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My son is 6 months old now and he has been swaddled since birth. Actually he seemed to have outgrown it at 2 months old and we went for 1 month without swaddling him. Then he was diagnosed with acid reflux at 3 months old and everyone told us to swaddle him and that would help him. So we went back to it. He is so good about falling asleep swaddled. I put him down awake and within 5 minutes he falls asleep for naps or at night. His sleep schedule is bed at 7pm, wake to feed at around 3am, back to bed until about 6:45am. Throughout the day he is awake for 1.5 hours, then naps for about 45 minutes (4 naps a day.)

He just recently started rolling over like crazy during the day and that has just started happening when he is in his crib while swaddled, which is so unsafe, so we obviously had to stop swaddling him. There is no time to gradually wean him as recommended on this site. We use a swaddle with the velcro so I have been swaddling his body but have had his arms out. He flails them around and cries and screams because he doesn't know what to do with his hands, then he rolls over onto his stomach and gets frustrated because he doesn't know how to go from front to back. He cries so loudly in frustration. He is so tired but doesn't know what to do. It now sometimes takes him and hour to fall asleep for naps and night. It has been 4 days since when let his arms out and it doesn't seem to be getting any better. I do not want to let him CIO but whenever I go in to help him (flip him onto his stomach or give him a pacifier–I know, I know, it's bad) he screams even louder when I leave. It's almost better if I don't go in. I just don't know what to do. There has got to be a better way to have him fall asleep than just exhaustion from crying for an hour. Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks in advance for any comments.

Well, thankfully things have gotten so much better! It took about 7 days for him to settle into sleeping without his swaddle. After I posted my original post, he quickly learned how to roll from stomach to back. Once he got the hang of that , he had no trouble and didn't get frustrated. He now prefers to sleep on his stomach or on his side, which originally freaked me out but now I am ok with it. It still sometimes takes him 20 minutes or so to fall asleep at night. (actually right now he has been in bed for 40 minutes and he's still awake, not upset just playing with his feet). I am not going to lie, it was a tough week. I did actually just have to let him work it out on his own sometimes. I didn't want to but I felt like I didn't know what else to do. Sometimes I would just stay in the room and stand over his crib without making eye contact with him until he got sleepy or rolled over, then I left. The biggest thing I can say is to not end up doing something that will be hard to break later like rocking to sleep or feeding to sleep. I stuck to my guns and made sure not to create another sleep association to help him through that phase.

The best news about him not being swaddled is that he now is not dependent on his pacifier anymore. Plus if it falls out, he has his hands free to find it and he can put it back in his mouth on his own. Another bonus is that if he wakes up, he spends about 15 minutes just rolling and playing before he starts "caliing" for me. It was a long journey to get from there to here but I am so happy we are out of the woods. Good luck to you when you come to this point. I'm sorry I don't have better advice with specific steps on how we did it. It was just trial and error mostly.