Belly button is one of the cutest things on your baby. It may be small but the care needed to keep it clean & healthy is a quite a bit. Here are a few tips on how you can keep this tiny little body part clean:
How Can You Keep Your Baby’s Belly Button Clean & Healthy
- After the umbilical cord stump falls off, give your baby a proper bath. Use the corner of the cloth to clean the belly button, avoid using soap or scrubbing too hard.
- Innies & outies: When the skin tissue heals, the belly button looks likes its popping out-this is an outie and an innie is a deep inward dimple. These are harmless and may or may not be permanent, and there’s not much you can do to prevent them.
- Umbilical hernias too aren’t painful and generally self correct themselves in a few years.
- Look out for omphalitis -one dreadful complication you should look out for. This is seen before the stump falls off and is life threatening. Symptoms are pus, bad smell, persistent bleeding and tenderness around the belly button. This is a rare situation but if you find symptoms like these get immediate treatment.
Quick & Simple 7-Step Process To Cut Your Baby’s Nails:
- Gently grasp a finger at a time.
- Press down lightly on the nail. The growth of the nail will be of different colour than the rest of the nail, so identify that this is the part to be cut.
- Use scissor or nail clippers, whichever is convenient to you.
- Once the nails are trimmed use an emery board and soften the edges.
- Blow against the cutting surface of the clippers or scissors to remove the cut nail particles.
- If your baby pulls back or fusses, sing a song or make some playful noise as a distraction. If the fuss continues, stop and spend some time with the baby and get back when things cool off. If you continue cutting despite the baby might become averse to the clippers making the process even more difficult.
- Keep clearing off the baby’s cut nails from the floor or table so that they’re out of the baby’s reach.
Some tips which can making nail cutting easier for you and the baby:
-Trim them immediately after a bath, when they are soft.
-Trim them while your baby’s asleep.
-You can use adult clippers to trim your baby’s nails. Sometime they make it easier.