A swaddle that works!!

I think the reason my little one is now getting so much sleep at night is because of the swaddle.

Swaddling is a fine art - one we were never able to properly master. That's why we cheat and have a pre-made swaddle. For those uninitiated in swaddling, it's basically the act of wrapping your child up like a burrito. In fact, it's exactly like making a burrito. You pull one side of the blanket over them, pull up the bottom and wrap the otherside. Voila - baby burrito.

Our problem in the beginning is that we were too gentle with our little burrito. We didn't want to make the swaddle too tight. Even though every time the nurses in the hospital brought her back to us after a night in the nursery she was wrapped so tight her eyes were popping out (not really, but it was pretty tight).

Soon we learned, a loose swaddle is no swaddle at all. We started trying to get it as tight as we could, but we were no match for our daughter. We dubbed her Houdini (she has lots of nicknames, as you can tell) for her amazing ability to break any swaddle in less than a minute.

We would be so proud after getting her wrapped up in her burrito, only to see that defiant fist pop out 45 seconds later. Once the first fist was out, it was all over. Within 30 more seconds she was laying with the blanket spread around her, legs kicking in the air triumphantly.

Hence the cheater swaddle. At Babies R Us (you can get ANYTHING at Babies R Us) they sell predone swaddles that use velcro to bind them up, for lack of a better description. She can't break it. Well, either that or she doesn't want to. It's probably more of the latter. But she actually seems to like it now. And the swaddle is green, so she looks like a little pea pod with a baby head on top. No more Houdini!