Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Day 194 - How Do You Sleep At Night?

We're duvet people. We don't really hold with the traditional blankets thing as we both feel it's a bit claustrophic if you're pinned tightly to the bed.

But enough about us! What about the baby?

Conventional wisdom says that babies should only have one blanket at a time and it should only come upto their chests. You place the baby's feet at the bottom of the bed, and adjust the blanket to the right place. If the baby is too cold, you change the blanket for a warmer one.

That's conventional wisdom and it's very good advice. So we're going to ignore it. Well, a bit. Not really. We've decided to go for Grobags. Here's one of the designs we've got:

Grobags are like fitted sleeping bags for babies. The baby needs to wear appropriate sleepwear and then they are put in the bag. They button up around the baby's arms and neck such that they cannot wriggle their way down under the covers and come in a number of togs, much like duvets do. They are recommended by the FSID, The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths as a very safe method of keeping your child warm. It's horrible to have to consider SIDS.

The old friend I mentioned a couple of days ago had made mention of how once the baby is born "
people appear to have extremely strongly held opinions re child-rearing and will attempt to blackmail you into adopting them with the coin of fear (e.g. 'do x and you'll increase the risk of SIDS')". I don't want to be over the top or overstate the likelihood of anything terrible happening, but it makes sense to us that if one method is known to be less risky, you take advantage of it.

Plus, as K___ says, they look cool.

5 comments:

  1. I must say you are very well prepared for all this. Ethan's 3 months old and I've not heard of grobags until today. We've been swaddling instead. Frankly I can't recommend swaddling highly enough; it seems to provide instantaneous peace and gratification to the little fella. Having outgrown the traditional square of fabric, he now has 2 designer swaddling garments complete with velcro straps for the discerning infant. They seem to perform the same function as the grobag and are sold under the trade name "Kiddopotamus" here in the US.

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  2. One suggestion, if I may: buy a couple and see how they work out before you get one for every day of the week or month.

    We loved Kiddopotamus' Swaddle Me wraps, as did 3B. For awhile. Now we may be moving on to something like the Grobags (called Sleep Sacks in our neck of the woods). Point is, we got one Sleep Sack and one Swaddle Me before he was born, and we're glad that we didn't get more Sleep Sacks until now, because he's already outgrown the one we got. Now that he's into them--maybe--we'll get some more.

    I think that you've made a great choice (if I say so myself, having made the same choice), but just remember that kids are fickle, even at a few days old.

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  3. That's it: the Kiddopotamus' Swaddle Me wrap! Worth its weight in gold. That said, I have a feeling he's beginning to grow out of swaddling now (they're like so spring season), thus will check out the sleep sacks / grobags forthwith.

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  4. We used "sleep-sacks" for Baby Gage (as they are called in the states...) Anyway...loved them. And, they made us parents feel at ease when he was sleeping in his crib.

    :)

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  5. Oh, and we used the swaddler like Papa Bradstein is referencing when Gage was a newborn. We didnt switch to the sleep sack until Gage outgrew the bassinet & it was winter time.

    ~L

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