Looking back – swaddling and the newborn hare

I’ve recently been writing some entries about when the baby was first born to fill in some history there – from when I was FAR TOO tired to even think about putting it down on paper. I filled in a lot of gaps, but was remembering some other things from those first days yesterday – things that made me want to laugh (or cry at how tired I was then!) and I just wanted to get them down now.

First I was thinking about swaddling. We had gotten some of the “miracle” blankets and “swaddle me” blankets from friends – but darned if we knew how to use them or why to use them… We were so confused. We’d been told that the baby’s crib needed to be completely bare / devoid of anything that could be a suffocation hazard. And then they’d wrapped her in this blanket in the hospital! Wasn’t that a hazard? But wouldn’t she be cold without it...? What were we supposed to do? We tried swaddling her in the blanket, but were always paranoid about it.

One night in those first long weeks we’d gotten up with her and my husband had gone out of the bedroom. Forty five minutes or an hour had passed while I fed her and burped her and tried to get her to go back to sleep, but he was nowhere to be found. I was half convinced he’d gone to sleep on the couch! I finally went out to the family room to find him on the computer. I thought he was emailing or “goofing off” and was not too happy about it (I don’t know what I was thinking as any sane person would use any “goofing off” time to sleep in those days.). When I looked he was watching Youtube videos on swaddling. He’d been reading every post and watching every video he could find on it (at it must have been 2 in the morning) to be ABSOLUTELY sure he was doing it right and it was safe for the baby. Who needs a push present when you’ve got that?

It was around that same time that we tried to start reading her books on occasion (I still haven’t quite gotten this down at night. She either wants to be eating and is ticked I’m reading rather than feeding her or she wants to grab and rip the book – while eating.). I’d read her Guess how much I love you and left it on the table next to the chair. Later that night, I heard my husband starting to read it to her over the monitor. He read how little “newborn” hare had asked big “newborn” hare to guess how much he loved him. This went on for a few minutes till I finally had to get up and walk into the baby’s room to tell him – you know it’s actually little “nut brown” hare and big “nut brown” hare. The mistake had been obvious to me – as I’d read it to her the same wrong way for the first few pages earlier that night. Between the two of us, we will be SO lucky if this kid ever gets past a 2nd grade reading level.