Swaddle Me Infant Wrap Blanket

The Swaddle Me infant wrap, or infant blanket, is a brand name variation on the traditional swaddle technique for young infants. The Swaddle Me blanket is manufactured and sold by a company named Kiddopotamus, who specializes in infant products and specifically this particular line of blankets.

The Swaddle Me is a very popular product that you’ll see sold in many retail and online outlets around the country. Babies R Us prominently features them as does online retailer Amazon.com. You can generally get a SwaddleMe blanket for about $15-20, though Amazon often has certain colors and materials for less than that if you check back regularly.

The SwaddleMe blanket comes in a range of colors, sizes and materials so you can use them throughout the year. The size small is geared towards infants 7-14 pounds and the size large is for infants 15-22 pounds. The materials options are as follows: 100% cotton, fleece, microfiber, organic material, bamboo and flannel.

My daughter used these blankets every single day for the first handful of months of her life and I can personally vouch for their importance and usefulness. We tried to swaddle her in the receiving blankets that the hospital gave us, but they invariably fell apart or were just too difficult to use. We bought a handful of Swaddle Me blankets for each size and time of year, and they were an essential part of our lives for many months.

The swaddle technique has literally been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years, all around the globe, and it essentially helps soothe and comfort a newborn baby, especially when they are going to sleep either for naps or for the night. The concept, as explained by Dr. Harvey Karp in his bestselling book The Happiest Baby on the Block, is that newborn babies are basically in their “fourth trimester” of development and that the first three months of their lives are very months where they should still be in their mother’s womb if it was physiologically possible. What this practically means for you as a new parent is that you should try to recreate the womb whenever possible, especially when your newborn child is upset or cranky.

Dr. Karp popularized the “Five S’s” to help parents cope with this new knowledge and they are: swaddling, swinging, shhh sounds, side laying position, and sucking. Dr. Karp lays these out in order of importance, as some infants will be soothed by just a few of the five, while some will need all five. There are also times where you have an infant who is just in the throes of a temper tantrum and though you normally only need to employ 2-4 of the five, all five might be necessary at that point.

There is nothing fundamentally intuitive about the five S’s to my mind (since I didn’t do the research), but all I know is that they work. I could not believe it when I first tried it with my daughter, but it worked like a charm, and the swaddling technique was the absolute most important part of that system. Without the swaddle the child would just wriggle out of the position you were trying to hold her in, and it would all be for naught. Do yourself a favor and purchase Dr. Karp’s book – you will not regret it!

Swaddling has also been found to reduce risk of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) in young infants, and this is comforting for parents of young babies. We are told to keep our infants on their backs (‘back is best’), and this swaddle makes it so that the infant only can sleep on their back.