How to swaddle your baby aka makin’ a baby burrito

Swaddle that baby

Swaddling, for some reason, makes newborns feel more comfortable. My guess is it reminds them of what they’ve known for the past few months and cuts down on opportunities to accidentally punch themselves while exploring their environment. I’m afraid I drank all my newborn memories away and cannot comment with first hand knowledge.

While I can’t claim I’m an expert on newborn psychology, I am an expert on sleep. More specifically I know that I like to sleep, and I sleep better when my newborn sleeps. As such, I’ve found that swaddling works pretty well to accomplish this task.

Step 1: watch this video on how to swaddle

The video is 42 seconds. Not too much extraneous there. I’ll do another one with the new staff writer soon enough but attempting to film it yourself is a bit difficult with someone trained in properly emulating a newborn.

If you want a diagram, click here.

Step 2: enjoy your baby burrito

That’s it, there ain’t no more.

Thoughts on the swaddle

While at the hospital there were plenty of babies swaddled in the nursery. Our nurse at one point swaddled my baby and saw a pacifier next to her (oddly it wasn’t hers.) she informed us that they don’t do pacifiers and seemed somewhat aghast that we did as if we were bad parents.

While pacifiers can introduce nipple confusion and aren’t natural, I’d say that falls into the same category as swaddling which would produce current environment confusion. There’re plenty of reasons to not swaddle a baby, however if you’re at the point of not sleeping for days on end due to baby, I’d say those arguments could be invalidated fairly quickly by the “if you’re not able to take care of yourself you’re not going to take care of your child” category.

Alternately

Should you be not all that interested in attempting to fold a baby burrito, you can also buy somewhat of an auto-swaddle outfit. It makes it a bit easier when you’re dealing with a baby fight.