After waiting nine months to hold your precious baby in your arms, you may be surprised.
Your baby, while beautiful, may look nothing like the infants you have seen in those magazines and childbirth books you’ve been pouring over for the past several months.
Most of the pictures you see of “newborns†are actually babies who are several weeks old.
If you do not know what a normal newborn looks like, you may become concerned.
In this series of posts, we will share with you information about how normal newborns can look so you will know what to expect.
The largest part of your newborn’s body is her head. Fitting that large head through your pelvic bones can take time, and work.
The bones in your baby’s head are designed to safely shift so that she can pass through your pelvis. This is called molding, and this is why some infants are born with unusually shaped heads.
While these cone-shaped heads can be alarming to look at, they are perfectly normal, and usually resolve within a few days after birth.
This tends to be less of an issue with babies born by Caesarean section since they typically do not have to adapt to the birth canal.
Your baby will continue to have “soft spots†on her head for months to come. Do not press on these areas. Your doctor will check your baby’s head during routine well-baby exams to make sure bone development is proceeding as it should.
