Every mother thinks they know what is best for ALL babies in the ENTIRE world. I am no exception. I've been a mother for a whopping 4 months, and here I am giving my expert opinion on what I think other mothers must have. Maybe you have a baby like mine though: a short ninja baby who sleeps more like a manic floppy fish out of water, than like a baby. In that case, you will NEED what I have.
Swaddles:
We've tried them ALL.
First, we had the Halo Sleep Sack/Swaddle.
(By the way, this is not my baby)
Sorry to say, I hated this one. We have the shortest baby, which is weird because neither Carl nor I are all that short. Della has been hovering around the 5th-10th percentile in height since she was born. She is très petite, and the newborn sized Halo Sleep Sack/Swaddle was just too much for her. Kind of hard to explain, but there was too much extra fabric in the sleep sack part, so when we swaddled her it would bunch up in the middle by her face. During the night, no matter how tight we swaddled it (which we couldn't get it as tight as possible because of all the extra fabric) she would shimmy all the way down in the sack and it would end up covering her mouth and nose. HATED that. Drove me insane and it scared me every time I woke up to find just her little eyes peering out at me over the swaddle.
We also have a Miracle Blanket.
(again, not my baby. )
I liked it because the fabric is lightweight and it has arm cuffs, so you can pin your baby’s arms down so well that it would take a miracle for baby to breakout of this thing. This would work well for the criminally insane. However, it takes a very patient and calm baby to get them strapped in. If you have a baby like mine, who fights bedtime, fights the swaddle, thinks she fights crime, and definitely fights sleep...then this will NOT work. Della's limbs are always moving very rapidly. The upside of that is she has fantastic looking abs and great upper body strength. The downside is we could never get her in this complicated apparatus fast enough before t-minus meltdown happened. We needed something simpler.
My favorite swaddle in all of swaddleland is the Summer Infant Swaddleme.
It met all my requirements. No extra bulky fabric, simple enough to get a Tasmanian baby into, good enough for short baby-folk. The only thing that scared me is that she could, and would, easily breakout of it. I was nervous that she would break free, and then grab the swaddle and bring it up to her face (like she does with everything she can get her hands on) and cover her nose and mouth with it. I'm paranoid like that.
SO, we also bought this Summer Infant Swaddle Pod that we zip up over the Swaddleme.
(also not my baby. This baby looks like she enjoys sleeping too much to be mine)
This way she is double swaddled. If she breaks out of one, she is still trapped in the other one. And to date, she hasn't found a way to unzip herself from the swaddle pod. She can, however, fit her tiny fists up through the neck of it and punch herself in the chin. Resulting in a wide awake baby. That's why we have to keep double-swaddling. Two layers of protection. That's always been my motto.
(my baby.)
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