Branch Events May 2014

Bumps, Babies and Beyond

Friday 2nd  10 - 11.30am

Methodist Church Hall
Chapel Street
Ely
(Map)
FREE ENTRY including refreshments and home-made cakes.

The usual toys and craft activities will be available for babies and toddlers. Breastfeeding and bottle feeding welcome. Parking available in St Mary's Street car park. Entrance to the church hall is through the blue gate at the back of the car park.

This month's special guest will be the Cambridgeshire Baby and Toddler Feeding Clinic. 
On Wednesday 30th April Cambridgeshire Baby and Toddler Feeding Clinic will open on a weekly basis to provide free information and advice for parents and carers. Come along at 10am to the Tillage Hall in Waterbeach if you are concerned about breast feeding, bottle feeding, tube feeding, colic or reflux, tongue tie, gagging and choking, weaning, fussy or restricted diets. The clinic is open for any babies and toddlers up to the age of 24 months. It is run by Sarah Oakley, Lactation Consultant, Tongue-Tie Practitioner and Health Visitor; Mags Kirk, Speech and Language Therapist and Moraig Goodwin, Osteopath.
Mags Kirk and Moraig Goodwin will be at Bumps, Babies and Beyond to answer questions you may have about feeding and to give you advice. There will be some brief demonstrations of techniques you can use to help with your child's feeding development.

Open Houses

Wednesday 7th 9.30-11.30am

At Nancy's house in Aldreth

Friday 16th 10.30-12pm

At Katy's house in Ely

Monday 19th 9.30-11.30am

At Emma's house in Ely

Thursday 29th 9.30-11.30am
At Sian's house in Soham

Evolutionary theory on why babies wake their mothers in the night

A leading evolutionary biologist has put forward the theory that an infant’s tendency to wake up in the night may have been a Darwinian tactic to make mothers breastfeed more, thus reducing their fertility and limiting the number of siblings that will be born, which in turn improved a child’s chances of survival.

Breastfeeding acts as a natural contraceptive during the first six months after birth, stopping women from menstruating. Encouraging the effect would have been beneficial for our ancestors, because the fewer siblings one had, the more competition there would be for scarce resources, and the lower the risk of infectious disease spreading, argues Professor David Haig, of Harvard University.

Read more: Babies evolved to wake new mothers in the middle of the night as a survival tactic, claims Harvard biologist The Independent 10/4/14

Mother's pregnancy diet affects baby's food preferences

Julie Mennella of the Monell Chemical Senses Centre in Philadelphia says, "amniotic fluid is a complex 'first food' that contains chemicals that have both tastes and smells."

Pity the poor participants in this experiment carried out by Mennella. They had to sniff a bunch of amniotic fluid samples, and apparently had no trouble identifying the womb juice that had been extracted from women who had taken a garlic capsule 45 minutes before. All flavours tested so far, says Mennella, have been detectable in the fluid, including mint, aniseed, carrot and vanilla.

Another experiment by Mennella involved one group of mothers drinking 300ml of carrot juice four days a week for three weeks during the last trimester of pregnancy, a second group doing the same during the first two months of breastfeeding, and a control group giving carrot juice a wide berth altogether. The babies who tasted high concentrations of carrot in utero and in their mother's milk went on to happily eat more carrot during weaning. According to Peter Hepper, director of the Fetal Research Centre at Queen's University in Belfast: "foetuses exposed to garlic in the womb are more likely to prefer garlic in later life, indeed studies show up to the age of eight at least."

Read more: How a child's food preferences begin in the womb from The Guardian 8/4/14