Before your little bundle of joy arrives, make sure you're well-prepared for the cost of expanding your family. Bringing your baby home should be a time of joy, without the financial stress of becoming new parents. As the old saying goes, if you wait until you can afford kids you'll never have them. But you must be ably to cover basic expenses.

Preparing for baby

During the waiting period, much excitement and attention is placed on choosing names, the perfect pram, a nursery color scheme, baby furniture and myriad of clothes and fluffy toys.

However too often the planning stops there and little thought is given to the family finances. This is a major problem. Managing your money is even more crucial when you have the responsibility of a child. If you have an expensive month and need to live on water and white rice for a few days until pay day, it won't kill you. But a baby can't wait a few days for formula, new nappies or other baby stuff.

Microwave ovens pose a serious safety hazard to young children, a new study of scald burn injuries demonstrates.

Hot foods or liquids from microwave ovens were the fourth leading cause of scald injuries in children under 5 years old, a review of records from the University of Chicago Burn Center shows.

"Parents do need to teach their toddlers and their older children that the microwave is a potential source of danger as much as the stove is," Dr. Gina Lowell of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, one of the researchers on the study, told Reuters Health.

Pregnant women who are part of an Asian-white couple face an increased risk of gestational diabetes as compared with couples in which both partners are white, according to a new study from Lucile Packard Children's Hospital and the Stanford University School of Medicine.

The researchers also found that Asian women whose partners are white are more likely than white women with Asian or white partners to have a caesarean delivery, as part of a broad analysis of perinatal outcomes among Asian, white and Asian--white couples.

The study will be published in the October issue of American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. The findings, the authors say, could benefit clinicians working with an increasingly diverse patient population.