Now We Know
Richard and I have been debating for months whether we should stop wrapping the boys at night. We have continued to put it off time and again, because we believed it would be incredibly difficult to stop. We even phoned a parent help line to ask advice and they said that we should wrap them for as long as possible. So for the past several months we’ve come up with more and more elaborate wrapping techniques to try to keep them (and I really mean Lachlan) contained. Then last night I’d had enough. It was 1:20 in the morning and I was dead tired. Lachlan had lost his dummy and was out of his wrap again. I replaced the dummy and started trying to rewrap him, which is not easy in the dark when I’m half asleep and he’s fighting me every inch of the way. Especially considering the previously mentioned elaborate wrapping technique. So in a split second decision, I decided to unwrap him instead. I took the wrap away and he was asleep before I had finished. It was a huge gamble, but it seemed to pay off. I stayed with him in the room for the rest of the night, because I was worried about him becoming distressed or getting tangled in his sheets. He did neither, though he did wake a few times looking for his dummy. And we never knew before now, but it seems that the little fellow is a tummy sleeper!
So we’ve now lowered the base of his cot and we’re going to start leaving him unwrapped when he sleeps. Hopefully we can teach him to find his own dummy when he wants it and we might get some better sleep at night. Or am I dreaming? We’ll still have to teach him to put himself to sleep without the wrap, but hopefully that will only take a few days. And by the time we do his oxymetry test next Thursday night, he’ll be sleeping like a baby.
We’re going to continue wrapping Dan for a little while longer, partly because he’s on oxygen and we’re not sure what he’ll do with his nasal prongs and oxygen cable if he’s unwrapped. I think we’ll just see how it goes with Lachlan first and then move onto Dan in a few weeks.
In other news, Dan still has a runny nose – it’s truly disgusting – but he seems to be over his cough. It’s taking forever for him to get well again, but hopefully it won’t be much longer. On a more positive note, however, we’re moving forward a little bit at a time with their food intake. They’re both very happy to munch on biscuits, vegemite toast and soft fruits but I think it’ll be a while before they show much interest in pasta and lumpy foods like that.
