I have many irritating faults. I pretend I’m listening when I’m not, I sprinkle when I tinkle, and whenever I hear a car horn out in public I pretend that it was me farting. However the character flaw that probably annoys Kerry the most is my tendency to continually question conventional wisdom, especially when it comes to caring for babies.
We don’t tend to have rows but we have definitely had mutual sulks about the efficacy of cough medicine, the need to discard boiled water left in an open container after 1 hour, and the ability of the medical profession to distinguish a coccyx from a humeroulnar joint.
I was out in the garden this morning shoveling a newly aquired heap of horse poo into my compost heap when I remembered another bugbear of mine.
As far as the senses go, newborn babies are pretty basic. They can only focus 18 inches directly infront of their face. They can distinguish between soft and loud sounds and high and low pitchs. They can tell the difference between sweet, sour, bitter, and salty tastes.
So why is it that everyone assumes that babies have some sort of superhuman sense of smell? Every time the baby is passed to one of it’s parents and stops crying someone always pipes up with “Oooo, they can smell it’s their Mummy/Daddyâ€. Bits of old clothing are even left in the baby’s cot so they will be fooled into thinking there parents are there.
I’m sorry, but if I put one of my stinky t-shirts in with Evan you would be completely justified in calling the child protection services. And while I concede that he might be able to tell Kerry and I apart by smell, I very much doubt he would be able to tell Kerry and freshly laundered clothes apart, or even me and a piece of mouldy damp carpet if it came to it.
Even Wikipedia are at it:
[a baby] within the first week of life can already distinguish [by smell] the differences between the mother’s own breast milk and the breast milk of another female.
How!? How can they possibly know that a 1 week old baby is making a distinction between two different milks!? What instrument did they use to measure that!? I pore score on the whole debarkle.
And don’t bother responding with so called “factsâ€, “evidenceâ€, and “methodically scientific research papers†in order to prove me wrong. That’s just the sort of low down underhanded trick that Kerry would pull.
I’ve never even heard this theory of smell. I can’t imagine they have some sort of super sniffers either. However, babies do seem able to tell their parents apart from other adults, and they’ve got to be using something. Radar?
I have often wondered if children and their parents have been fitted with some kind of magnet that draws them to one another.
They know this because they’ve done this same breast milk smell test on baby lab rats - and they ask them.
So what’s supposed to happen to old boiled water? Never heard that one before…
It wasn’t the boiled water part I’d objected to, it was the bottles taken out of the sterilser and left on the counter with no lids on. Yes, I know you were waiting for the water to cool.
I’d love to see the research on exactly what happens with the bottles once sterilsed in the microwave, ie how long do they remain sterile with just freshly boiled water in and sealed up?
Evan doesn’t have everything sterilised as he’s been putting things in his mouth for ages anyway. Well, with help from his big sister mainly.
I dunno, Torquemada…I say it still moves…