Freedom!!!

As many of you know Julia has been swaddled when she sleeps basically since Day 1.  She had a very strong startle reflex that caused her to flail her arms and basically slap herself awake whenever she tried to sleep.  So we swaddled.  At first we swaddled tightly with a regular muslin blanket and I have to say that Andrew was much better at this than I was.  I would cringe as he cinched the blankets around her but inevitably she would stop crying and calmly (relatively speaking) go to sleep.  Then as Julia became more active and stronger we had to up the ante in order to keep her swaddled.  Who knew what a market exists for different swaddle blankets promising to keep your little one wrapped tight?!?

We began using a SwaddleMe blanket which uses velcro to keep the flaps secure and tight.  Then, as Julia learned to wiggle her hands out of that, we used the SwaddleMe and a regular muslin swaddle blanket on top of it.  We drew the line at using a blanket that is basically a straight jacket for babies; especially since the one time we did use it, we picked up Julia to discover that her attempts to escape had ended in her arms at very strange angles that would have caused permanent damage if babies weren’t made of elastic. 

Well, our swaddling essentially ended last Friday night when Julia expertly escaped every attempt we made to keep her wrapped.  We would wrap her and within 30 seconds there would be a hand peeking out the top of the blanket, her little fingers making a beeline for her mouth and her eyes looking at us with an expression that clearly said, “I win.”  We tried again on Saturday and Sunday to get her swaddled believing that there was no way she would be able to sleep soundly without it.  Especially as we had both done a lot of reading of others’ horrifying experiences of trying to unswaddle their babies and ending up with many, many sleepless nights until success was achieved. 

But on Monday we decided to bite the bullet and attempt “free sleep” that night.  We reasoned that we were just putting off the inevitable and at least, if we had a week of not sleeping, we are going to Charlottesville to visit Andrew’s parents this weekend and could at least get a few hours of napping in while Julia visits with her grandparents.  So we began.  Monday morning the nap was a complete failure.  I tried for 2 hours to get her to sleep and it resulted in a total of five minutes of nap time.  Monday afternoon I had more success, it took a half hour to get her to sleep but she slept with all her limbs free for 45 minutes (a long nap for her!).  Then came Monday night; the initial getting to sleep process took about an hour and a half and then…. silence.  She slept.  We heard her wake up a couple of times and were on eggshells waiting for the crying to start.  Instead we heard slurping – she found those fingers!  She nursed at midnight, had a brief period of wakefulness at 2am when she was flailing around and couldn’t get her fingers into her mouth and needed to be soothed and then slept again until 5:30.  Last night was similar, two nursing session and a little bit of settling required but that’s not different, and in the case of many nights, better than her previous sleeping. 

So we are cautiously calling this a success!  And all the grandparents should be delighted that all of Julia’s fingers and toes will be on open display for all sleeping periods going forward!