Babywearing tip: wear them high

I’ve been babywearing for 22 months now. I can’t believe how fast time has gone by! But it wasn’t until my daughter started outgrowing the Ergo Baby, at around 10 months, that I started looking more into babywearing – the different types of carriers and types of carries I could do. I love soft structure carriers (like the one on the picture above) because I tend to babywear for several hours at a time and I have a huge baby but I also use ring slings a lot for shorts trip, and every now and then for longer trips too.

Even though I’ve been using these carriers for a while, it wasn’t until this year that I learned a great trick to make my baby feel less heavy. You’ve probably deduced by the title what my trick is – to wear them high.

When I got my Ergo I read the manual and looked at videos on how to wear my daughter properly but no one ever mentioned to wear her high.  Everything I saw at that time said to put the waist band on my hips or right above my hips and so I did.

Now that I’ve tried different positions, I learned that if I put the band on my hips it makes my baby hang a bit too low. It makes her feel heavier and the straps pull on my shoulders.  Now that she’s almost 30 lbs this is an issue since most of the weight would go to my lower back.  She would feel pretty pretty heavy and sometimes I’d get a bit of lower back pain.

One of the babywearing rules is that your baby has to be high enough so you can kiss them easily. I always paid attention to this and wore my daughter so I could kiss her but I didn’t realize I could wear her even higher (or that I could kiss her even more easily).

Now when I wear my daughter in a soft structure carrier I put the waist band right under my breasts, around my ribs and above my waist line. I do this wether I’m wearing her in the front or in my back.

By doing this I can wear her for many more hours without feeling any strain.  For some reason this position feels like she weighs 15 pounds less and it’s very comfortable for both of us. Plus by doing this, the carrier fabric gets around her butt and legs in a perfect position – butt hangs low and knees are higher than butt, creating the famous “M” position.  Check out my picture above so you can see how high I wear her.

When I use my ring sling I also wear her high.  I like to wear her in a way that her face is practically next to my face.  This also makes her feel less heavy and I can wear her for a long time.  Plus I love having her so close because we can share food and drinks and she loves looking into my eyes when she’s talking to me. It melts my heart!

One last thing, this is not an ideal position if you’re going to nurse in the carrier but if you plan to do that just loosen the straps so your baby can hang lower and then when she’s done tighten them back up and rearrange her so she can be high again.
In this picture my daughter was nursing, you can see how she’s much lower compared to the first picture:

I recently shared this tip with a friend that’s been wearing her toddler and she was surprised at how much comfortable it felt so that’s when I realized that a lot of other moms might feel more comfortable if they tried this.  So if you’re a babywearing mama, next time you’re going to babywear, wear your baby real high and let me know if you too find it more comfortable.