Head shape

Do you know how heavy baby's head is?

Normally it's hard to figure out the difference, but when you try to pick up a sleeping baby, you can feel the actual weight. It almost feels like lifting a heavy iron ball with tiny limbs attached to it.

:-)

Apparently, head shape forms for about one year after birth and it keeps changing throughout. Thanks to all that weight, it's very easy to develop flat surfaces on skull. After about one month, we noticed that she has developed a slight flattening on the right hand side. May be it was due to our sleeping position (I used to sleep on her right side). She developed habit of tilting her head slightly towards right while sleeping. Due to her curly hair that flattening was not easily visible. It could be seen only while bathing her. But Mom warned me about it.

It seems severe flattening translates into Plagiocephaly. And only workaround is to keep changing sleeping positions.

So I had to work hard on making sure that she was not resting her head on the same flat spot. We used change sleeping positions, beds and even bedrooms. It's interesting the number of ways one can sleep on the bed.
:-)

Tough part was to keep her head from sliding back to the original position. Since the flat surface was easy to rest on, she used to move and adjust her head to go back to the old position very often. No matter what I did, she used to tilt her head in her sleep after a while.

I spent numerous sleepless nights positioning her head on her left side. I tried to keep some stuffing on one side, so that she would have to rest her head on her left side. But that usually used to make her uncomfortable after a while. So the only option was to keep adjusting the head position as often as possible. But it's easier said than done. It was more difficult, since adjusting her head position usually used to wake her up.

:-(

Thankfully, after rigorous re-positioning for last two months, her head is back to it's round shape now.

:-)