Not Yet
The other evening we tried an experiment. What would happen if we un-swaddled Forest for bed and did not give him his pacifier? It wasn’t that bad at first. He cried for about 30 minutes and then went to sleep. However he woke up at about 2 am and spent several hours crying off and on. And then when I tried the same method for naps, he didn’t sleep at all. Yesterday he missed both his morning and mid-day nap because of exhaustive crying. It was awful. By the time his evening nap came around I had him swaddled with a pacifier. He had been so traumatized by the whole thing that he wouldn’t let me put him down all afternoon. Not even for a diaper change, otherwise screaming and crying as I’ve only seen him do when he got his shots. My mother’s heart was broken and I was ashamed of hurting my little man.
Brad, ever the logical one, suggested we do it one step at a time and since the issue isn’t really the swaddling but the pacifier, let’s start there. We had already been on that path by refusing to not put it back in for several consecutively longer time frames over the past week. And we’d noticed that he went back to sleep at night without needing/wanting it. Low and behold… it worked. Even this morning for his nap, I didn’t offer the pacifier and while he cried some, it wasn’t the horrid screaming and he went to sleep within 10 minutes. Once he’s “off” the pacifier perhaps then we can start the un-swaddling process again. But cold turkey just didn’t work.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment