Random baby facts

Just in case someone besides P and myself find these interesting :-) I remember a few of these from my child psych class back at the U...

~From early on in your pregnancy, your baby is more like a newborn than you might think. He sleeps, moves around, listens to sounds, and has thoughts and memories. Just like newborns, fetuses spend most of their time sleeping. At 32 weeks, your baby sleeps 90 to 95 percent of the day. Closer to birth, your baby sleeps 85 to 90 percent of the time, the same as a newborn.

~Awake or asleep, your baby moves 50 times or more each hour, flexing and extending his body, moving his head, face, and limbs, and exploring his warm, wet compartment by touch. A baby may touch his face, touch one hand to the other hand, clasp his feet, touch his foot to his leg, or grab on to the umbilical cord. By week 37, your baby has developed enough coordination so that he can grasp with the fingers. (I read in one of our pregnancy books that little ones in the womb actually get 'bored' and that's why they explore so much. Makes sense, it's not like he has toys or a TV in there to watch ;-)

~Along with these common movements, babies perform some odder activities, including "walking" around the womb by pushing off with its feet. (maybe that explains the feeling like my entire uterus is shaking...or maybe he's swinging on the umbilical cord :-)

~Fetuses also react with motion to their mother's actions. For instance, ultrasounds have shown a fetus bouncing up and down when the mother laughs. Watching this on the screen, moms-to-be often laugh harder, and the fetus starts moving up and down even faster! (very interesting and completely adorable! Lil' Bean was moving lots during our ultrasound...perhaps our laughing and clapping helped :-)

~Second or third children may have more stretching room in the womb than first babies because a woman's uterus is bigger and the umbilical cord longer after her first pregnancy. These children usually get more motor experience in utero and tend to be more active infants.

~By week 29, you should be feeling your baby move at least 10 times an hour.

~Along with the ability to feel, see, and hear comes the capacity to learn and remember. For example, a fetus may be startled by a loud noise, but stops responding once the noise has been repeated several times. (hopefully Lil' Dude is getting used to G-dawg! Not only is Goliath becoming increasingly more protective, we think his bark is getting incrementally louder too ;-)

~Studies have also shown that babies can feel and remember their mother's emotional state. An experiment in Australia revealed that unborn babies were participating in the emotional upset of their mothers watching a disturbing 20-minute segment of a movie. When they were reexposed to this film up to three months after birth, they still showed recognition of the earlier experience.(this is fascinating...their memory is incredible at such a young age! So much for watching the L&D videos :-)

~In the 1980s, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro performed a study with a feeding contraption that allows a baby to hear one set of sounds through headphones when it sucks faster, and to hear a different set of sounds when it sucks slower. This experiment revealed that within hours of birth, a baby already prefers its mother's voice to a stranger's, suggesting that it must have learned and remembered the voice from the womb. Newborns also preferred a story read to it repeatedly in the womb over a new one. (So the 'read it again' that I used to hear while babysitting starts very early...:-)