[BLKNSLVR]

Man, SIDS. It's specifically non-specific, but the worry it causes is quite specific.

My daughter, as a baby, always managed to find a way to sleep on her stomach. Wouldn't sleep on her back, but almost magically by comparison would fall asleep lying on her stomach (face to one side or the other, not straight down, obviously - I hope). We tried various combinations of devices, arrangements of pillows and cushions, tight wraps, to keep her lying on her back, but babies are remarkably, if involuntarily, wilful (or she was, anyway, and remains to this day).

I worry about very few things, but for the first few nights we'd regularly get up to check on her, and literally be holding our breath waiting for her to expel hers.

Out of necessity the every-parents-SIDS-fear, from allowing the baby to sleep on their stomach, had to be removed from our psyche so that we could continue to function day-to-day.

Said baby is now, thankfully, a semi-healthily functional teenager. As functional as teenagers get anyway :)

[mindslight]

I swear, all the shit they push at new parents. You can see the point to much of it, and it's obviously going to be a very stressful time regardless. But there's the same inescapable bureaucratic dynamic where once something becomes legible, the system pathologically emphasizes those few bits over and over and over, to the detriment of balanced judgement - both your own and most healthcare providers if you try to get some nuance out of them.

It's understandable that they're trying to help the people who might not be the most competent at following the guidelines, because there is still harm reduction to be had there. But it pushes the instruction-followers into the territory of "well, this probably doesn't apply to us because XXX", which is an epistemologically terrible place to be.

We're still joking about how much they repeated the advice to keep the belly button dry, when it was relevant for like maybe two whole weeks.

[globalnode]

during covid they actually laid hospital patients face down (suspended i think?) to help with breathing when a ventilator wasnt available. this behaviour reminds me of that, perhaps your baby was doing this to help with breathing? i dont know...