I’ve been there: up at 1 am, 2:30 am and returning to sleep at 4 only to be up again at 6!
The exhaustion we feel as new moms can be overwhelming! You are up with a crying baby and find yourself crying right along. You feel lost, alone and like you are doing EVERYTHING WRONG! I’m here to tell you – You are NOT alone!
Every other mom in the world has been there. Oh there might be some moms who tell you their baby slept 12 hours a night straight from the hospital, but this is few and far between. I had 8 babies and every one was different. I wish there was a Magic Formula of how to get a crying baby to stop crying and go to sleep (if I knew it, I’d be a millionaire right now and I am most definitely not!) But there are some tips that might help your baby. I’d like to share one tip a week for this year to help new moms get through this very rough phase of life. If you have any great tips that helped in your own parenting, please email me and let me know and I will try and feature it in a blog post!
Swaddling
This is something our grandmothers and great-grandmothers did but it fell out of fashion and was a forgotten or poo-poohed idea for many years but has been renewed recently. Even Jesus was wrapped in swaddling clothes! I swaddled 6 of my 8 babies and the swaddled babies all slept more peacefully than their non-swaddled siblings. Could it just be the children who would have slept better anyway? ABSOLUTELY! But infants who are left to thrash around become more distressed.
Think about it. They’ve been in the most squashed contained position for months! They emerge and all of a sudden all of their limbs are flailing. Everything is kicking and free. Those of us who are claustrophobic think this freedom is great – but I have seen my newborns go from contented to severely stressed when their limbs are set free. Now I realize they need to learn and grow strong, but there is a time and a place for freedom. Bedtime is not it.
There is a right way and a wrong way to swaddle. You want to make them snug but not tight. You want to make sure their heads and necks are exposed and never covered. I am linking to video on how to swaddle and they give several different safe ways to try.
Did you swaddle your newborns? What are your experiences?
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(image courtesy of lucy jude/flickr creative commons)
It worked so well with my babies. I would swaddle them and put them in a Moses basket, and they did really well in their little cocoon. 😀
It is awfully nice to see them contented and nestled in, isn’t it, Rosilind? Thanks for coming by today, dear friend!
Yes, definitely swaddled all of ours. There is a phrase these days that would charaterize well what I did with most of mine–“the 10th month of pregnancy”. I think that idea goes along with what you said. Sure, they have to adjust to ‘life on the outside’ but after 9 months in the womb does all that adjustment have to happen so quickly? Swaddling worked for our babies.
I like that phrase! Yes, with our wee ones we should look for those long slow transitions – it helps them AND us!! Thanks, Bonnie.
Characterize*
Yes, I swaddled all 5 of my babies. After 6 weeks I also got them on a feed, play, sleep cycle and (for the most part) had good sleepers. I highly recommend moving them OUT of your bedroom, as well. So many times I would hear their little noises and automatically get up to feed them. They would have fallen back asleep if I hadn’t acted. You WILL hear them when they truly start crying. 🙂
Yes, Stephanie, we moved ours out of our bedroom once they had outgrown the cradle (about 4 weeks). I am a terribly light sleeper and I can’t have anyone in bed with me (except for my husband 😀 ) and those little grunts and shuffling noises woke me right up. Thanks for sharing!!
This is great advice! I just had baby #5 and could never get the hang of swaddling before, but I started with this sweet one because I wasn’t getting ANY sleep, and I do notice a big difference in how well she sleeps. The big muslin blankets you can get in a 3-pack at Target work great. They are oversized and lightweight, so makes swaddling easy especially for my 10-pound big baby, and doesn’t make them all sweaty.
So glad it has been helping your baby!! 10 pounds – what a bundle of joy!! 😀
…Is that why I still like to sleep with the blanket completely surrounding me?
Well I didn’t swaddle you, but you DID watch me swaddle all the others, so maybe it’s you duplicating what you saw?? 😀 😀
We did swaddle for a time, but it seems like my babies like to be able to move about. So we swaddle for the first couple of weeks, and then let them go free. But, we also co-sleep, so maybe that is why the swaddle didn’t work as well for us.
Hi Heather…I had some who liked to be swaddled for 6 weeks but some who preferred more wiggle room after 2 or 3 weeks. So much depends on their temperament and transition time. And I bet you are right that co-sleeping makes a difference since there is already a bit of constriction in space. That’s something I could never do (I jokingly tell my husband that I barely tolerate HIM in bed with me!) or I’d never have slept at all. Thanks for sharing your experience, Heather!
Our son is grown now, but I tried swaddling him as a newborn. He wanted no part of it and kicked off the swaddling clothes every time! Thanks for hosting & God bless!