By Hannah Schenker
Newborn babies are so super gorgeous – with their tiny little squishy faces, scrumptious fingers and toes and the smell…it’s enough to make your ovaries ache. There is plenty to love and adore about them, even if all they seem to do is eat, poop and sleep. But there are also plenty of strange and interesting things about them you may not have heard before.
Here are 10 fascinating things about newborns:
- A baby’s eyes are 75% the size of an adults. That’s right – they ARE huge! But, their vision is far from perfect, only around 20/400. They should reach 20/20 vision by about six months of age. Until around 3 months, though, they can really only see things up to 8 or 9 inches away from them – about the distance of your face to theirs when you’re breastfeeding (and means they can also focus on their own hands)! (source)
- The word “noggin” is actually the term for the protein that keeps a baby’s skull from fusing. (source: Morris, Desmond. 2008. Amazing Baby. Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books).
- Babies grow a mustache in the womb. You heard me right: a mustache! About four months in, they form this crazy little mustache (which is actually really fine hair), which spreads over the rest of their body too. This hairy suit, called lanugo, is actually shed by the baby one strand at a time either before or after birth. (source)
- Babies can sleep with their eyes open. Yes, all that eye rolling and gurgling after a nice feed could in fact be sleep. (source)
- Babies don’t have real kneecaps. They have cartilage, rather than bone in their knees. They don’t actually fully develop until between ages 3-5 years, when the cartilage should have ossified into actual bone. (source)
