***Amazing FACTS About Newborn Babies***

  1. Young babies are born with a well-developed sense of taste, but not for salt. Studies show that babies can’t taste salt until they’re about four months old. They can taste other flavors as well as adults can, especially sweet, bitter, and sour flavors (which might explain all the “baby tastes lemon” videos on YouTube), and maybe even better: some studies indicate that babies actually have more taste buds than adults do.
  2. Newborns cry an awful lot, but they can’t shed tears: they don’t have functional “tear” ducts until they’re between three and twelve weeks old. (They can, however, produce “basal tears,” the non-emotional tears we produce constantly to keep our eyes moist.)
  3. If you X-ray a baby’s legs, you likely won’t see anything where the kneecaps should be, or if you do, it’ll just be small, smudgy spots. Reason: all bones start off as cartilage, and they harden, or ossify, over time. Kneecaps take an especially long time to form (from three to five years) and because cartilage doesn’t show up on X-rays, babies appear to have no kneecaps.

 

That lack of hard kneecaps is a good thing, because the spongy tissue serves to absorb some of the abuse toddlers take during their crawling months and from their frequent falls.

  1. As we told you earlier, newborn babies cannot taste salt, but they can taste other flavors, and they can taste those flavors while they’re still in the womb, starting from about four or five months into pregnancy. Amniotic fluid is believed to be affected by the food the expectant mother eats, which, in turn, is believed to affect a baby’s flavor preferences after birth. If a pregnant mom eats a lot of garlicky foods, for example, the baby will taste that in her amniotic fluid in the womb, and will have a good chance of being drawn to garlic-flavored foods after birth.