Sleep sold separately.

We have either been the luckiest parents ever to walk the earth, or the sleep habits we started creating from day one really paid dividends.

Our son, since the age of three months has been a rock-solid sleeper. We will put him down to sleep and he will then wake up 12-13 hours later every night without fail, only exception being when he has been sick.

He is basically a college student trapped in a toddler’s body.

We had a lot of our friends with families, who early on would ask us ‘How is the sleep deprivation coming along?’ teasing us based on their own experiences.

We could almost feel their disappointment when we would reply with, we are ‘fine, got a solid 13 hours in last night, again’.

What is this voodoo? I hear you ask. Teach us your tricks you wizard.

Let’s get started on some hint’s tips and tricks we used, to help your little one to develop sleep habits that will make them sleep like a teenager!

This is a pretty lengthy post, with a lot of content to get through. Some quick links here to help you get to what you are interested in.

I was torn were to place this section in the blog, it’s by far the most important section at the same time it also needs all the other bits and pieces in place to be truely successful.

We are actually going to consider two routines, the one for you baby and just as importantly the routine for you as parents.

Does not matter what baby site or book you read, if there is one thing there is consensus on, it’s that establishing a good sleep, nap and waking routine is one of the most important things you can do as a parent to foster good sleeping habits for your baby early on.

Babies like routines, they have come into an environment that is bright, noisy and unpredictable to them, having a good routine in place provides a baby with a grounded sense of protection and assurance in this strange new world that they are adjusting to.

Ideally a newborn should be getting around 17 to 18 hours sleep in any given 24-hour window.

They have no context of night and day yet as their circadian rhythms have not yet developed. You can start to prime this development by making sure that their evening sleep is in a much darker location than their day sleeps or naps.

For the first month we used a bassinette downstairs and during the day just covered it with a spare swaddle for day nap/sleep times.

After 1 month, all day sleeps and naps where in his nursery, we did not use the blackout blinds during day, only for his evening sleep to help establish that day and night are different.

A newborn baby can bring a whirlwind of emotions and life changes for new parents. One of the most significant challenges parents face is adjusting to the disrupted sleep patterns that come with having a baby. While it’s common knowledge that establishing a sleep schedule for your baby is essential, many new parents overlook the importance of creating and maintaining their sleep schedule. In this blog post, we will discuss the importance of parents having a sleep schedule and how it benefits both the parents and the baby.

The Importance of Sleep for Parents

• Physical Health: Sleep plays a crucial role in maintaining our overall health. Consistent, quality sleep helps our bodies repair and regenerate cells, support the immune system, and maintain a healthy weight. Adequate sleep is essential for parents to stay physically healthy and energized to care for their newborn.
• Mental Health: Sleep deprivation can have a significant impact on mental health, leading to irritability, mood swings, and even depression or anxiety. Establishing a sleep schedule allows parents to get the rest they need to maintain mental and emotional well-being, improving their ability to cope with the stress and challenges that come with parenting.
• Cognitive Function: Lack of sleep can lead to cognitive deficits, including impaired memory, concentration, and decision-making. Ensuring that parents are well-rested improves their ability to make informed decisions and problem-solve effectively, contributing to a safer and healthier environment for the baby.
• Strengthening Relationships: Sleep deprivation can strain relationships between partners, as irritability and exhaustion can lead to increased conflict. Prioritizing a sleep schedule can help maintain and strengthen the bond between partners, creating a more harmonious and supportive environment for raising a child.

How a Parent’s Sleep Schedule Benefits the Baby

• Consistency and Routine: Babies thrive on consistency and routine. When parents establish a sleep schedule for themselves, it naturally extends to the baby. A predictable routine can help the baby feel secure, reducing anxiety and promoting better sleep for the infant.
• Improved Responsiveness: Well-rested parents are more alert and responsive to their baby’s needs. They can better identify and address the baby’s cues, such as hunger or discomfort, leading to a happier and healthier baby.
• Role Modeling: Parents who prioritize their sleep are more likely to instill the importance of sleep in their children as they grow. By setting a positive example, parents can help their children develop healthy sleep habits that last a lifetime.

Tips for Establishing a Sleep Schedule for Parents

• Prioritize Sleep: Recognize the importance of sleep and make it a priority in your daily routine. Plan your day around ensuring you have time for restorative sleep.
• Create a Sleep Environment: Designate a specific area in your home for sleep and make it comfortable and conducive to relaxation. Keep the room cool, dark, and quiet, and invest in a comfortable mattress and pillows.
• Establish a Sleep Routine: Develop a pre-sleep routine that signals your body it’s time to wind down. This might include activities such as reading, taking a warm bath, or practicing relaxation techniques like deep breathing or meditation.
• Share the Load: If possible, share nighttime baby care responsibilities with your partner or enlist help from family and friends to ensure both parents get adequate sleep.
• Be Flexible: Understand that life with a newborn can be unpredictable. Be prepared to adjust your sleep schedule as needed, and don’t hesitate to nap when the opportunity arises.

We took a very simple approach, divide and conquer.

• Alternative nights on ‘shift’. M – Dad, T- Mum, W – Dad etc
• The person on shift had the baby monitor on their side of the bed.
• All food was pre-prepared and ready to use.
• Under no circumstances could you wake the ‘off shift’ person, unless a medical emergency.
• Shifts were tradeable, I will take your Monday and Wednesday shift, if you can take my Friday. This became a fun moment for us, as shifts become a valuable currency :).
• Does not matter of you are working or not, ALL pitch in.

This is probably one of the most important decisions you are going to make, where is your little one going to rest their head each night?

The American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends rooming sharing for the first six months, ideally up until the first year. The main rationale behind this is it can reduce the risks of SIDS by 50%, along with other benefits of easier feeding and comforting. This is how we started out, with a bassinet located next to our bed.

Regardless of where you ultimately decide, there are several things that you need to be in place to develop a location that promotes sleeping.

A location, such as a nursery or a room if sharing that is calm. By calm I mean, as clutter free as possible (meaning no toys), not painted in overpowering colors, dark as possible (black out curtains or blinds are your friend). We are trying to help the baby understand that this location has one purpose, sleep.

When we take you to this room little one, will change you, get your pajamas on and lay you down to sleep. When we come back again, we will wake you, change you and get you dressed for the day.

If you are room sharing, a simple room divider or screen can create that model of a location with one purpose, we sleep in it.

Bed sharing – just don’t do it, not recommended by the AAP. The only time we ever used this is when the little one has been poorly. You being kicked by a wriggling 10lb+ bag of restlessness does not equate to a good night’s sleep for either of you.

It’s not a play room, it’s a sleeping room. This is crucial as your baby will very quickly start to associate the two, which is what you want. They are the only 3 things that should ever be happening in that location. They are sleeping, getting changed and being comforted (includes bottle feeds during that glorious 0–3-month age of 2 hourly feeds)

At approximately 4 months we transitioned our little one into his own room.

We opted to paint the room a flat white, with a mountain mural on one wall, then add in black out blinds, a changing table, a crib and nursing chair.

Other additions we had in there where a baby mobile above the crib. You should position this so when the baby is laying down, they need to move their eyes upwards to see it fully, this added effort to move their eyes up and towards the mobile, makes them very tired.

We also used an Amazon dot, hooked up to Spotify. We found a soothing baby music playlist and each night we left the room; our last words were “Alexa play soothing baby music for one hour.

A note on furniture. Yes, you can go to some fancy baby store and blow hundreds of dollars on a hardwood, ‘Mahagony Uber Baby Bed 1000 Mk II in Midnight Grey’

Or alternatively, save yourselves a ton of money and go to Ikea and buy a regular crib.

Height adjustable, side removable for when they are older. Then use the spare change to go start your little one’s savings fund.

Same applies to the changing table, save yourselves a fortune, we used an Ikea Hemnes dresser, secured a foam changing mat to the top, swapped out the drawer handles for some teddy bear themed ones my wife found on Etsy and called it day.

When it is no longer needed as a changing table, we will just use it as a regular dresser.

We also used an Ikea mattress (In one of the books we read early on, we did become aware of ‘off gassing’ which is basically the release of toxins from brominated flame retardants used in a lot of mattresses).

Even though Ikea themselves have phased out the use of these type of fire retardant chemicals, paranoia had already taken hold of us at that point.

So, we also purchased a Harlow’s Earth Crib Mattress Cover to give us peace of mind.

Downside is, it can be a little noisy (think jumping on a chip packet) when your little one discovers the joys of jumping in their crib.

Having a little one is expensive enough as it is, you can be smart, save some money on the way and have an incredibly attractive nursery.

I always think that Rockwell based his 80’s song on what it feels like to be a baby. Me being stuck in the 80’s aside, let us move on to keeping tabs on your little one, when they should be sleeping.

You are really spoiled for choice here, there are so many on the market nowadays, some offering integrated video and all sorts of extra functionality. We opted to go old school here and just went for a classic audio monitor. We had several requirements.

Ultimately, we chose the Vtech DM221, ease of use, low cost and two parent units. One for downstairs and one for our bedroom. This monitor has been flawless in its operation since day one, we did have to adjust the levels due us using Spotify in his room for sleep music.

We were conflicted about this; babies don’t move a great deal at night, right? did we really need a camera? The main reasoning behind having we could fathom, was ensuring that the baby had not flipped onto their tummy from their back when swaddled.

Anyway, long story short, we soon discovered babies move a lot! as in its exhausting to watch.

Instead of buying a new camera just for the function of baby monitoring, we repurposed a security camera we purchased for our dog a year prior.

We just secured that to the wall (it has a magnetic base, so we just secured a washer to the wall, and placed the base on that) and used our mobile phones to view.

The nice thing about this was the motion alerts it provided, you can set a zone up and draw around the crib, any movement in that zone will generate a mobile alert. Google Nest Cam is the product we used, but again you are spoilt for choice in this arena nowadays.

The elephant in the room, so wearable monitors, such as the Owlet Smart Sock give you real time feeds to your mobile device on the baby’s heartrate and breathing then will alert if any of the thresholds are broken.

Now these are not recommended by the AAP as they provided a false sense of security around SIDS when there are much more proven ways to help reduce the risk. It can provide you with a false sense of security that technology can save the day.

These types of devices are insanely popular though and have seen an explosion in the volumes being sold.

The baby marketing world is cutthroat and plays on all the fears we have as parents.

Oh yes, we totally boarded the ‘will do anything we can do protect our little one train’.

Depends on who you ask.

If you ask Dad (me) not in a million years, this device for all its promise, stressed the living crap out of me, you become fixated on the graphs and data, you see the O2 rate drop from 98% to 95% and have your own panic attack, then sigh in relief when it goes back up.

Eventually you learn that these things can fluctuate a lot over one sleep period.

Nothing will prepare you for when you get the ‘Red Alert’ though which are mostly false positives, but personally this gave me more sleepless nights than the baby ever did.

Now ask Mum the same question, and you get the complete opposite answer, she loved this thing as she felt it helped her achieve peace of mind at night.

Amazing how something can provide two polarized responses!

Prior to bringing baby home, we attended this new parent’s educational class at a local college, it was a good practical agenda, diaper changing, core items you are likely to need and the headline item for me, how to swaddle a baby.

I nailed that class, at the end of it I could swaddle the practice mannequin so fast, with one hand to perfection. I was ready!

These types of courses are typically run at local hospitals, they are usually pretty cheap, and I can’t recommend them enough, so worth checking locally.

Fast forward 4 months, and I have realized, I am so not ready!

I am on the receiving end of my 3rd high five to the face, I just got the left arm in, now onto the right. Hang on, how did you get the left arm out again so fast? Wait, how are your legs out already? I finally finish, scoop the little one up and cry a little inside as the swaddle falls to the floor.

Swaddling is more of an artform than a science, for us compounded by our little one has been an active wriggler since he was born.

For this section, I am not going to focus so much on swaddling itself, which is important.

It soothes the baby with firm contact providing a feel of security, just ensure not too tight around the chest and hips and it also helps with the Moro / Startle reflex, where a baby will twitch their arms and wake themselves.

I am going to focus more on the swaddle transition and the trial and error we had with that, as that transition was more of the challenge for us as new parents.

Our baby was showing signs of needing to transition away from a swaddle at 3 months, some signs are, manages to get their arms out of the swaddle, showing signs of being able to roll over.

We noticed that most mornings from the age of 3 months he had managed to escape the swaddle.

The problem we had that was, without the swaddle he still had a strong Moro reflex, so was constantly waking himself up.

Now came the trial and error or I mean research. We ended up testing and trying 3 different styles of sleep suits before we found one that worked for our little one.

First up, we tried armless sleep sacks, so these are like sleeping bags with arm holes for the little one. These where a total no go, his Moro reflex was still quite strong, and he would literally face palm himself awake in these sacks’ night after night.

We tried these for a week, then quit.

Next up, Flying Squirrel Suits (based on the fact they look like a wing suit when on) these have sleeves, or more accurately places for the arms to go, that are meant to help reduce the range of motion that can happen with a Moro reflex.

Again, unfortunately just a no go. He got very distressed by having some movement for his arms but not enough.

He could not look at his hands and fingers or self sooth himself as he was still fully enclosed in the suit.

Third times the charm, we came across a swaddle transition suit with the most bizarre name, Baby Merlin’s Microfleece Magic Sleepsuit. Now there are not many baby products that I can confidently say have moved the needle much in terms of quality of life, this thing though. Oh my!

We credit this suit with really being the start of his 13-hour sleep-athons that he has been doing ever since.

It is basically a thick (ish) sleeping suit with open hands and feet, which is great for temperature control, inner cotton layer. They key thing for us though was as it’s a little thicker than traditional sleep suits so it stopped his Moro reflex in its tracks from waking him up. Its thick enough to restrict some of the movement, yet at the same time with the open hands he could still self soothe.

First night in this suit, 12-hour sleep straight through at 3 months. Being typical parents, we panicked here as well, as suddenly having your little one knock out marathon sleeps took some adjustment on our part.

It is a warm suit, they offer a cotton version, but temperature regulation using socks or no socks is pretty easy. We typically had him just in this suit a diaper and adjusted the room accordingly.

Keep in mind this is a swaddle transition suit, so as your baby gets stronger and starts to be able to roll themselves over, you will need to move to more traditional bedtime attire.