I never knew that until this morning.
Up until just recently (as in, three days ago) Pierce has been swaddled to sleep. Yes, I swaddled my son until he was 8 months old. With pride. Okay, less with pride and more out of pure fear. He slept so well that I was afraid to mess with anything lest he turn into one of those babies that never sleeps and has his Momma walking into walls with exhaustion.
I agonized over how to rid him of the swaddle. Should we just go cold turkey? Wean him off of it? I was leaning more towards weaning, but that meant that it would be longer when he was finally sleeping without the swaddle, and I really wanted him to be able to sleep without us needing to bring the swaddling blankets with us if we were going to be out somewhere with him past bedtime. And I really didn't want to hear any more Judgey McJudgerson comments about the swaddle.
After months of doing nothing because I couldn't decide whether or not to go cold turkey, I decided to just take the plunge. Yes, I was scared, but he needed to learn to sleep without the swaddle at some point, and really he seemed to not want to be swaddled anymore when we went to put him to bed. I knew that he'd eventually learn to sleep and I wouldn't be so sleep deprived I couldn't function.
It's actually been going pretty well. I can't really complain. He doesn't sleep through the night, but he doesn't usually wake up too much, either. Last night he woke up a lot. The worst part of him waking up without being swaddled is that he's so much more difficult to get back to sleep. He has spent a lot of time sleeping in our bed with us when we can't get him to go to sleep. The first two days when he made it into our bed I just left him there, but last night when I woke up and he was fast asleep, I was able to successfully transfer him to his crib.
Despite the 5:30 wake-up calls this is going a lot better than I thought it would, so I'm happy, albeit a little tired!
0 comments:
Post a Comment