Why wear instead of carry?

I'll often hear from a concerned mom that her husband won't try using their carriers and that he would prefer to just carry the baby.  Well, the goal of babywearing is to promote in-arms parenting, so the question then comes, does it matter if he carries instead of wears?  Well, no, not really, except for those times when he wants or needs his hands free.  Let's take a look at some of the things dads can do while wearing that might be a challenge or impossible while holding.

 

Chores/ Homemaking/ Honey-Do List

This baby's mama mentioned to her husband that wearing skin to skin could help a
sick baby with temperature regulation.  She went out and came home to daddy having
put a feverish baby on his back while he washed dishes.

A man can cook breakfast with a baby on his back, it's difficult and potentially

dangerous to use the stove with a baby in your arms.

 

This man right here is mommy-porn.  He's feeding the baby AND vacuuming!  A hero among men.

 

You can change a toddler while wearing your newborn.

 

 

You can also repair the air purifier that the kids broke

 (that's a good strategy, blaming it on the kids, I'm pretty sure my kids have

learned from this dad).



 

Or you can get some yard work done.  A little sunshine and raking.

 . 

 

Or even a little mowing (we highly recommend ear protection for

 baby if you are using power tools near him, and always exercise good judgment about the likelihood of something kicking back and injuring your child)

 

But maybe you're thinking to yourself, "but if I'm holding the baby, I CAN'T do chores, this is genius!  I won't have to do any of those boring tasks!" (my husband would give his right arm to avoid yard work)  But maybe there are a few things you would LIKE to do, but can't because of your habit of holding the baby in your arms.

Work from Home; or you know, Play Video Games

 

Some of these dads are working, and some are playing.  I'll let you decide.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sightseeing/ Exploring

A short jaunt out with baby can be done carrying baby in arms, but an adventure out of the house for hours can quickly exhaust even the strongest arm muscles.  With baby in a carrier, you can:

Explore Russian cathedrals.

 

Climb Dunes on a beach hike (I spot 2 babywearing dads here)

 

Take all of the kids for a hike on Mt. Olympia

 

Or head out for a more local hike with other babywearing parents

 

Take photographs from the famous observatory in LA



 

 

You can also get to those places for exploring by public transportation more easily when a baby is worn.  Strollers are cumbersome and difficult to navigate on most public transportation, and a baby in arms makes holding the handrails difficult for you.

You can hang on and show baby the fun sights you pass on the train.

 

 Until you go underground, then baby might steal your iPhone.

 

 But you'll be able to get all of the kids up the escalator safely and have

your hands free to operate the card reader at the exit.

 

 

Play Time

 





You can take the kids to the playground, and swing with the baby,

or just push the preschooler on the swings while you wear the baby.

 

You can teach your big boy how to ride a bike while you keep the little one safe and cozy.

 

 

Shopping

 

Okay, shopping might not be every guy's favorite "guy" activity, but sometimes it is necessary.  It goes a lot faster if you have your hands free to collect your merchandise or carry bags.

 

 Grocery (and wine) shopping is much easier with baby in a carrier.  Placing the car seat on the cart is dangerous, and carrying a baby in arms makes it difficult to get items from shelves, and we won't even consider the ridiculous proposition of pushing a stroller AND a cart.

 

Your wife will adore you for wearing the sleepy baby while she tries on clothing. 

You have no idea how difficult it is to buy clothing after you have a baby.

 

And then of course, there is always the male bonding trip to the home improvement store.



 

 

Party time

 

And once you've finished all of your must-do tasks, it might be time to relax and enjoy time with family, friends, or on your own.  You could

 

Watch a game or Dr. Who on TV (and have hands free for the clicker, and maybe a snack).

 

Get all of the kids in to the game in time for the opening pitch. 

 

Have a hand to hold your beer at the family barbeque

 

Have 2 hands for getting beer for yourself AND your wife at Octoberfest.

 

Take a look at the map to find the best place to find a beer in Germany

(seriously, that's what his wife says is going on here).



 Or, you could just make your own beer!

  Hmm, that's a lot of beer.  Reminder, always drink responsibly when caring for children. 

Especially if wearing them.  A beer is fine, getting sloshed is not.

 





So, as we can see, while there are lots of things you can do with a baby in arms, sometimes a carrier really allows for activities and outings you couldn't do with baby otherwise.  Give it a try, you might like it!

 

 

Thanks to all of the BWI of DC-MD-VA families who provided pictures for this post.

June Membership Drive!

Hey folks, it's that time again... a membership drive!  This time with a twist.  Usually, we've done membership drives with a little incentive for you.  This time we have incentives all around!  Babywearing International has offered us a month to keep 100% of our dues instead of sending half to the national organization.  This is great for all of us because it speeds up by half the funds needed to purchase new carriers for our library.  That means new carriers for you to borrow can come to us even sooner!

In addition to the incentive for the chapter, every new member (or renewal) for June will be added to a drawing to be held at the end of the month.  We are continuing to add goodies to our drawing, but so far we have
  -  a $25 gift certificate to Abby's Lane, a locally owned carrier and cloth diapering boutique
  - a $25 gift certificate to Bringing Home Baby, a locally owned baby boutique
  - several DIY ring sling kits
  - a homemade doll carrier for your little one to wear his/her dolls/bears
  - a hand knit item TBD

 

Current members who renew their memberships (you can renew early) will receive an additional month of borrowing privileges. So, if you would normally expire in August '13, but you renew now, you will get 13mo from your renewal date, so you will have until Sept '14 to borrow carriers.

 

Now is the perfect time to join BWI of DC-MD-VA!  Show your support, borrow great carriers, and maybe even win fun prizes!

 

You can join at any of our meetings, or for information about joining online, email dcmdva@babywearinginternational.org. 

 

Happy babywearing!

 

 



Beyond Babywearing

As much as I love using baby carriers to wear my boys, I also appreciate that they can be used for other things. For example, when a wiggly toddler doesn't want to be worn, but every cart has broken safety straps, I can tie him in.

Wrap as a shopping cart strap

Or, when you go to a fancy anniversary brunch and it turns out the restaurant doesn't actually have high-chairs, you can create an instant baby-safe seat.

Mei Tai as a high chair

I also discovered that carriers can help support the belly during pregnancy. With baby E., I wrapped my belly starting at 20 weeks to help with my chronic pelvic instability. (Pregnant women may also know this as symphysis pubis dysfunction or pelvic girdle pain. The difference with mine is that it may never go away).

When I was 20 weeks pregnant with baby E., I decided to wrap my belly with a woven wrap to lift and support it and give some compression to my back. I wore the wrap for half the day and a Prenatal Cradle Plus, leftover from my pregnancy with V., for the other half of the day.

A woven wrap is like the sophisticated older brother of the Moby. They both are long pieces of fabric designed to wear a baby, but a woven wrap only stretches on the diagonal which means it gives a much more supportive fit than a stretchy Moby can. Woven wraps are often made by hand or with intricate designs. They have a higher price point, but also have a longer, more versatile life.)

20 week belly--KoKaDi Forest Birds, 4.2m

Verdict: the wrap was more breathable and comfortable than the Prenatal Cradle Plus.

Sometimes I felt rather bold wearing my support outside of my clothes rather than underneath, but it was worth it! 

Zara Black, 4.6m

After this Zara picture, I decided to get the tail around me one more time. Since Zara has long tapers, the top layer ended up creating a panel of farbic that I just pulled down to cover the rest. It lost the pretty, intricate look, but it look more like part of my shirt.

 

 

Want to see how I do this? Here I am 38.5 weeks pregnant, using a Neobulle Simon 4.6m.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpgsaPj9n0

Some women like to do the same kind of thing with a ring sling. Personally, I found that the ring sling could not actually lift the belly or stabilize my pelvis and hips, but it could give some compression to the belly. At the end of my pregnancy, I wanted to coax baby to flip face-down, and out of that pesky occiput posterior position, so I used a ring sling to apply gentle-but-firm pressure my belly. It didn't persuade my little guy to turn, but maybe it will work for some other mama out there.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc48d6NE7wY

 

 

Posted by Pamm

Babywearing through Deployment (and beyond)

As some of you may know, April was the month of the Military Child, in honor of our littlest service members. The ones who didn’t sign the dotted line but are just along for the ride, and unknowingly are their parent’s biggest motivators, both home and away. Many who have talked to me know, a deployment is what really got me in to babywearing. I was interested beforehand, but when my husband left less than two weeks after our first daughter was born, I needed something to keep her close and still be able to get things done. Especially because until we figured out that she had food allergies, she was grumpy a LOT and didn’t want to be put down.

We used babywearing to get us through pretty much everything. Laundry, cooking, eating, traveling
through the airport, grocery shopping, going for walks, and of course, making friends. The best thing
that babywearing ever did for me was bring me to a new group of friends, which has grown and grown with every new duty station, as there are babywearers everywhere! The moms I met in my first
babywearing group, several of whom were also military spouses, were my lifeline. I went to my first
babywearing meeting when my daughter was six weeks old, and they helped guide me through sleeping habits, natural remedies for nursing issues, and through the maze that is food allergies. They helped me find carriers that worked for us by lending out their own at meetings and even to take home, and helped me get her on my back. We spent a lot of time traveling when my husband was gone, as we lived on the opposite side of the country from our families. Thanks to babywearing I was able to check my luggage, wear my daughter on my front, a diaper bag on my back, and navigate the airport hands free all while keeping her safe and close.

We have moved twice with my oldest daughter, who is just under 3, and now have an almost 9 month
old. My husband has been gone since right after Christmas, and if I thought babywearing saved my
sanity last time, this time it has been even moreso. I wear my youngest daughter every single day. We
wear to get household chores done, or to chase the older one around her gymnastics class, or to take a
walk to the playground. It’s really hard to run a double stroller across the street and hold someone’s
hand! I wore her at the beach last week when we went to visit some friends, and my older daughter
wanted to build sand castles and play in the waves. While she can certainly crawl and sit, and even walk a little, I didn’t want her trying to wander off or put anything from the sand in her mouth! Sometimes I’m wearing both of them- the older one is usually too busy to be up for very long, but when she’s sick, tired, or overwhelmed, it’s not uncommon for her to bring me a wrap and ask to go up.

While babywearing has been a lifesaver for me here at home, it has also made a huge difference for my husband when he’s home. After he returned from the last deployment, my daughter recognized him from skype, but still often wanted to be “uppy mama”. We got an Ergo that was supposed to be for me, but my husband used it ALL THE TIME. They spent a lot of time bonding that way- she loved the higher view from his back, and he was able to hold her without fear of dropping her and carry her for long periods of time. When we were moving, and when we were house hunting, usually one of us had her up. We even helped friends move that way!

When I was pregnant with my second daughter I still wore her all the time, but when I was on bedrest and I wasn’t allowed to wear her, she rode on her dad’s back and on her uncle’s quite a bit. My husband was gone for training quite several times last fall, but for when he was home we bought a carrier that he could wear both of our girls in so that he was able to bond with both of them before he left. It’s wonderful knowing that when he gets back in a few months he will be able to pick right back up where he left off, and they will be able to have those moments together again.


Posted by Kit

Editor's note:  Kit has taken her experience with babywearing in a military family and has channeled it into a project providing carriers for veterans, service members, and their families.  To learn more and support The Carrying On Project, visit them on Facebook or at their website.

Take a Hike, Baby!

For as long as I remember, I’ve been a nature-lover. Walks in the woods observing interesting
fauna and flora and hikes to places both familiar and new have been some of my favorite activities since childhood. Before we became parents, my husband and I enjoyed visiting and hiking in national, state and local parks. We’ve never been “hard-core” hikers covering 20-mile trails, but we found pleasure in treks of a few miles.

 

Prior to my son’s birth, I had some knowledge of babywearing, because my parents had worn my older brothers and myself in old-school Snuglis and framepack carriers, and my younger brothers were worn occasionally in the backpack and very frequently in ring slings. I even wore them myself sometimes as a teenager. I didn’t know about mei tais or SSCs or wraps before my son was born, but
I learned about these different carrier types more or less accidentally via the internet and was able to further expand my exposure to carriers and carries when I attended my first babywearing meeting right around my son’s first birthday.

I suppose because we already knew about babywearing, it never occurred to my husband and
I that we would not take our son with us on our outdoor adventures from an early age. When my son
was two months old, he went on his first hike in a mei tai sewn by my mother-in-law and that I learned to use via pictures and instructions I found online. It was about a two-mile roundtrip hike down to a waterfall and back. Given that my son was so young, we had to stop multiple times for diaper changes and to feed him, but it felt so nice to start sharing my love of the outdoors with my infant and to have him close while doing something I enjoyed so much.

 

Over the past three and a half years, babywearing (and toddler-wearing) has made it possible
for us to take our son on hikes in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, to overlooks and waterfalls in
Shenandoah National Park, to gorgeous vistas in the Grand Tetons, past brilliant-blue geothermal
features at Yellowstone National Park, on hikes when visiting our parents, across snow-covered fields, and on many other outings. Wearing him has allowed us not only to carry him much further than he could go on his own but also to keep him safe near overlooks, drop-offs, and scalding hot pools and geysers. As he has grown, he is worn less and less as he builds up stamina (and common sense :-) and becomes a decent little hiker himself. Had it not been for babywearing, had we waited until he was “old enough” to complete hikes on his own, would he be able to hike as far or enjoy the outdoors as much as he does at age 3? Maybe he would; it is hard to say. But even if that were true, we would have missed out on years of sharing close-up experiences with the natural world, and a desire to explore what it has to offer, with our child.

Posted by Genny

Does Babywearing Ruin YOUR posture?

How much do I love shoe shopping? Oh let me count the ways ... size 11 EEE? And nothing drag queen spectacular or orthopedically correct ugly, please. Just normal shoes. Forget it, I'll just go to the men's section...

This is why I only attempt to go shoe shopping once every few years. The rest of the time I limp around in crocs. But the baby, now ten months old, is getting heavier on my back and my feet crying for more support. So I started wandering into shoe stores, baby in a wrap.

In one store the salesman suggested I stand on a digital foot pressure reader, which would map my feet and suggest what sort of inner sole support would correct my feet's ailments. I had used these before with success, so I stepped right on the foot pad reader.

"Er, could you do it without the baby?" the salesman asked.

"Um, no," I replied. "She's usually attached to me this way."

"Oh. Okay." Clear puzzlement in his voice. Why would anyone want a baby glued to their back?

The foot reader made its colorful little map of my feet, and soon a dozen boxes of shoes were brought out for me to try. About halfway through the baby decided she was tired of watching over my shoulder and gave my hair a good hard yank. I quickly unwrapped her, and I took the opportunity to suggest a re-read of my feet without the baby attached to me.

The foot map was practically identical! How much pressure (weight) was different, but it was distributed across my feet the same way, babywearing and not wearing.

The salesman was mystified. How could I be standing the same way, with and without an extra pack, especially a live wiggly one, on my back?

"It means this is a good carrier," I suggested. "My posture is the same; I don't have to compensate with my balance when I am carrying my baby."

I left the salesman pondering this as I happily walked out with several pairs of not-too-ugly shoes, including a pair from the sale rack that complemented the colors of my wrap. However I was happy beyond the shoes. I knew my feet were happy carrying the baby because my balance was the same whether I was carrying her or not. I may be functioning on mommy brain, but by wrapping my baby I did not need to re-learn how to walk!