Evaporated milk, boiled water and Karo Syrup. No, it’s not the ingredients for a new smoothie. It’s a recipe for baby formula that my late mother-in-law Carmen used when bottle feeding my husband Mike in 1949. I found it on a list of baby “to-dos” when sifting through a box of Carmen’s personal papers. Mike and I had a good laugh over the formula recipe. In today’s world, Karo syrup and evaporated milk wouldn’t pass muster as a healthy brew for a baby.
For some reason, breastfeeding went out of fashion post-WWII, and I guess commercial formulas weren’t developed yet. On a list of questions Carmen wrote down to ask her doctor was: “Should I get pills to dry up my milk supply?” The doc’s reply, jotted in the margin: “Husband can get.” That gave Mike and me another laugh. You had to know my father-in-law, Jack, to understand our reaction. Remember the TV show All in the Family? Carmen asking Jack to get those pills would be akin to Edith asking Archie to buy her sanitary napkins! Carmen’s doctor obviously didn’t know Mike’s dad. Thankfully Mike thrived on the Karo concoction, as he recently turned 76.
Times keep changing, and every generation of new parents gets an updated list of rules governing baby and mother care.
Carmen was told to bathe Mike’s bellybutton with rubbing alcohol and dust it with boric acid powder several times a day for at least ten days. Ouch!
If Mike’s skin was dry, a slathering of mineral oil was recommended. Today, that’s considered unsafe. Hello? Mineral oil equals a pore-clogging petroleum by-product.
Another thing that struck me was Mike’s rigid feeding schedule. Feed the Karo concoction at 6 a.m., 9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m., 6 p.m., 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. At 10 days old, drop the 2 a.m. feeding and no feeding needed past 10:30 p.m. after two weeks. Add in strained orange juice at six weeks, cod liver oil at seven weeks and cereal at four months. Eventually add in solid foods, but only on a prescribed schedule. No wonder Mike is the most organized man I’ve ever known!
New parents today are taught to lay their newborns on their backs for sleeping and put nothing else in the crib but baby. I laid my babies on their stomachs right away, installed ‘bumpers’ on the side of their cribs and put so many stuffed animals in their beds there was hardly room for a baby. My boys were very attached to sleeping with their baby ‘blankies’. How do tiny tots in 2025 get to sleep without cozying up to a tattered smelly blanket?
Young moms today would be jealous of Carmen’s postpartum self-care schedule. A 10-day hospital stay was average then. Total bed rest was called for during the first three days. On days three and four, Carmen could get out of bed for two hours. On the fifth day post-partum, she could get up for meals and lay on her stomach for 30 minutes. At 10 days: start exercising, knees-to-chest reps for five minutes. No stairs for three weeks.
Of course, Carmen had questions that new mothers always worry over. What to do for colic? How do I know when he’s hungry? Too cold? Too hot? Can I bind him too tight?
Binding dropped off the baby-care “to-do” list in my generation, but swaddling, aka binding, is back with a vengeance. “Don’t let baby Lilly work her arms out, Grammy!”
Babies just keep coming, and parenting rules of engagement keep changing, but somehow most of us survive our parents and make it to adulthood.
Here’s to all the moms and dads, past and present, who fumbled in their duties now and then, but always followed baby-care rule number one: to love us.
