2. A baby cannot
taste salt until it is 4 months old. The delay may be related to the
development of kidneys, which start to process sodium at about that age.
3. In medieval
Europe, leeches were commonly used to treat babies’ illnesses. For example,
leeches were placed on a baby’s windpipe for croup. Additionally, teething
babies were commonly purged or bled.
4. A baby’s eyes
are 75% of their adult size, but its vision is around 20/400. By six months, a
baby’s vision should reach 20/20.
5. Newborns are
more likely to turn their head to the right than to the left.
6. The inner ear
is the only sense organ to develop fully before birth. It reaches its adult
size by the middle of pregnancy.
7. A baby can
recognize the smell and voice of its mother at birth. It takes a few weeks
before a baby can see the difference between its mother and other adults.
8. A baby’s first
social smile appears between four and six weeks after birth.
9. The heaviest
baby on record to survive was a 22 lb. 8 oz. Italian baby born in 1955. In
1879, a woman in Canada gave birth to a 23 lb. 1.92 oz. baby that died 11 hours
after birth.
10. In the United
States, more babies are born on Wednesday than on other days of the week.
Sunday is the slowest day.
11. An average
baby will go through approximately 2,700 diapers a year.
12.
Traditionally, the length of the cut umbilical cord was thought to predict the
length of a male baby’s penis.
13. In Ancient
Rome, an olive branch would be hung from the front door of a house if a boy was
born, and a strip of woolen fabric was hung if the child was a girl.
Eighteenth-century London houses hung strips of ribbon on their doorknockers:
pink for a girl and blue for a boy.
14. The Apache
Indians ritually killed one twin, arguing that the mother did not have
sufficient milk to feed two infants, and some Eskimo tribes left one twin
outside to die in the cold.
15.
Babies typically prefer a female voice over a male voice, which may explain why
people raise the pitch of their voice when talking to babies, otherwise known
as “motherese.”
16. In four or
five out of every 100 newborn babies, there is discharge of milk from the
nipples. This is due to unusually high levels of the mother’s hormones that
leak across the placenta during pregnancy. Premature babies never have this
discharge, only those who are full term.
17.
A baby’s head is proportionally huge, being one-quarter of the total body
length, compared to only one-eighth of the total adult’s length.
18. At the moment
of birth, a baby’s heart beats at 180 pulses per minute. Within a few hours,
the rate falls to 140 pulses. At 1 year old, the infant heart rate is 115 beats
per minute. An adult’s average resting level is 70-80 beats a minute.
19. Research
shows that a baby responds positively to the fragrance of its mother’s breasts
and ignores breast pads used by other women. Even more striking is the
discovery that a blindfolded woman has the ability to identify her own child
from a host of other babies by scent alone.
20. New babies
prefer looking at a drawing of a face rather than a random pattern, and they
prefer smiling faces to grumpy ones.
Thank you for sharing these facts. They are truly adorable.
ReplyDeletewww.writeitloud.com
Awwwwh this made me fall in love with babies again. Thanks for sharing didn't know most of these.
ReplyDeletetrendwithgloria.com
so nice! cant wait to have one!
ReplyDeletewww.liveinibadan.blogspot.com
I love babies. Dey are cute !!
ReplyDeleteAwww..I so love babies. So adorable. Great info Carina
ReplyDelete