Keeping with the “it sounds religious, but isn’t” theme for today, I thought I’d mention our Baby Björn. We’d heard good things about it, so put it on Sam’s baby registry, and then promptly bought it for ourselves, because it looked too good to do without. Sam recently gained enough weight that she’s now above the minimum weight for this thing, so we tried it out today. We got the regular size instead of the extra long thinking that Carolyn would be wearing her, but now we think that may have been a bit silly. It does fit me, though barely. I’m still trying to decide if we should take it back and trade it for the larger one.
Our trial run went pretty well. Sam was crying when she went in it (though not too badly) and calmed while there. I carried her around, I sang to her from Sergeant Pepper’s (finally forgetting enough lyrics that I just played it on the stereo). She calmed down, and eventually fell asleep. Which is when I got concerned. She fell asleep with her face straight into me, and I was worried about her getting enough air with her head pressed directly against my several-day-old jammies. I took her out and put her in her crib, it took her a couple of tries, but then she went down for a good nap.
I had never really understood the phrase “to sleep like a baby” before having Sam. I knew that it meant to sleep really soundly, but it didn’t make sense to me. I knew enough about baby’s sleeping patterns to know that babies slept briefly and often woke up crying. Therefore, to mean that you slept well while saying that you slept like a baby just seemed wrong! Sam finally taught me what it means. I took Sam out of a convoluted contraption I was wearing on my chest, placed her first on the changing table, then on a blanket on the floor which I wrapped around her snugly, and then picked her up and put her in the crib. All this time, she stayed asleep. One of the “sleep tests” we read about was the arm test. Want to know if your daughter can be moved out of your arms and put in the crib to sleep? Lift her arm up by the wrist 3-4 inches and let it drop. Does she fail to arrest the fall? She’s asleep. I guess it’s just another example of the way babies enter the world trusting and dependent.