First bath.

Little Dude had his first bath ever yesterday.

I LOVE Little Dude's expression.

Normally a newborn is given a bath in the hospital shortly after birth. It's done by the pediatric nurse and when we had Little Lady she had to be placed under a warmer for 45 min afterwards which translates into precious time not being spent in proud new parents arms!

Ok so 45 min of this little persons life may not seem that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things, but to us those first few hours, days, weeks is sweet bonding time.In our Bradley class we took before Little Lady was born we learned about the benefits of not giving your newborn a bath right away. We really liked the idea of having her first bath at home in a more peaceful setting, rather than with bright lights shining down and rubber gloves handling her.


When we asked the hospital if we could be the ones to bathe her our response was "No, babies are slippery when they are wet." Um... Duh. I understand it's a liability issue, although I don't agree with it. We were told if she wasn't bathed by the staff then they would only touch her with gloves on and in my inexperience I thought human touch would be a far better option. In hindsight I realized they don't even need to touch her but a few times for a few minutes, for example to weigh her, and we held her all the other times. But we went ahead and had her bathed in the hospital.

With Little Dude things turned out a little differently. I'm not sure if it was because he was born at 3:51am and things were slow that the nurses were so much more laid back. The ped nurse we had was really awesome and told us to let her know when we were ready for his bath, that there was no rush.

"This is so much like being in mama's tummy!"

We ended up just not taking him down to the nursery for a bath. It worked perfectly! Of course they still wiped  most of the vernix off of his skin shortly after he was born while he laid on my tummy. :)

Little Dude's cord stump fell off on Monday during the night so he got have his first bath ever in a warm bath tub with his daddy!

He didn't care too much for daddy scrubbing his head but he LOVED just floating in the water, he just looked around and bobbed so peacefully!!

This is definitely the route we will go with all future first baths!