Early on when Alethea first came home from the hospital we used a blanket to swaddle her.  That lasted all of a week, since she would always get her arms out.  So then we bought a fleece sleep sack that had a separate wrap part that went around her arms and had a giant patch of Velcro to hold it shut.  About a month later she had figured out how to weasel her arms up and out of that.  It was at that point that we began calling her the Houdini of Swaddle.

Having decided against other swaddling products available in local stores as being too easy for our Houdini to escape from, I went online and found the Miracle Blanket.  There is a lot of nice verbage on their website, but as Peter put it, “It’s essentially a straight jacket for babies.”  It doesn’t have ties, but it does have two flaps that go over the arms and tuck in under the baby and then two longer flaps that you wrap several times around the child to hold the arms securely in place.  Just what we needed.  I ordered one and it worked so well, I went back later and ordered a second.

So we used the Miracle Blankets for about three months, but then she started to get her arms out of it.  I’m not sure how, since often the flaps for her arms would still be tucked neatly underneath her back.  Despite her Houdini like maneuvers, I had decided that we should swaddle her as long as possible, since it really does help her sleep.

But the last straw came the other night when I went into her room at 4am, an hour after Peter had been up to reswaddled our escape artist, and found that she had managed to roll over so many times in her crib that the Miracle Blanket wasn’t even on her, but was instead rolled out in a line across her bed, like some sort of discarded mummy wrappings.

I told her then and there, “That’s it.  We’re not swaddling you any more if it means we have to wake up once an hour to rewrap you.  You’re just going to have to learn to sleep without it.”  And so she is.