Little Pixie Gifts - Gifts Blog

Baby nappy bags have evolved in many ways from the old bulky bags of yesteryear. New shapes, sizes, colours and the way they can be worn makes them far more usable and portable. Traditional totes are carried by hand. Newer style courier and messenger nappy bags are carried over the shoulder. Some of the new styles are very fashionable and chic, looking nothing like a nappy bag. Lately backpacks, which are obviously worn on the back, have become very popular too. No matter what style, all modern nappy bags boast compartments and pockets just like a a traditional tote style of bag. Many nappy bags can also be hung from the handle of a stroller, making a lot less work for Mum or Dad.

It’s important to find good a quality, hard wearing and long lasting baby nappy bag as it will be going everywhere you and baby go for quite some time.

Nappy bags lead a hard life. Choosing the latest colour and style is great, but the durability is possibly the biggest consideration. The last thing you want is to get caught out by your lovely nappy changing bag letting go at the seams and spilling all over the ground. Will your potential new nappy bag stand up to being tossed about, in and out of cars, pulled and played with by your growing little one, bouncing on the stroller and generally being dragged around shops and playgrounds? It’s important to know that it is well made and it comes with a warranty.

Another important thing to consider is the amount of pockets and compartments the baby changing bag comes with. It is far easier to have all of the essential nappy changing items organised and easy to access when changing a nappy. Some bags have the right number of pockets, but the size of the pockets is impractical, or the positioning of the pockets is just not user friendly. Some bags have a window and dispensing system for wet wipes - something that is needed at every nappy change. This can be a wonderful thing, it saves plenty of time as it saves pulling the wipes container out of the bag.

If the baby will be bottle fed, consider if the nappy bag allows for the cool storage of bottles, or will you have to carry another bag? Does it come with a baby changing mat to lay baby on?

Size is another important consideration. It needs to be big enough to hold all the considerable paraphernalia that your baby will require, but it doesn’t want to be so large that it is too heavy and a total inconvenience to carry around. Does it have enough space to carry some additional clothes for baby and perhaps yourself? As babies become toddlers, the size of the clothing and nappies, and therefore the space these items needed becomes larger. Is there room for growth? There will also be food, drinks and snacks to carry when baby becomes a toddler, will all of that still fit?

When considering styles, decide if you want the bag to look like a nappy bag, or to be a little more discrete. Don’t forget Dad either. Choose something that you will be both be comfortable carrying and using.

Nappy bags are one of the most helpful items to buy when caring for a bay. They make baby mobility so much easier. A well designed, good quality nappy bag will help to organise all of baby’s needs and provide years of useful service.

Parents say a baby lights up their life. A new study proves they’re right - literally, because an image of a smiling baby “lights up” the reward centres of the mother’s brain.

A report from the Baylor College of Medicine researchers recently appeared in the journal Pediatrics and the findings could help scientists demystify the special mother-infant bond and how it sometimes go wrong.

“The relationship between mothers and infants is critical for child development,” said Strathearn. “For whatever reason, in some cases, that relationship doesn’t develop normally. Neglect and abuse can result, with devastating effects on a child’s development.”

To study this relationship, Strathearn and his colleagues asked 28 first-time mothers with infants aged 5 to 10 months to watch photos of their own babies and other infants while they were in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The machine measures blood flow in the brain. In the scans, areas of increased blood flow “light up,” giving researchers a clue as to where brain activity takes place.

The subjects were shown photos of babies with different expressions: smiling or happy, sad and some expressions.

Strathearn said the women in his study spent about 20 minutes in the MRI machine.

“It was interesting, some of the mothers when they did come out of the scanner told me that they felt like reaching out to their baby when they saw their baby on the screen — for some of these mothers at least, it was really a very strong stimulus for them, even being in the noisy scanner, lying completely still.”

“The most important thing is that this response that mothers have to their babies is biologically driven. That there are particular brain systems in place to help forge this important relationship between a mother and baby. I think where it leads now is to look at where those systems aren’t working normally, aren’t functioning as we’d hope they would, and how that may be associated with difficulties in the relationship between mothers and their babies.”

Dr. Jean Wittenberg, head of the Infant Psychiatry Program at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, said it’s an important and interesting study.

“It’s part of a general development in psychiatry and neuropsychology looking at finding the areas of the brain related to specific behaviours,” he said. “It’s a way of helping us understand more about the psychosomatic continuum.”

Maternal responses are both psychological and physical and “each one has influence and impact on the other,” he said.

Wittenberg noted that what happens in the first couple of years sets down patterns that can be lifelong.

Caring for an infant can be tedious and frustrating, he said, but if the mother is rewarded, it becomes worthwhile.

“Mothers are responding very specifically to their own babies in a physiological way,” he said.

When the mothers saw their own infants’ faces, key areas of the brain associated with reward lit up during the scans.

The areas stimulated by the sight of their own babies were those associated with the neurotransmitter dopamine. Specifically, the areas associated included the ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra regions, the striatum, and frontal lobe regions involved in emotion processing, cognition and motor/behavioral outputs.

“These are areas that have been activated in other experiments associated with drug addiction,” said Strathearn. “It may be that seeing your own baby’s smiling face is like a ‘natural high’ “.

The strength of the reaction depended on the baby’s facial expression.

“The strongest activation was with smiling faces,” he said. There was less effect from pictures of their babies with sad or neutral expressions.

“We were expecting a different reaction with sad faces,” he said. In fact, they found little difference in the reaction of the mothers’ brains to their own babies’ crying face compared to that of an unknown child.

Overall, the mothers responded much more strongly to their own infants’ faces than to those of an unknown baby.

“Understanding how a mother responds uniquely to her own infant, when smiling or crying, may be the first step in understanding the neural basis of mother–infant attachment,” said Strathearn.

Based on the news release from http://www.eurekalert.org and an article from the Calgary Sun: http://calsun.canoe.ca/Lifestyle/2008/07/07/6088751.html