- Things the women’s liberators didn’t tell you: this – pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum – was a lot easier in my twenties.
- Note to first-time moms: breastfeeding will help your uterus get back to its pre-pregnancy size faster. Emphasis on uterus. Not to be confused with waist line. For tips on getting your waist back to pre-pregnancy size, refer to bullet 1.
- The size of the diaper bag and the time required to leave the house are both inversely proportional to the size of the baby.
- The amount of laundry generated by adding a new member to a family is exponential, not proportional.
- Soft spots are very soft but also very intriguing. If fontanels were created through intelligent design, why not a smaller head or a shorter pregnancy? On the other hand, how could fontanels be the result of evolution and natural selection if human babies could not be born without them? It’s the chicken or the egg question, really.
- Can you tell I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at the top of my baby’s head lately?
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Tanya adds: According to Dr. Harvey Karp and his book, The Happiest Baby On the Block, human gestation used to span over 12 months. He claims that’s why some babies suffer colic for the first 3 month after birth. Heads got bigger as brains got bigger, so we delivered them earlier as a matter of survival. (Whether that’s true of not, his “swaddle-suck-shush-shake-stomach” method definitely works.)
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I just turned 30; now you tell me!
As for head size and soft spots, they would have evolved together. As the baby’s head got larger (more developed, better chance of survival), offspring with softer heads would have had a better chance of surviving birth…as would their mothers, who could then go on to produce more offspring with soft heads (assuming they carried the mutation and it didn’t arise de novo in that particular offspring). From the intelligent design perspective, I’d keep the heads big and the pregnancy the same length (so the babies would be more developed) and make the pelvis bigger. (Of course, if you’re going for biblical literalness, painful childbirth is a consequence of the fall, right?)
Though this article seems to think our ancestors had bigger pelvises and possibly bigger-headed (and therefore more self-sufficient) babies: http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2008/11/14/2419711.htm
Which begs the question: if our babies’ heads have gotten smaller, what’s the advantage?
Though I liked this quote: “Human babies require intensive care, not only from the mothers but from an extended group, which may have spurred the development of human society and culture.”
Tick Tock, tick, tock…I just turned 28!
This blog is better than Jon and Kate plus 8!!!!!!!!!!