Postpartum

Negotiating Maternity Leave Baby Talk A maternity leave is time off from work due to the medical and personal needs of pregnancy and childbirth. This leave might be paid or unpaid depending on company policy. Daddy Alert! If financial concerns ...

Staying at Home: Finances The money issue is often the deciding factor for most families when it comes to deciding if a parent should stay at home. Even if you desperately want to stay home, it may not be clear how your family can survive with...

Your baby todayYour baby will be able to recall and recognize the frequency and pattern of the most familiar sounds he hears within the uterus-your voice. Also, you might have noticed that loud noises may startle your baby during these final week...

The New Mom Dilemma: Stay at Home or Return to Work? Perhaps you've always been the working type but now that you've had a baby, you've changed your mind. Maybe you've always wanted to stay home, but you didn't feel like your circumstances wou...

First Toys: Faces and Voices Toys aren't always colorful plastic shapes you buy at the store. Almost anything can seem like a toy to your newborn. Before she can even hold a conventional toy in her hand, she'll become infatuated with two toys yo...

Holding Your Baby You will spend lots of time holding your baby—to comfort her, to move her from one place to another, and just to enjoy being close to her. This is one of the ways you and your husband bond with your baby. Go ahead and let f...

Your baby todayYou can see from this image just how much amniotic fluid is around your baby at this time. Ultrasound displays the fluid as black on the screen. Sometimes there will be speckles within the fluid: these represent skin and hair cells...

Birth Trauma Someone may try to tell you that a negative birth experience won't affect you after it's over. The sad fact is that you can have such a horrible birth experience that it leads to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or birth traum...

Common Myths of New Motherhood As if you needed another challenge on top of learning to be a mom and getting to know your baby, there are a bunch of myths about new babies in circulation. By ridding yourself of some erroneous bits of information...

Baby's First Website Taking pictures and making movies are great ways to record how your baby has been growing and developing his first year. That way you can always look back and have a clear reminder of this rapidly changing time. As you coll...

Your baby todayHere the skin looks almost loose around the neck as the baby has turned his head slightly. This is normal at this stage: the lack of fat beneath the skin and the need to grow rapidly can make your baby appear as if he needs time to...

Watching for Postpartum Depression E Alert The consequences of depression being unrecognized and untreated can be tragic for the whole family. Be sure to get help for your baby's mother if you think she is having problems with postpartum depress...

Use this worksheet to document the facts about your company's maternity leave policy. ...

Use this sample agreement as a model for your own written record of your personal maternity agreement with your company. ...

Your baby todayAt the back of your baby's eye, nerve cells that identify either black and white or color are maturing. The cells that respond to color signals are the last to develop but will eventually process more than half of the information t...

How to Enjoy Romance After Having Kids Couples start having problems in their sex lives when the job of raising the children becomes so overwhelming that there is no time to be alone and no energy, even if you find the time. Or when one of you s...

Maternity Leave and Stay-at-Home Moms If you have a job where you work for someone else outside your home, the typical leave of absence for childbirth will be six to eight weeks. This is not necessarily a paid leave. What you are given is the op...

Dealing with Postpartum Depression: One Woman's Story After my third child was born I developed what I thought was postpartum depression. I was in a stressful second marriage and noticed that all during this pregnancy (following so quickly on th...