Motherly talks with young housekeepers: embracing eighty-seven brief articles on topics of home interest, and about five hundred choice receipts for cooking, etc.Beecher, H. W., Mrs.
General
Motherly talks with young housekeepers: embracing eighty-seven brief articles on topics of home interest, and about five hundred choice receipts for cooking, etc.
Beecher, H. W., Mrs.
Cooking; Home economics
Let us take this uneasy little mortal. Ah! we see. In dressing it in
the morning you pinned the little waists as tightly as you could draw
them, so that the body is as round and unyielding as a marble pillar.
The morning bath and change of clothes brought some relief from the
night’s fetters; and for the first part of the day, or, if uncommonly
strong and healthy, until night, the child may be quiet and endure; but
by night, release from so many hours’ bondage is absolutely needed.
How would you like to have your clothes thus bound about you? No room
for free breathing, no elasticity of body! What chance for healthy
digestion? After many hours, during the day, of perfect inactivity,
what wonder if by night the poor baby feels this compression
insupportable! Its little limbs must ache, and the whole body become
stiff and numb. But instead of relief, when the child is disrobed and
night-clothes substituted, it is only to tighten the bands, and leave
it to pass the long hours of darkness as much like a mummy as before.
When we see a child thus bound, we think it would afford us pleasure
to act as dressing-maid to the mother long enough to teach her what
torture she is thoughtlessly inflicting on her helpless babe. It has
no way of attracting your attention and begging for relief but through
tears. If the mother was subjected to the same distress for once, she
would ever after understand why her baby lifts up its voice like a
trumpet, to tell her of her sins.
Whenever an infant begins to cry, without any apparent cause, by day
or by night, let your first act be to examine its clothing; loosen
it, remove the pins, or untie the strings, and see if the lungs have
free space to expand, and the body a chance to move every limb and
muscle. Rub the body gently with your warm hand, particularly the back,
lungs, and bowels, to promote the circulation which the barbarous
swaddling-bands have all day impeded. Try this remedy, particularly at
night, and, unless you again “put on the screws,” in most cases your
baby will fall into a peaceful slumber, and you may hope for unbroken
rest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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