Penn Unswaddled

This post title is supposed to be a play on something "unplugged."  Did anyone get it?  Oh well, I just try to keep the post titles clever, but after 1000 posts, I can sometimes be low on the creative juices!  Anyways, Penn has been swaddled any time he's had a nap in his crib since his birth pretty much.  There's been plenty of naps in his car seat, bouncer and other random places, but as for his real, solid crib naps, they've always been aided by the swaddle. Well, as of late, this little man is starting to move and groove.  He sometimes gets a sweet little fist out of his swaddle confines.  It's upsetting to him and so I usually just reswaddle him and hope for the best, but lately I feel like maybe he's ready to try sleeping without being pinned down essentially.  Since we had an opportunity for a quicker, informal nap (and this poor child was so, so tired from his morning at church) I decided to see if it would work.  Penn sucked on his fists and fingers and kicked around for about 10 minutes and then fell asleep hard.  When it was time for his next feeding I had to wake him up and this is what I found.  Passed out!  How precious!  I practically cried because the no-more-swaddle is just a sign of growing older.

But I was also proud of my little Penn pulling off a good little nap from which he had to be awakened (and might I mention that his brothers are not that quiet during the morning naps and he slept through that without the comfort of being swaddled up).  I swaddled him for his afternoon nap because that is his best nap and I'm not willing to sacrifice it to a startled awakening (and he loved the swaddle still because he napped over 2 hours and had to be awakened again).  Tonight I tried not swaddling him again for his pre-bedtime catnap, but he was having a hard time settling down and I needed him to sleep through bathtime for the big boys, so I caved and went up and swaddled him.  I found him sucking his left thumb!!  I was so excited to see he found it!  I'm sure it was somewhat of an accident, but he's been close in his finger/fist sucking/gnawing, so I figured it would happen.  This is exactly when Koen and Tavin found their thumbs and went for the unswaddled approach to sleeping, so Penn follows suit as well.  Stay tuned for developments, but I would think in the next week or two we will be phasing the swaddle out.