trauma to the fetus is usually less than one half of one percent when done by experienced medical personnel. Due to the slight risk of injury to the fetus, a lot of mothers choose not to have this operation done. If you are highly anxious about having a baby with Down's syndrome, spending the whole pregnancy with this anxiety is likewise not healthy for your pre-born baby. Some moms choose this prenatal test to alleviate their anxiety even though they will not consider having an abortion. There are newer tests (alpha fetal protein, followed by chorionic villus sampling when indicated) that can be executed even earlier in your pregnancy to observe the presence or absence of Down's syndrome even as early as ten weeks after conception. Chorionic villus sampling bears a higher risk to the developing baby, it is not recommended. Some mothers just feel that the moment of birth is soon enough to become mindful of any problem that could not be adjusted while the baby is still in utero. Society, we feel, is slowly realizing that special babies truly are special babies.

Different Ways A Dad Can Hold His Baby

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Mother hold their babies one way, fathers hold their babies otherwise, and babies profit from this difference. Here are some tested favorite holding models for fathers.

1. The football hold. Drape your baby tummy down over your forearm like a football, baby's neck in the crook of your arm and the diaper region in your hand. Grasp the diaper area firmly in your hand and mildly press the base of the palm of your hand against your baby's tense abdomen.

2. The neck nestle. This is one actually works better for males. Nestle your baby's head on the curvature of your neck, permitting your chin to rest on top of baby's head. Gently push her head to your Adam's apple. Babies hear using the vibration of their skull bones as well as their eardrums. Sing a droning on song, like "Old Man River," in a rich male voice. The vibrations of your voice box and jawbones on your baby's thin skull will oftentimes lull a fussy baby right to sleep. An added magnet of the neck nestle is that your baby would feel the warm air from your nose on her scalp. Seasoned mothers relate that breathing on their babies' faces or heads calms them. Fathers could have a "magic breath" all their own.

3. The front bend. Fussy babies frequently settle better in the bent position as though this relaxes the spinal muscles and hence the whole body. Having your baby facing you, flex baby's legs on your chest, and support her back with one hand and the nape of her neck with the other. When baby is bent in a C positioning, she often settles better and releases more gas. If she squirms in the back-forward position, turn baby around, still bent, and allow her to face forward, leaving her back and head to rest on your chest while holding her outstretched legs over your folded arms.

4. The shoulder ride. About six months a baby's head control has developed adequately so she can sit upright and enjoy riding on your shoulders. Babies appear to like this riding position around five or six months since their hands, head, and back are less confined and they have a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of their world.

5. Select the right baby carrier. Most fathers don't feel comfortable with several of the baby carriers on the market because there are so many straps and buckles for the impatient male. The sling-type carrier works best for men since it is much easier to adjust. It is frustrating to pick up a fussy baby and try to make several adjustments in a carrier that has been previously adjusted to follow your wife's body. This is known as the art of wearing your baby—and it's as significant for fathers to learn as for mothers.

By Athena Goodlight

Night Wakers: Understanding Your Baby’s Sleeping Patterns


A lot of books do proclaim that babies must be sleeping through the night at three months, but most babies haven't read these books. In actual fact, the only babies who sleep through the night at three months are "somebody else's baby." The age at which babies settle down—meaning going to sleep readily and staying asleep—varies staggeringly and is typically a reflection of your baby's temperament and not of your night time parenting skills. Remember that throughout the first six months, or even a year for some babies, a baby wakes up easily. They don't wake up to bother you or to deliberately keep you awake. Doctors realize that babies do what they do because they're designed that way. An exhaustive explanation of why babies sleep differently than adults will help you understand and therefore sympathize with your baby's frequent night waking.

Babies and adults have two dissimilar sleep patterns. For simplicity we will call these two patterns light sleep and deep sleep. During light sleep, the higher brain centers are not entirely shut down and the sleeper could awaken easily. During deep sleep, the higher brain centers shut down, leaving the sleeper to drift into a very deep, almost motionless state of sleep. The main difference between adult and baby sleep is that grownups spend around eighty percent of their night sleep in the state of deep sleep, whereas with babies the opposite is true. They spend most of the night in light sleep. This hardly looks fair to you till you realize that babies are deliberately designed that way for both survival and developmental reasons. A baby has the highest percentage of light sleep throughout those early months when his nighttime necessities are highest, but his ability to convey them is lowest. Say he had a stuffy nose and could not breathe, yet could not easily awaken to communicate this need? Suppose he were hungry and required food, yet didn't easily awaken to cry? Suppose he was cold and didn't easily awaken to signal this need for warmth? If a baby had the equal predominance of deep sleep states as we do, his survival will be in peril. As the baby grows older, the percentage of light sleep slowly decreases as the percentage of deep sleep increases.

Some other interesting reason why babies have a huge percentage of light sleep is linked to their need for developmental stimulation. Prominent sleep researchers feel that during the state of light sleep, the higher brain centers keep on functioning, and this operation is essential for the brain to mature. When this theory was explained to a very tired mother of a frequent night waker, she exclaimed, "In that case my baby is going to be very, very smart!"

© 2011 Athena Goodlight


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Baby Feeding and Social Development



You may have a six-month-old baby nursing from the breast frequently and it can be an easy and enjoyable method of feeding him. Some may not look forward to starting solid foods, but your pediatrician may recommend that it is time. Here are some tips on how you can enjoy feeding him solids just as you've enjoyed him breastfeeding.

Breastfeeding is not just nutritional but also social and developmental interaction. Solid feeding could be as well. Regard solid food feeding as an add-on to, not a substitute for, breastfeeding. Get the most out of this new relationship. Besides using your fingertip and a spoon to begin solids, let your baby to feed himself. Place a little of mashed banana within grabbing distance on his table or high-chair tray. Take advantage of your baby's rapidly developing hand skills. Around six months babies swoop upon anything of interest placed in front of them. You'll discover your baby can soon pick up a morsel of food between his thumb and fingers and slowly bring it to his mouth. In the beginning phases of finding his mouth, the baby might have more misses than hits, resulting in much of the food being scattered all over his cheeks. Sharing the food with his face and shirt is part of feeding. Let your baby the undergo trial and error; in time practice makes perfect.

Letting your baby to feed himself capitalizes on some research on infant learning. A skill that's started by the baby has more learning value and attention-holding power than one initiated by the parent and simply took part in by the baby. Relish table talk. Talk to your baby when feeding. Talk about both the food and the process so that he learns to tie in the words with the type of food and the interactions soon to follow. Say such things as "Matthew want carrots . . . open mouth!" as you gently approach his mouth with the solid-laden spoon. Talking to your baby when feeding also helps you know if he's really interested in taking solids at a particular time. When his face lights up and his mouth opens when you talk, this gives you a clue that he is ready. Allow the baby to watch your mouth open; odds are he will mimic your facial motion.

Reading the feeding cues of your baby, promoting self-feeding, and advancing slowly all lead to a significant rule of baby feeding: producing a healthy feeding attitude. To a baby, eating isn't only a nutritional requisite but a developmental skill. The more a baby enjoys an experience, the more efficiently he advances in that skill. Infant feeding not just provides fun and nutrition for the baby; it also helps parents watch and enjoy their baby's rapidly developing hand skills. Feeding is a social interaction, not just a nutritional necessity. Enjoy it!

© 2011 Athena Goodlight