Fig. 21.—Baby’s toilet tray equipped with jelly glasses, bottles, celluloid hair receiver for cotton, and a soap dish, as follows:
1. Safety-pins sticking in cake of soap.
2. Jar for sterile nipples.
3. Jar of sterile water.
4. Jar of boracic acid solution.
5. Nursing bottle.
6. Sterile water to drink.
7. Nursing bottle for water.
8. Small tooth pick swabs.
9. Liquid petrolatum.
10. Gauze mouth swabs.
11. Absorbent cotton.
12. Soap.
(By courtesy of the Maternity Centre Association.)
The giving of the baby’s daily bath, after he comes, will be greatly simplified if you will assemble beforehand and keep in readiness on a tray or small table, all of the things which are to be used each time. Dainty little outfits for this purpose may be bought, or you may arrange an entirely satisfactory one from jars and bottles to be found in the house, as suggested in Fig. [21].
The above lists of dressings and articles to be used in the care of both mother and baby can be considerably modified, according to one’s tastes and means, and still be satisfactory. They merely represent a fair average of what has been found adequate to meet the usual needs of the mother and baby at home.
It will be a good plan for you to have in readiness, by about the end of the seventh calendar month, all of the dressings and other articles to be used during the confinement. This is in case you should have a premature labor, for which the same dressings are needed as in a normal delivery. The baby’s clothes, however, will be in time if they are ready by the end of the eighth month. A baby born before this time would probably be so frail that he would be wrapped in cotton at first, instead of being dressed in the clothes ordinarily prepared for a fully developed baby.
If you will make such preparations for the baby’s arrival as I have suggested, you will be doing a great deal toward securing his safety and well-being, as well as your own.
CHAPTER VII
THE BABY’S ARRIVAL
During the past nine months you have had the happiness of guarding the little life within you and of making soft, warm garments to have in readiness for the baby when he comes. You have prepared your room and his; folded up the packages of gauze and cotton and prepared all sorts of other things to be pressed into service upon the baby’s arrival, and through it all you have dreamed and planned and built the loveliest of castles in Spain.
And now, at last, the baby is coming!
It almost takes your breath away to realize it after all those months of waiting and dreaming, and though it scarcely seems possible, the waiting is almost over.
This same waiting grows very hard toward the end for you are tense with expectation and suspense. The hours and days seem endlessly long, as they pass without giving the looked-for signs that the baby has started. You find it very hard not to grow discouraged and impatient, he seems so long in coming. Your physical discomfort is aggravated by the greater pressure made by the baby during this period, and you cannot get away from it day or night. The desire to urinate is almost constant; your back aches; your feet feel heavy and swollen and the baby disturbs your nights by his increasingly vigorous kicking.