Rensselaer Union, Volume 8, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 September 1875 — Baby’s Clothes. [ARTICLE]

Baby’s Clothes.

After baby begins to walk the trial which falls to the proud young mother’s lot is neither light nor uncommon. If she be., only tolerably familiar with the laws of life and health there is a constant warfare going on in her mind between the pretty costumes of the child and her reasonable and natural solicitude about its health. If it is a plump and vigorous child, she loims to-exhibit- its dimpled neck, arms and legs to the general public, and she generally strikes a balance by showing the legs. Now every baby’s feet should be kept warm, and a tender child’s especially, and yet these extremities are seldom properly clothed. Bare legs will not do for our climate. If our children do not die of tin's exposure they are likely to become feeble in growth, and die before middle life, except in rare instances. Not only are the lower extremities too much exposed, but the throat and chest are usually too heavily clothed, and the little creature tugs and toils with the weight and fettering- of handsome wrappings until the perspiration starts freely, _ apd weariness overtakes It. With an ignorance in no way greater than its mother’s vanity or inconsiderateness, it insists upon a rest. It gets it, of course, and also the croup, or congestion, or fever, each more or less intensified according to the child’s constitution and' temporary conditions. Sensible mothers will dress their children in long stockings that have more or less warmth, according to their temperament and the temperature of the air they are to. breathe. Their hands should be carefully warmed in winter, and their chests and necks properly wrapped, but not bundled. When self-forgetful tenderness is the prampting-jnotive jn--selpcting pretty clothes for the baby, apd the ideal of the mother corresponds to the demands of nature, the little creatures will be prettier, because rosier; the costumes that they wear will be as tasteful and carefully made, and the world will get a race of stronger, and consequently better, men and women, whose foreheads will be wider and brains clearer; and then a higher standard of intellectual culture will dawn upon our country. Then there will be fewer little graves among the green grasses that grow in the gardens of the dead; fewer Rachels weeping lamenting because their children are not.— The Metropolitan.