Burritos No More
After six full months of sleeping immobilized in their Miracle Blankets (following several months of immobilized sleep in the womb), Eloise and Julian are now both swaddle-weaned at night. (We are still swaddling them for naps. We’re a little bit afraid of what will happen if we stop. Experiments thus far have not been promising.)
Now that they can move around, we can’t have blankets in their cribs anymore, even the tightly tucked ones that we used to use. So we’ve transitioned to wearable blankets, which are vest/sack/gown things that give them a little extra warmth. We have a few fleece ones, but as the weather was getting warmer I started eying these great Aden and Anais muslin ones. I had it in the back of my mind to pick up a couple the next time we made it down to Bellani Maternity, when lo and behold a package of six-month “birthday” gifts arrived from our friends Julia and Jeff in Portland, Oregon, containing — among other things — two muslin sleep sacks!
Julia and Jeff are our “twin twins,” because Julia and I were due on the same day (among other eerie commonalities). Their adorable kids, Ben and Elly, were born one week before Julian and Eloise, and it has been great fun to follow the development of all four of them. Eloise and Elly have been showing uncanny similarities…we’re a little bit nervous about what will happen when we allow those two little firecrackers meet in person.
Anyway, now that Julian and Eloise are unswaddled, they are entertaining us by the degree to which they move around the cribs in their sleep. The other night I heard discordant music playing over the monitor and went up to discover that both had simultaneously kicked on the mobiles in their cribs (they continued to sleep peacefully through the cacophony). Julian can sleep-rotate himself 180 degrees in a matter of minutes. I check on them much more frequently now because I’m curious to see what funny spots they’ve scootched themselves into. (I am easily entertained.)
Another mini-milestone passed.
Filed under Baby Stuff | Tags: sleep, swaddle | Comments (3)Update
Eloise, our little firecracker, has slept in her crib all night un-swaddled for the past three nights! Yes, she’s still woken up crying several times in the night, but we haven’t had to go in there, and she’s put herself to sleep each time. I can’t tell you how proud we are.
(It’s easy to take for granted our little Julian who continues to sleep blissfully through the night, unperturbed by all of the activity in the crib next to him. We think he’ll actually be more of a challenge to wean from the swaddle, but for now he’s content, and so are we.)
Thanks also for all of the helpful suggestions of rainy-day activities. I’m hoping the weather will just be completely awesome for the rest of the spring and summer so I won’t have to use any of them, but in the unlikely event that it, you know, rains in Providence during April and May, I’ll give them a shot.
Filed under Parenting | Tags: eloise, julian, sleep, swaddle | Comments (4)It Goes On
Today we continued along the path to solid foods, introducing the more conventional rice cereal. Rice cereal is… weird. It looks like instant mashed potatoes, and when mixed with formula is, if possible, less appetizing. Eloise was not impressed with the special of the day, but Julian contentedly nommed it down. Tomorrow we’re going with applesauce. (And yes, yes, I know you’re “supposed” to wait 3-4 days before introducing each new food, but I just can’t, in good conscience, keep shoveling this bland mush into their mouths. If they like the applesauce, we’ll settle on that for a few days.)
The other thing going on is our continuing struggles with sleep. I meant to write a long, detailed post on our adventures with sleep training (and may yet, if I find the time and you, dear reader, express an interest) but the short version is that we went with Dr. Ferber. Julian has never really been a problem in terms of sleeping through the night, but we needed to get Eloise down to a single wake-up to feed, and we’re still working on getting them to nap reliably during the day.
About a week and a half ago we decided to eliminate Eloise’s final night feeding, and that’s been something of a battle. Even though she should be able to sleep through the night without eating, she emphatically does not want to, and is not shy about expressing her displeasure, loudly, at 4:00 in the morning. The last two nights have seen me spending those gray hours between 4:00 and 7:00 sitting in the glider with her sleeping on my shoulder, since she’s currently refusing to go back down into her crib. The challenge is exacerbated by the presence of her brother, who can sleep blissfully through almost anything, but not his sister wailing at 4:00 in the morning. We’re now planning to whisk him out of the room at the first sign of an Eloisplosion since otherwise they take turns working each other into a frenzy and no one gets any sleep.
As if that weren’t challenge enough, we’re also trying to wean them off sleeping swaddled. Yes, at this point, the babies can only fall asleep if tightly wrapped, which means if, say, they wriggle out of their blanket in the middle of the night, they can’t go back to sleep… ELOISE.
Our plan is to use the spirit of the Ferber method: we’ll put them down unswaddled and each night wait a progressively longer amount of time before picking them up and swaddling them. That sounds like it might work, right?
Right?
Please, God, let us get more sleep tonight.
Filed under Parenting | Tags: feeding, food, sleep, solid, swaddle | Comments (6)