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This was one of my favorite new baby products when #2 was born. The struggle of the unraveling swaddle is real, and this just puts a tidy stop to it. Additionally, it lets you keep the baby's hands up at their chest, which is more optimal in terms of midline development and I swear I saw a difference in #2 as compared to #1, who was swaddled arms down.
Verdict: Must Have
Status: Own one, wish I had two in each size.
SOP: Buy this and have it on the ready. Sizes are "Newborn" for the 5-13 pound crowd and "Big Baby" for the 13-19 pound crowd.
Get One: Woombie, available on Amazon for $27.99. There is also a less expensive, basically identical, version from a company called Comfort & Harmony. This is a great item to borrow from friends, or to look for second-hand, given that it's a super-clutch item, but is used relatively briefly.
Our Experience: I can't recall where I initially heard about the Woombie, but it was, for real, my lucky day. At birth, #2 was just shy of 8 pounds, so the hospital receiving blankets and our vast collection of various swaddle blankets were fine for the first two weeks or so, especially since he was slower with weight gain than his brother. After that, I know I was over the swaddling blanket--they break out of them, the blanket gets over their face, every time you touch them or need to do a diaper change the whole thing falls apart. Sigh. Life. It's hard. Before committing to purchasing on Amazon, I decided to reach out to my Breastfeeding group and see if I could get a loaner. We ended up with both the Woombie and Woombie convertible in the "Big Baby"(13-19 pound) size. It was, to say the least, a revelation.
My two favorite things about this product are the ease of the zipper, no blankets coming undone or Houdini breakouts, and hands can be easily kept at midline. You're probably nodding your head along until the last point -- "hands can be easily kept at midline." WTF does that mean? And why is that important to me? With #1, we mostly used the Miracle Blanket, which was indeed miraculous, but in order to work, it required that #1's arms be swaddled down at his side as shown below. Think for a moment about how you sleep in bed. Do you sleep with you arms down at your side? I bet you draw your arms up to your chest, if not at first, in the course of sleep through the night. Infants begin developing their midline crossing skills pretty early, and these later translate into general manual dexterity and fine motor skill. An early skill it affects is the ability to pass a toy from one hand to the other. Our first child did this much later than our second child. Wrapping a baby's arms at his side can mute that development. Is it the end of the world? No. But I know more about this topic with #2 than I did with #1, and it was important to me to try and be more sensitive to this development.
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I just want to point out here that it is 100% possible to swaddle in a blanket (though not with the Miracle Blanket) or with other swaddle products on the market with hands at midline, however that hands up wrapping makes it much easier for baby to Houdini out. Part of the goal of swaddling is to make baby feel snug and to dampen the startle reflex a bit to prevent baby flailing awake.
The Woombie, in my unsolicited opinion, covers a lot of bases:
- it permits midline-friendly swaddling;
- it permits safe swaddling;
- makes it easy for parents to pick baby up for soothing without the swaddle falling apart;
Baby #2 was able to wear the "Big Baby" size until he reached about 18 pounds. At that point we were ready to begin the nerve-wracking transition away from swaddling and so we switched to the Love to Dream Swaddle UP 50/50, which I will review in a separate post.
