Hannah's Got a Sleep Sack

I ordered this sleep sack for Hannah about a month ago and am loving it!  I was a little unsure of it when ordering and spent some time waffling back and forth and trying to engage Eric in my waffling before giving up and hitting the submit order button. It was only $20 so it's not like we'd be out too much if it didn't work out.  When it arrived and I had unwrapped it, my uncertainty heightened:  the dang thing looks like it could easily fit a 6-year-old in spite of the size reading 18-24 months. I was worried that all that bagginess would get bunched up under her while she was sleeping and annoy her enough to want to communicate her annoyances to us in the form of very loud screams at very early hours of the morning, but nope. It never bothered her. She didn't even look at us or it funny the first time we put it on her.

Hannah modeling her Halo SleepSack before nap time today.

Trying to dress her for sleeping is by far one of my most stressful daily tasks.  She always seemed hot in the summer, and we kept the thermostat on 78 degrees, but I worried that she'd feel a little chilly if she were just in a onesie or a onesie and shorts. Everybody likes at least a sheet over them, right? It's just comforting. So I kept her in thin cotton zip-up footed sleepers.  I think sometimes it was too much (her sweaty self was my clue), but I couldn't bring myself to dress her in any less.

The problem with cooler weather is that her room ranges from 1-5 degrees cooler than the rest of the house, including the hallway right outside her room where the thermostat sits. My guess is that underneath that very old plaster wall in her room, there is a miniature arctic playground complete with polar bears and penguins who radiate that arctic playground into her room.  I would like to replace that arctic playground with some heavy duty insulation but tearing out the plaster wall is not an option at the moment. Instead, I put a thermometer in there about a month ago and have been studying the situation ever since, tweaking the thermostat by a degree here and another degree there while monitoring the temperature in her room in an effort to discover the lowest possible setting that we can keep the thermostat on without letting her room drop below 68 degrees.  I was hoping to find a rule like "it's always 4 degrees cooler in Hannah's room than in the hallway" or something like that, but a rule like that would make life too easy so of course no such rule exists. So far, my research has shown that if the thermostat is on 71 or lower, Hannah's room remains 4 degrees cooler (so it'll be 67 if the thermostat is on 71).  But if we bump the thermostat up to 72, her room heats up to 71 and stays there.  How weird is that??

In an ideal world, we'd keep the thermostat at 68 degrees like we always used to, but the thermostat at 68 means 64 in Hannah's room which is 4 degrees cooler than I'm comfortable with, and that 4 degrees keeps me up at night.  Don't get me wrong, I'm a summer girl all the way and would love to keep the thermostat at 72 constantly (and since we signed up for Clean Currents, 100% wind power about a year ago, I don't have to feel too guilty about wasting energy), but I don't want to have to pay to keep it that cozy in here...

Fortunately, unlike her mama who HATES all things cold (except ice cream), Hannah doesn't seem to mind it and is actually sleeping better now than ever. She's down without much of a fuss between 7:15 and 7:30 and sleeps straight through the night until between 7:00 and 7:30 the next morning (7:45 on Tuesday!).  How amazing is that!!  This has been constant even though the temperature of her room has wavered between 66 and 71 while I've been doing my research/thermostat experiment.  The pajamas I've settled on is one of those fleece blanket sleepers with the feet, a onesie beneath it, and her sleep sack over it.  

I'll keep monitoring the thermometer, especially as the temperature outside drops, but I'll probably stop sending Eric into her room in the middle of the night with a flashlight and strict instructions to tip toe in his most ninja-like impression just to check the temperature.