Newborn Wonders: 5 Facts About The First Days Of Life

No matter how much experience we have as mothers, the first days of life for a newborn baby are always unique. Inadvertently, we tend to make comparisons with other babies. But this is still a period full of news.

The day our baby is born will no longer be another day on the calendar. It will forever be marked as your child’s birthday. And the celebration begins the moment it comes into the world.

If we are first-time parents, then our baby will be nothing but surprises. In addition, the things we discover will be incredible. Even though we discover new things all the time, there are some things we do not even notice. Some details pass unseen, for various reasons. 

Below we will go through five aspects of a newborn baby’s life that you probably did not know about.

What happens in the first days of life

It does not matter how much time we have spent on planning, the arrival of a new baby can still be turned into endless chaos. We’re starting to forget all the plans we’ve made, and all we can think about is our newborn baby.

At the same time, your baby is adjusting to life outside the womb. If you are thinking that your life is changing, then remember that your little one’s life has just been completely transformed.

Researchers have already discovered that the fetus can perceive certain things that happen outside the stomach. However, the baby can not even begin to imagine the changes it will soon experience.

Have you ever asked yourself what it is like to breathe inside the womb? Or how these functions change. How does a newborn baby see and hear us? In the following, we will explain better how they feel.

Hair, eyes, mouth and heart

• A newborn baby’s hair is so fragile that it can fall out just by rubbing against the sheet. As a result, many babies quickly become bald. Soon new and stronger hair begins to grow.
• A newborn baby’s tear ducts are not open, which means that babies scream without tears during their first days of life.
• A baby’s lips are so sensitive that small blisters can form around them as a result of breastfeeding.
• During the first days of life, babies’ heartbeats beat very fast. Their hearts actually beat up to twice as many times per minute as an adult’s – between 130 and 160 times per minute.

Respiratory system

• One thing we do not do as adults is to breathe and swallow at the same time. But during their first days of life, newborn babies can do both at the same time. They retain this ability until they are six months old, to be able to breastfeed.
• You may worry that your baby sneezes often, but it does to clear his airways.
• Newborns do not know how to breathe through the mouth. They only breathe through the nose.
• A newborn baby can hold its breath under water. It even has an instinct to swim. But this ability disappears quickly.

Newborn hygiene

• Because their sweat glands have not yet developed, babies do not sweat during the first days of life.

• The breath of newborn babies is always fresh. This is due to the fact that they have no teeth. Bad breath begins to come first with the accumulation of bacteria on the teeth.

The baby’s senses during its first days

• A newborn baby recognizes the mother and other details through the sense of smell. The sense of smell is its most developed mind.
• After four months in the mother’s womb, a baby can already protect itself from light, and can respond to loud noises.
• A small baby can only see clearly up to 23 to 25 centimeters from his face. This happens to be the same as the distance between mother and child during breastfeeding.

Physical growth: weight and size

• When your child catches a cold, it does not grow.
• At the age of six months, your baby will have doubled its birth weight. At one year of age, it has tripled.
• The length of a baby’s foot during the first days of life is the same as one third of its length when it grows up. When your child is one year old, the measurement will be about half of his foot as an adult.

• From conception to birth, the weight of the fetus will double about three thousand million times.
• Although newborns gain more weight in the autumn, they grow twice as much in the spring.
• Children born in the month of May can weigh 200 grams more than children born during the rest of the year.