I know I have mentioned it before & I think I have posted pictures on my blog, but I am a huge fan of swaddling. Both of my girls loved to be swaddled & I swear that is one of the reasons we were able to sleep train them so well at an early age & why they are still good sleepers today :) However, Sophie started getting very active about a month ago, so I knew we would have to teach her how to sleep unswaddled soon. I can already tell she is going to be more feisty than Sadie. The minute Sophie started rolling she has became a busy body. I can hardly keep her in her car seat anymore unless she is strapped in because the girls tries to wiggle her way out! Sweet Sadie has never been a climber. Still to this day, she has to ask me to pick her up every where we go. And she has no idea she can get out of her crib - she just lays in there like she can't get out. I have a feeling Sophie will be jumping from couch to couch & climbing out of her crib before I am ready!
Since the day we brought her home from the hospital, we started swaddling her in this:
I never liked swaddling her with a blanket because that never worked - I needed the blanket with the Velcro for extra reinforcement! We used to wrap her up tight & call her our little burrito :)
Once she got to big for this (& to active - she could break the Velcro & unswaddle herself) we moved her on to the next best thing:
I probably started using this blanket about a month or so ago. It is a halo sack that zips up so you can still swaddle them tight on top, but they have more room towards the bottom. The first time I did it, I let her arms stick out of the holes & then I swaddled her but that didn't work & she became unswaddled right away. So I had to literally zip her up so the only thing you could see was her head & that cute little face! Then I would swaddle her nice & tight. This worked pretty good but for the past couple of weeks she has been waking up occasionally grunting & trying to do her best to break out of there. Especially when she started rolling both directions. And technically, the blanket says to stop using it once your child can roll. So I did the next best thing I could think of & I moved her to a traditional halo sack:
This way you can zip up their body & have their arms sticking out of the arm holes so they are kind of in a little "womb" but not swaddled tight like they were. She has been napping in this for the past 2 weeks & her naps had been ok. She wasn't sleeping as good as she was before totally swaddled, but she was still able to go 3-4 hours straight without me having to go in there to mess with her. I was still swaddling her the old way at night because honestly I was scared we would have a bad night & not get any sleep!
Finally, I was lazy yesterday afternoon & I didn't have this halo sack with me, so I put her down for a nap with no blanket - I just laid her down like normal in regular clothes & it was the best nap she has had in a while! She would wake up occasionally & roll around, but since she wasn't constricted she could move freely & would pull her feet up & play with her toes. I told Bryan I had a gut feeling that I just had to try the same thing when she went to bed last night & low & behold my patience had worked - she slept 11 hours straight totally unswaddled & we didn't have to go up to her room at all during that time! And when she woke up this morning, she was as happy as she could be, rolling around & playing with her toes again:
I had been so nervous to go through this process with Sophie because it was harder for her to go from swaddled to unswaddled than it was for Sadie. And it's a tricky situation because she is such a good sleeper & I didn't want to mess up her mojo! But I am happy to report that we are officially finished with all swaddle blankets in this house so that will be one less piece of laundry to do & one less item to travel with :)
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