To Swaddle or Not to Swaddle.....that is the question!



My Sleeping Burrito!

 Who knew that my Son's desire to have his arms pinned tightly to his side while he sleeps would lead to our first parental "what should we do" struggle?  We spent every night up until about 2 months swaddling him extra tight with blankets.  Ronnie actually got really good at it and I would say he is a swaddling pro.  After about 2 months he started to get really good at getting out and this would lead him to wake up.   We found another must have baby product: (so far my list is Moby and....) Halo 2-in-1 sleep sacks!  This genious product is a warm cozy wearable blanket with "bat wings" that can do the arm pinning for you!   We used our size small sleepsacks until Logan was 5 months and his feet were starting to stretch out the bottom.  Finding the next size up was challenging.  Maybe kids aren't supposed to be swaddled this long thoughts started nagging me.  We decided to try leaving him unswaddled for a night to see what would happen.  He fell asleep fine, but woke up at about 10pm because he punched himself with his free hands.  Being back at work and not strong enough to miss any precious sleep we immediately swaddled him and he slept through the night.  About a month later I had a three day weekend so I decided that it was time to just bite the bullet and go cold-turkey with the swaddle.  I resigned myself to losing some sleep.  The first night he woke up again at 10pm (oh dear, are we going to go back to waking every 3 hours again???) but after about 10 minutes of watching him squirm in the monitor he FELL BACK ASLEEP for the rest of the night!  The next night he slept through the night!  Success....the first weaning experience was over!  We packed up the well-loved swaddle sacks with a feeling of pride.  I have now come to realize that while we stress over many different decisions  (pacifer, thumb, bottles, food, etc.) we are going to have to wean our children off of a few habits over their lifetime no matter how thoughtfully we make these choices.