What to Do After Your Baby is Born

In this video, I'm going to share with you my top three tips for parents and caregivers after your baby is born. I want to make sure you're doing all three of these so that everybody's a little bit happier and healthier. Let's dive in!

My name is Lindsay, and welcome to the Little Foundations Channel where I help parents and caregivers create healthy habits for their babies from the very start.

Today, we're talking about tips for after your baby is born. So if you're watching this, ah, congratulations! My heart is so happy for you! You're either about to have a baby or you just did, and I'm so happy for you and your whole family.

These are tips for you as soon as your baby is born. Let's jump right in.

Tip number one: Set up and accept help. All those sweet people in your life who really want to help but don't know what to do, they probably really mean it, and you would do it for them. And I know that you don't want to wait until the last minute, until you're really exhausted and wish that you had help. So, sometimes I'll tell parents and caregivers, try to get your significant other or your sister, or your best friend, to try to organize your family and friends with meals and visits and helping you out around the house. We don't want them there every single day, yes, but we do want to take some help and have some adult conversation when we can.

Tip number two: Address any pain and discomfort right away. Now, you're starting to feel exhausted, and you don't want to push through any pain or discomfort, whether that's pain for you and breastfeeding or any discomfort for your baby. We want to address that right away. Pain and discomfort are not something to push through, and it's not normal. We want to make sure that you and your baby are comfortable. It's not just going to get better if we push through, so let's address it right away. You can reach out to your medical team or reach out to me, and we can see what tweaks we can make to make it a little bit better for everyone.

Tip number three: Cues, cues, cues. I want to make sure that parents and caregivers know about feeding cues. It's one of the most important things that we can do. Whether this is your first baby or your fifth baby, every baby is different, and their cues for hunger and fullness might look different. But I'm going to share with you some of the most common cues so you'll know what to look for.

So, as your baby starts to get hungry, you'll start to recognize a pattern of cues. Sometimes that might look like your baby rooting a lot more or putting their hands near their face. They might clench up their little fists and stick out their tongue or suck on their tongue and lips. They might even touch their belly and look around a lot as they start to become more hungry. If we miss any of these cues, sometimes they will start to cry. But don't worry, as we start to get more comfortable with the pattern of what their cues look like, you'll start to recognize them a lot faster.

And now, the cues for being full. These are equally as important. Sometimes, especially in the first few days of a baby's life, we desperately want them to be happy, so we go to feed them, and sometimes we feed them a little bit too much. So we want to be able to look for their fullness cues as well.

So, some cues to look for: if your baby is starting to turn away from the breast or bottle, spit out any breast milk or formula, or spit out the nipple altogether, starting to slow down or fall asleep, or start and stop the feed many times. Start to close their mouth or open up their body and become a little bit more floppy and relaxed. And if we still don't read their cues and recognize that they're full, and we still keep trying to offer, they might actually start to cry.

Sometimes babies cry from discomfort, from having a burp stuck in there or being too full. So, it's important to recognize those cues as well.

Again, it can be tricky to learn your new baby's cues, but reach out because I'm always here for you.

Let's recap what we talked about.

First, we're going to set up help and allow it. You would do the same thing for your family and friends, so please let people help you.

Number two, we're going to look for any pain or discomfort that we might be feeling or our baby might be feeling, and we're going to address it right away.

And number three, we're going to work really hard to learn our baby's cues when they're hungry and when they're full.

Let me know how it's going. You are doing a great job. For more baby feeding tips, check this out!