Natalie’s Blog

Natalie has already gone through a variety of styles of sleep-wear in her young life. Initially, she wore “sleeping gowns.” I dressed her in them mostly because I got a lot of them at my baby shower and many more experienced moms espoused their virtue, which is that middle-of-the-night diaper changes are easy because the gowns don’t have snaps or pants. The other advantage of sleeping gowns is that they have little cuffs that fold over newborns’ hands to keep them from scratching themselves. Natalie managed to scratch her face quite a bit anyway.

Actually, I hated those sleeping gowns! When ever we picked Natalie up, the gown would ride up practically to her neck—we were constantly adjusting those stupid gowns. In the old days, the gowns had a draw-string at the bottom so that riding up wouldn’t be a problem, but since strings on baby clothes are a strangulation hazard, the modern versions have elastic at the bottom. I think once the draw-string was banned, the usefulness of the sleeping gown went out the window.

Not it’s obvious, but here is a picture of wee little Natalie in her first sleeping gown. This photo was taken the day she was born:

See how scrunched up the gown is in this picture?

At some point (maybe around 6 weeks?) we realized that Natalie slept better when she was swaddled with two blankets. So she really didn’t need more than a t-shirt onsie underneath, which is how she slept until we stopped swaddling her around 4 months. Swaddling was fun because when we unwrapped her in the morning, she was all cute and stretchy. Here’s couple of photos of swaddled Natalie, around a week old:

Next we tried a sleep sack, which is like a wearable blanket. They have the advantage of easy changes because they have no legs, but don’t ride up because the bottom is closed.

The sleep sack didn’t last long because once we started co-cleeping the velour sleep sacks were too hot for Natalie. Since then we’ve been alternating between footed pajamas and t-shirt onsies, depending on the weather.

Here she is in some footie PJs:

Snuggled up next to Mama at Aunt Elaine’s house:

And here she is in a onsie with her “Flock of Seagulls” morning hair:

Now Natalie has outgrown all of her footie pajamas and most of her t-shirts, so I decided it was time to buy her some proper “pajamas.” That is, sets of pants and shirts (short or long) that are designed to wear at night only. Footie pajamas are cute, but Natalie is tall and outgrows clothes length-wise well before they are too tight, so she gets more wear out of separates than one-peices.

Much to my disgust, all of the “girls” pajamas (ie pink and purple with hearts) at Babies r Us had ruffles or lace around the collars of the shirts! That’s much too itchy to sleep in, so I bought her some “boys” pajamas (ie blue, red, or white with animals or transportation themes) that looked much more comfy. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that clothes for baby girls are already priming them to sacrifice comfort in the name of fashion, but somehow I still find it shocking.

Here is Natalie looking super-cute in her new transportation-theme “boys” pajamas:

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 26th, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under Growing, Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.