It was the back of his knees that did it.
Finn’s four months old now and he’s at that stage where he kicks like he’s trying to escape a burning building every time you change him. So I’m sat on the bedroom floor on Saturday night, wrestling him into a sleepsuit while Eilidh had a bath (her first proper one in about a week, I was under strict instructions not to knock), and I noticed the skin behind his knees was a bit… off. Not angry looking. Just rough. Like the back of my hand after a week of winter jobs with no gloves.
I ran my thumb over it and it felt like fine sandpaper. The rest of his leg was that daft soft baby skin you can’t stop touching. That bit wasn’t.
So obviously I did what any calm, sensible father does. I googled it at 11pm and got myself in a right state.
Here’s what nobody really warned me about. Baby skin is all over the place. Finn’s had the lot already. Spots on his face at about three weeks that the midwife called baby acne (I didn’t know babies could get acne, I thought that was a Year 9 thing). Cradle cap, which made him look like he’d been dipped in cornflakes. Flaky wrists in the first fortnight. Red cheeks every time he’s been crying, which some days is most of the day.
So when something new turns up you’ve no idea whether it’s a thing or just Tuesday.
What I’ve picked up since, mostly from our health visitor and a bit from a paediatrician in a Netmums piece Eilidh sent me, is that with eczema it’s less about one big obvious sign and more about the skin just being different from the skin round it. Rougher. Flakier. Sometimes a wee bit raised. Sometimes red, but not always, and on darker skin the redness can be a lot harder to see, so how it feels matters more. If you run your finger over it and it’s a different texture altogether, that’s worth paying attention to.
And the places to check are the places you’d never think to look. Behind the knees. The inside of the elbows. Behind the ears. Anywhere that gets wet and stays wet, which for us means under his chins (plural, he’s a big lad) where all the milk and drool ends up. The NHS page says it’s common on the face in babies too, which explained a lot about his cheeks.
I’d been looking at that face every single day for four months and never once properly looked behind his ears. Is that just me? I’d have told you I knew every inch of him. Turns out I knew the front.
What we actually did
On the Monday Eilidh rang the health visitor and we got seen that week. She had a look, said it looked like mild eczema, which she sees loads of apparently, and went through the basics with us. None of it was dramatic, which after my late night Google session was a massive relief.
The big one is moisturising. Not a wee dab now and then, properly, at least twice a day, and you keep going even once it looks better. The GP prescribed an emollient (that’s just the medical word for a moisturiser, I had to ask) and we do it after his bath and again in the morning. You smooth it on the way the hair grows rather than rubbing it in hard. And you get it out of the tub with a clean spoon, not your fingers, so you’re not putting germs in it. I’d have been straight in with my fingers, no question.
The other stuff we’ve changed:
- Baths are shorter and just warm, not hot. We used to let him float about for ages because he loves it. Now it’s more in, wash, out.
- No soap or bubble bath. You wash him with the emollient instead.
- We switched to a gentle, fragrance free washing powder. I did the big shop that week and stood in the aisle in Asda for ten minutes reading the backs of boxes like I was revising for an exam.
- Cotton sleepsuits, and we’ve stopped bundling him up like he’s off to the Arctic. Getting too hot makes the itching worse. It’s baltic in Dundee right now so this goes against every instinct I’ve got.
- Nails kept short. Finn has the claws of a wee raptor and I swear they grow back overnight. Scratch mitts on at night.
One thing the health visitor was really clear on, and the NHS says the same, is don’t start cutting things out of his diet (or Eilidh’s, since she’s breastfeeding) off your own back. Talk to the GP first. I only mention it because the internet is full of people who are very sure dairy is behind everything, and at midnight that stuff is weirdly convincing.
When to stop googling and ring someone
I’m an electrician, not a doctor, so I’m not going to pretend I know more than I do. But the NHS is pretty clear on when you get it looked at quickly: if the skin is weeping, crusty, blistered or has spots full of pus, if it’s swollen, sore or warm to the touch, if it suddenly gets a lot worse, or if your baby has a temperature or just doesn’t seem right in themselves. For a wee one under five you can ring 111 if you can’t get hold of the GP.
Even for the mild stuff though, just ask. Health visitors have seen it a hundred times. Ours didn’t make me feel daft at all, even when I asked if it was because I’d used my own shower gel on him once back in week two. (She said probably not. It’s not happening again, put it that way.)
Three weeks on and the backs of his knees feel nearly normal. The bit behind his left ear comes and goes. His cheeks still go red when he’s raging about something, but that’s just Finn having opinions.
The funny thing is it’s made bath time better. Those five minutes of cream afterwards, with him lying on the towel kicking and grinning at the ceiling, have turned into my bit of the evening. Eilidh gets ten minutes to herself and I get my wee man covered in cream like a buttered roll. I’m not going to get soppy about it. But I look forward to it more than the football now, and I never thought I’d say that.
So that’s us. If you’ve got a baby with dodgy skin and you’re lying awake reading forums, go and check behind the ears, book the health visitor, and then try and get some sleep. And if you want to chat to other dads who’ve been through it, the Dadsnet community is full of them. Plenty of them are up at 3am anyway.
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