Pregnancy and child care

Description

Having a baby in Pregnancy and child care is a perfectly normal, physiological procedure. It is also, usually, downright hard work; and, beside the hard labor iouswork, there is not only a wearied and severely shocked nervous system to be restored, but there is also a certain amount of uterine shrinkage which must take place.

Well directed exercise

–And this requires from four to eight weeks; and so our mother must be allowed weeks or even a month or two to rest, to enjoy a certain amount of well-directed exercise, to have an abundance of fresh air, to be wheeled or lifted out of doors if possible into the sunshine, that she may be the better prepared for the additional duties and responsibilities the little new comer entails.

Sunshine and fresh air are wonderful Pregnancy and child care health restorers as is also a well-directed cold water friction bath administered near the close of the second week of a normal puerperium. During the second week a few carefully selected exercises such as the following are not only beneficial, but tend to increase circulation and thus to promote the secretion of milk and the shrinking of the uterus.

Streching is one method of Pregnancy and child care

1. Head raising, body straight and stiffened.
2. Arm raising, well extended.
3. Leg stretching, with knees stretched and toe extended.
4. Massage, administered by the nurse.
A splendid tonic circulatory bath may be administered at the close of the second week (in normal puerperium), known as the “cold mitten friction,” which is administered as follows:

The patient is wrapped in a warm blanket, hot water bottle at feet, and each part of the body–first one arm then the other; the chest, the legs, one at a time–is briskly rubbed with a coarse mit dipped in ice water.

As one part is dried it is warmly covered, while the next part is taken, and so on until the entire body has been treated. The body is now all aglow, the blood tingling through the veins, and the patient refreshed by this wide-a-wake bath. Properly given, the cold-mitten friction bath is one of the most enjoyable treatments known and under ordinary conditions, if intelligently administered, may be given as early as the eighth day

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AFTER PAINS
After the birth of the first baby the uterus usually is in a state of constant contraction, hence there e are no
“after pains;” but after the birth of the second or third child, the uterine muscle has lost some of the tone of earlier days–there is a tendency toward relaxation–so that when the uterine muscle does make renewed efforts at contraction, these “after pains” are produced