Baby's First Bath

I just read an article on Baby's First Bath from Bellies and Babies here. It reminded me how thankful I am of the fact that I was able to have a home birth.
The first bath was one of the things that I was worried about as an expectant mom. From all the literature I had read, talk that I had heard, my baby was going to be taken away from me and washed minutes after the birth. I came hesitantly to my midwives asking them what they were going to do about cleaning my baby after the birth, it was so ingrained in me by our culture that a bath was normal, that if I remember correctly my question was "So after the birth how soon do you have to give the baby a bath?".
The question reflected very well my position. I wanted my baby on me and nursing, not away in another room being washed. I wanted to smell her and love her and did not want the interruption. However I did not know if that was possible.
Luckily I had the very best midwives, and they raised an eyebrow at me exclaiming "We don't wash a newborn!". What a relief! They then went on to explain how beneficial the vernix is to babies and why we wouldn't want to wash her right away. It all made sense to me in a medical sense, but there was a deeper feeling to it, really... I didn't want my baby's first experience out of the womb to be a brutal uncomfortable bath to "clean" her of me... of us.

After the birth, she was on me warming up and nursing for a while before we even cleaned of the blood that had coated a bit of her hair, and after that there was no need for anything more, truly. The vernix was absorbed into both her and my skin, she smelled great... that new baby smell that I sometimes miss so much now that she's toddling around. She was not dirty... she did not need a bath... There would have been no reason for anyone to take her away from nursing and bonding with me for it.

Our first bath, the next evening I believe (those days are a bit blurry now), was exactly as the one shown at the end of the Bellies and Babies post as what should happen.
We poured a bath for both me and her, and I just held her in the water swaying her slowly in, bringing her head down and covering her ears a bit here and there, softly moving her hair from her scalp to make sure I washed every bit of her. And she enjoyed it so thoroughly. She was so content in that water and I couldn't be happier that I was able to wait for her to truly enjoy that experience.

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there...
And an especially happy Mother's Day to my mom who is reading this blog from France. We love you so very much and miss you all the time.
Thank you for having been the most amazing mom from the very beginning, only now that I am raising Victoria do I truly understand everything you have done for me. I love you.

This Moment-Peekaboo

{this moment} - A Friday ritual started by Soulemama. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savour and remember.

Quick Embroidery

I have a few onesies for Victoria that are very plain. I enjoy embroidering things, so of course it all came together in this little blue bird that I put together during one of Victoria's naps.
I was going to have the little blue bird sing some notes, but we have been focusing on our French over here, so I decided that he was going to have to be a French blue bird saying hello.
And of course when I think French, I think elementary school cursive... It was such a part of my education while I lived in France as a little girl, and I love the look of it.

Victoria is now walking (running is more like it!) and so all the pictures I tried taking of her with the shirt were completely blurry. I finally managed to take some after she passed out on the pile of laundry to be folded! Such glamorous modeling...

Trampoline!

We are lucky enough to have access to our friend's new trampoline and Victoria is in love... I might as well just let the pictures speak for themselves:

First....

First duckling of the season! Spotted a few days ago at the park we walk to every day. He was all by himself, no brothers or sisters yet, and his mom was not letting him go anywhere far.
I love watching the Spring babies appear!

We also were lucky enough to spot the first swallows of the season, of course my photography skills leave to be desired, and as they were swooping and flying all over the place I did not get a chance to get a good photo of them. But I was so overjoyed to see them as they are simply my favorite birds to watch in the Spring.

A new discovery: Bleach Dyeing

I promised a very long time ago a good friend of mine a cute dress with a print of the Elder Sign on it.
I knew that I was going to use bleach to make the print since I wanted that specific look of spreading stars that you can get with spraying bleach on black clothes.

So armed with a small bottle of a 50/50 solution of bleach and water I started spraying a cute black dress that I thought would work well for the project (this takes a lot of faith that everything will go well, believe me! I am not one to enjoy destroying anything, so not being sure that this would work was a bit scary).

I simply cut out the shapes that I wanted out of cardboard and set them on the dress, sprayed around and over them and waited for things to dry.
The Elder Sign is a bit abbreviated as I am not quite sure how to get small details in yet, usually it was a flame inside the star. I added a few tentacles to the dress as well as I liked the contrast of the black and rust color that was coming out. And then I decided to make another shirt for her. She just adopted a hedgehog... so I made a "hedgehog love" shirt for her.

The first dress was 100% cotton and took forever to dry. The bleach solution was also not working very strongly on it, so I actually added a few drops of pure bleach here and there. The shirt on the other end was a polyester mix and ended up changing colors really fast, I had to rinse it out almost immediately for fear of creating too much color change.

Here's what I came up with, I think they ended up quite nice and hope my friend will love them.