Bringing Home Baby Without Breaking Your Body – How to protect your joints when you have arthritis and a new baby
Despite infants’ diminutive size and stature, caring for a new baby is a very physical job! Many new parents and caregivers experience joint or muscle pain after repetitive stress caused by lifting, carrying, diapering, and holding their baby. It’s estimated that between 25-50% of new parents experience DeQuervain’s tenosynovitis (or “Mommy thumb”) alone. It is also common to have pain in other areas such as the wrists, shoulders and back. These issues are of course exacerbated by chronic underlying illnesses such as autoimmune arthritis. From my experiences as a new mom with rheumatoid arthritis and from my training as an occupational therapist, I would like to share tips on my…
Bringing Home Baby: Tips for Meeting the Caregivers’ Basic Needs
It’s hard to put into words how simultaneously joyful, exhausting, transcendent, stressful, surreal, and miraculous the first few months home with an infant can be. Now that I’m emerging from the fog but the experience is still fresh in my mind, I’d love to share some tips and strategies that helped me adjust to parenthood* over the last five and a half months. While pregnant, I found countless resources for how to care for a newborn, from feeding to sleeping to swaddling to safety. However, there were less resources available for how to care for myself and other primary caregivers in the newborn days. Thus, I will focus on these…