Babies with Sticky or Watery Eyes: Cause and Cure

Watery or sticky eyes is one of the most common issues you may face with a newborn baby. But is it something to worry about, yes and no. Let's find out.
 

The root cause for watery discharge is blockage of babies tear duct. As an immediate remedy you might be advised to use some eye drop, but that would be a temporary solution. Whats actually needed is, slow massage of baby's nose near the affected eye. The frequency of massage should be as high as possible. In fact it may need to be done as many as 50 times a day. This would help in opening up the tear duct. The problem may continue for a couple of months before the discharge lessens or stops completely. 

My Tweety had severe case of watery and sticky eyes right from the birth. The doctor at the hospital straightaway prescribed an eye drop to be administered 3 times a day, however our Pediatrician's advise was to clean the discharge with a wet cotton swab and do massage as many times as possible. The discharge continued for around 3 months and then subsided and now its gone completely :) 

Here is a picture of where you need to place your thumb and massage gently on both sides of nose:

And yes, this is a picture of my Tweety :)

In case the discharge doesn't stop even after massage, then it would require a small procedure called probing which would clear up the tear duct however this is totally your doctor's call. Please consult your doctor for massage technique, you may also ask about massage if your doctor straight away prescribes an eye drop.

Meanwhile i will try to prepare a short video of how the massage is done and post it as soon as Tweety obliges.

Happy Parenting :)

Image Credit

Cleaning a Baby Bottle Sterilizer

 

Avent 3-in-1 Electric Sterilizer

Most of us using baby bottle sterilizers have faced the problem of deposits on the heating element. The deposits may range from light cream in color to black spots. If left uncleaned for long these deposits can cause sterilizer to emit a smell into the bottles and may even make your baby reject the bottle. Also not much information is available for this important part of using an electric sterilizer. Let's take a look at reasons for the deposits and how to clean them: 

There may be two broad reasons for deposits on the heating element:

Poor water quality

Use only drinking water while sterilizing baby bottles. As regular tap water may be hard and thus leave calcium and magnesium deposits. These deposits are generally white in color and particularly hard to remove.
 

Insufficient quantity of water used

Put the exact measured quantity of water on the heating element. Less than required quantity would mean that water will evaporate prematurely during the sterilization cycle leaving the element burning. This would lead to deposits that are black in color and seem to be a nasty thing to have on equipment meant to sterilize the baby bottles.

One more thing to note is, even if you are putting in the right quantity of water, if your sterilizer is not leveled, it would lead to burning up of one side(higher side) of the element as the water will go down towards the side at a lower level.

See for yourself:

Element Before Cleaning

 

I realized the problem of improperly leveled table when I found the element burnt up from one side while the other side just had hard water deposits.
 

Cleaning the sterilizer element 

Now to clean the sterilizers element put a mixture of vinegar and water 1:3 proportion in the sterilizer and leave it for at least 15 minutes. This should loosen up the deposits and then can be removed by rubbing with a rough cloth. It would take some time as the deposits are stuck firm to the element but 30 minutes of hardwork and you would have a clean sterilizer ready to take on the bottles of the world:

Element After Cleaning

 Such cleaning needs to be done every 4 weeks or whenever you find deposits on the element. 

Happy Parenting :)

Diapers in Summers

It's peak summer time and unless you have a climate controlled home, it could be a very difficult time for your diaper wearing baby. One of the most effective grandmoms advice is to keep baby in cotton nappies (Langoti in Hindi). In such searing heat it's very important that we take care of this aspect.

This will also help your baby in becoming potty trained early as a diaper does not let baby realize the wetness and thus delays the understanding on baby's part about discomfort of being wet.

My Tweety is now five months old and we have stopped using diapers at home. This also means that we try to get Tweety to go every hour or so. She also enjoys these sessions where we hold her making hissing sounds (an old Indian way).

Baby Food Feeder - Way to start fruits and vegetables for baby

First few months of baby are spent drinking and spitting milk as the digestive system strengthens and develops capability to digest heavier foods. As baby nears the age of 6 months, you would need to start on other foods or juices to ensure that baby gets the adequate nutrition for wholesome development. Although my tweety is just 4-1/2 months old, our doctor said that we can start with juices and semi solid foods in small quantities.

There are a lot of baby foods like Cerelac in the market which are based on fruits or essential cereals but we all know that nothing beats the actual stuff. But for that we need to squeeze the juice out of fruits or feed the baby in extreme pulpy form so that eating (or gulping) and subsequent digestion is not an issue.

Baby Diaper Bag Essential Contents

As soon as you go out for the first time with your baby, you will realize that it requires a lot of preparation and a good number of essential things to be taken along. Now rather than organizing these things every time, it's better to have a dedicated bag with all essentials so that you are assured of having all things required to take care of your baby.

Listing down the essentials based on my experience:

The Magic Toy

When it comes to toys, babies have an attention span of an engineering student in a boring class. However, there are always some toys to which your baby will respond better or remains engaged for a longer duration. I call these Magic Toys. 

I have two such toys. One is the baby gym that I have already talked about, other is a Fisher Price toy which is essentially a small rotating disc with three animals attached to the disc. I got it as a gift so not sure about the price or exact name of it.

  

Tweety's Magic Toy