BATHTIME! oh your first bath, how exciting! You get told not to bath your baby for the first couple of days. Apparently they only need a plain water top to toe wash, we didn’t give Zachary his first bath until he was about a week old. These are just some of reasons why it had too be sooner.

When you’ve been up in pitch black trying to feed your baby, milk goes everywhere. After a good feed your baby will stop, have glazed cherry eyes, a little smirk and a milk beard. If they could talk they would say “oooo that’s some good ass milk”. But within seconds your baby is back in the room, you’ve wiped off the sloppy, stringy milk beard and realised some milk has travelled a little further than the beard area. It has gone into the rolls of the neck. Jamie and I called this ‘milk neck’. He started having a smelly neck because milk used to collect there, and it used to dry like rubber shavings. We couldn’t have this anymore, a baby wipe was just not serving its purpose in that area.

As you’ve probably been told before, your babies first poop (meconium) is sticky, dark green and tar like. Odourless I would add too. When people tell you this you think they’re over reacting but trust me. Gip? I’ve never seen anything like it! Its so hard to clean up, its like hot wax! So yeah, we was at home and Zac did a big oopsie of the green tar substance. And as awful as it sounds I couldn’t clean this little bit off his testicles. Poor lad.

Finally, the umbilical cord. You get told it will fall off in its own time. After a week you’ll want this thing to come off! You try your best to keep it clean and dry, but it started to smell. BAD. What no one tells you is this is basically dying flesh, isn’t it? It was inside of you giving your baby the goodness they needed but now its been cut off by its source, its going to die. Y-U-C-K. Some cords fall off sooner than others but if your wondering where a strange stench is coming from, its the cord. If not maybe your partner has passed some gas and blaming it on the baby.

So… time for a bath! A serious deep clean.

Things you’ll need at hand before you even start undressing your baby are:

• Bath tub or chair
• Baby wash (if you want to use some – we used Johnsons)
• Baby hair wash (again if want too)
• Flannel (we used this to keep him warm, we just placed it over his belly and poured the water on him)
• Towel
• Thermometer
• Entertainment (for example lights for little ones to look at or toys for older ones to hold) this makes bath time a fun and relaxed place.
• Jug

We had no clue what we were doing, put it that way. We squirted a little bit of baby wash in the tub, made sure it was the right temperature and just plonked him in slowly. His little face was a picture. I suppose this was new for all of us. But did he cry! Oh my gosh, not what I expected our first bath would be like. I thought it would be a nice bubble bath with a baby smiling and floating, having a little baby spa moment, but oh my, no no no. Even though he needed a deep clean and a good soak, it wasn’t happening. So we tried calming him down, talking to him, Jamie had a good grip on him so he felt safe, but he wasn’t having it. We managed to clean his milk neck and the little bit of poop off and tried to keep his cord dry, and we ended bath time there. I think all new mums and dads need good practise at lifting a wet, naked baby. Its as slippery as a fish soaked in Vaseline, yeah exactly like that, because they also flap like one too. Wow, that was some effort. We then wrapped him up in a towel, well tried, to swaddle him and he looked like a baby burrito. All that crying has finally turned into cute faces, a gummy smile, and cuddles. A light rub down and a baby massage to end. A clean baby grow and he was all fresh and smelling amazing.

How great is a babies life! I know its all new to them but after all of that I would love for someone to carry me to the bath, with loads of bubbles, fairy lights. A good scrub down, dressed and put to bed, how lush would that be?

Try to make bath time as fun as possible and make sure your little one feels safe. Even try go in the bath with them, this really helped Zachary for the first few times now he knows what’s coming and he loves baths. All round when you know your baby is happy, you’re happy.

Happy Bath time little ones!! Don’t forget your rubber ducks. Quack Quack!