Surprisingly, we didn’t really use ours as much as I thought we would. Sure, I used it when I was nursing (the first two months), and we definitely used it for the rocking chair photos we took each week of Kyle’s first year, but other than that, it wasn’t a necessity. We rarely rocked our boy to sleep. Starting from a very early age, we put him to sleep, awake, in his crib. That was a huge breakthrough for us in terms of getting him to sleep through the night, but it also meant we didn’t really need the rocking chair for actual rocking. I’m still glad we have it for bedtime reading and collapsing into at the end of a long day, but when I think back to those pregnant days when I thought not having a rocking chair would be our biggest parenting failure, I remember the words of a good friend: “Every child is so annoyingly different, you have no idea what you’ll need beforehand except for food and diapers.” So very true. But, still, I’m always curious about what worked for other parents. Did you use (and love!) a rocking chair or glider?
