We’re finally getting some peace at night! Koah is mastering the art of snoozing all night long, and Skye just moved into a big girl bed! Although, it hasn’t been an easy feat to get here, we have over the past while found some products that have made these transitions a little easier. Here are some of my top tips for getting some extra baby sleep:
You can find all of the items mentioned in this article in my Amazon Storefront.
Let them hear your voice!
We’ve all been taught that you have to let babies cry it out in order to teach them to sleep at night. I definitely understand that, but it is just nearly impossible for me to let my baby cry. One of the best tools I’ve found to meet in the middle is a baby monitor with two-way audio. When the crying just won’t stop, I can press one button and remind my little one that we’re right here and that usually helps her regulate. It also helps calm my mum anxiety and lets me go back to sleep knowing she’s alright.
We love this monitor from Amazon:
The Babysense Split Screen monitor has two-way audio, white noise, and a split screen video monitor so we can keep an eye on both of our little ones at night.
Use a Weighted Baby Sleep Sack
When my babies were brand new, I often put them in sleep sacks. This worked pretty well for my older child, but it didn’t seem to do anything to calm the nighttime anxiety of my second baby. Luckily, I found a weighted sleep sack, and that’s made all the difference. This weighted sleep sack from Nested Bean gives the baby the light pressure they feel when they’re being held. It’s amazing how magical this little bit of pressure was. I definitely recommend!
The Nested Bean weighted sleep sack comes in gray, navy, and white and has three available size ranges from 0 to 24 months.
Find a Natural Remedy that Works for Your Baby
I could tell that my baby had specific anxiety around sleep. This wasn’t normal baby-learning-a-sleep-routine nervousness; this was true stress around going to sleep at night. We really wanted to help calm her nerves and give her some relief. We found Boiron Quietude, and it has really been helpful. It’s a homeopathic, natural sleep aid for babies that includes chamomile, yellow jessamine, and passionflower extract. As always, make sure to talk with your doctor before your little one starts any supplement or medicine.
Quietude is sugar and dye free and is made by Boiron, a company that’s been developing homeopathic medicines in Canada for over 30 years.
Help Your Baby Understand Time
Believe it or not, this is a super important part of sleep training. It never occurred to me that the concept of time is so essential to the way we sleep at night, but it is! We found this Tommee Tippee Groclock, and it has been awesome. It trains little ones to understand night and day by switching the image to stars at night and a sun in the daytime. It also helps them understand how long “sleep time” is by counting down the stars each hour. You can start them out with no alarm and then add in the alarm feature as they get older!
The Tommee Tippee Groclock has tons of amazing reviews from parents like us who are finally getting some solid sleep.
Prioritize Pajamas
Babies can be extremely sensitive to texture, especially itchy or scratchy pajamas. The worst part is that they can’t even tell us that they’re feeling itchy! When our baby was having so much trouble sleeping, I went searching for anything that could make her more comfortable. I found these Moon and Back pajamas and I’ll never go back to what we were buying before. They’re organic, soft, cozy, and just the right weight.
Amazon has 25 color options available for these pajamas and they range from 6M to 5T in size.
White Noise is Your Friend
We absolutely love our baby’s sound machine. The sounds are so soothing and tailored to babies. Some traditional white noise machines have pretty harsh sounding rain, waves, or storms, but this Hatch Baby Rest Sound Machine is just perfect. I can definitely tell a difference in how quickly our baby falls asleep with this sound machine.
The Hatch Baby Rest combines nightlight, sound machine, and time-to-rise alert in one device that you can control from your phone! You can customise color, brightness, sound, and volume level and you can run all of those programs automatically!
I know that training a baby to sleep can drain your energy and patience. What has truly helped our family is to remember that our babies are crying out for comfort at night. We treated it more like an investigation into what was making her uncomfortable and tried to change one element of her sleep experience at a time. This really made it more like a family project than a big struggle. If you’re having a lot of difficulty getting sleep at night, reach out for help! Sleep is so important for every member of your family, and you all deserve to be well-rested.
xoxo Fil
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