N figured out a way to make the baby sleep a lot better. He dressed her up in warmer clothes. Turned out she was cold this entire time.
This is not something I could have ever figured out because it doesn’t occur to me that anybody can be cold in this tropical climate.
Humans can adjust to different temperature ranges, which is why we can feel warm in winter at 60F and cold in summer at the same temperature. However, adjustment takes time, and until recently, her climate was your internal body temperature. (Speaking from hindsite, a grandparent POV.)
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There’s also the fact that people lose a lot of heat through their head and newborns are about 1/4 head and have little hair.
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The problem is that she hates the hats and the mittens. Gets them off even while swaddled. Like a little Houdini.
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A good rule of thumb is for the baby to have 1 layer more than what you would wear. Babies lose body heat much more rapidly than adults (large surface area to volume ratio).
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That’s what my husband is saying! And he’s notoriously not resistant to cold.
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And there is indeed some evidence that the degree to which people are thermoregulated in their early days shapes higher order cognitive functions, like levels of self and/or executive control. Attachment security—which is typically related to predictive control—correlates with enhanced self-regulation (e.g., Mikulincer et al., 1993; Mikulincer and Florian, 1995), and also with a more coherent self and with greater self-complexity (Mikulincer, 1995). We interpret this evidence tentatively as meaning that the “self” and its regulation emerges from the interaction with and being regulated by close others (see for comparable reasonings Häfner and IJzerman, 2011; and also Righetti et al., 2013), and that one of the earliest mechanisms of these is through social thermoregulation.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4404741/#!po=0.675676
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Ok, ok, the warm swaddling stays on.
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The ‘losing heat through your head – need to wear a hat’ schtick is based on out of date research, so if Klara can’t stand it, let her be 🙂
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