This post is all about baby sleep!
I was overjoyed when my baby starting sleeping 12+ straight hours through the night. She was 5 months old when she first slept through the night. As a parent, this milestone was GAME CHANGING for me!
In the next month as my baby mastered night sleep, I clocked in 50% more time at work, worked out consistently, and attended at least 2 social events every week (!!!).
Plus, although it’s much harder to measure, I know that consistent sleep improved my marriage, parenting, and baby’s development.
In short, getting a good night’s sleep improved SO many areas of my family’s life, and I know it can improve yours, too! Here are a few resources and tips I used to help our family reclaim the power of a good night’s rest!
Resources
Babywise book
The #1 resource I used and recommend for helping your baby sleep is this book: ‘On Becoming Babwise The Infant Sleep Book’ ! It was recommended to me by a friend and it’s awesome. The book has simple instructions for helping your baby fall asleep and stay asleep, written by authors who are both pediatricians and parents.
I love that the book has general tips as well as specific schedule samples. Overall, it’s packed with knowledge and the tone of the book is very empowering (which is nice since I’ve seen a few doom-and-gloom type parenting books that seem pretty unhelpful!)
Here’s a link to their website: Babywise.life
& to the book on Amazon: Babywise book
Taking Cara Babies blog (free*)
In case you want some more baby sleep education, you might love the Taking Cara Babies blog!
This is another incredible resource for baby sleep that is authored by someone who is both a pediatric nurse and a real-life parent! I love that the blog is full of simple and helpful information easy for any parent to implement.
Cara, the author, has an awesome Instagram page @takingcarababies where she shares fun and helpful parenting tips. I love following her page and bookmarking the tips she shares that I never want to forget!
*Cara also sells actual baby sleep courses that walk you step-by-step through sleep training your baby. I personally am saving up for the courses. They’re a lot of money for poor college students, but Cara shares so much great information on her social media, the courses are bound to be amazing!
Sleep sack
Next, we started using this sleep sack super early! Our doctor taught us that the moro reflex (startle reflex) often wakes up baby unintentionally. You can help baby sleep by swaddling her arms to her sides. However, swaddles are hard to wrap just right and are often easy for baby to escape! Switching to a sleep sack was one of the best things we did for our baby’s sleep.
The sleep sack keeps baby warm and calm during sleep. I’ve also read that using a sleep sack can help cue the baby’s subconscious and prep her body for rest!
I’ve linked the sleep sack we use here – it’s from Amazon and comes in a ton of different prints. It’s easy to wash and folds up great for traveling.
Sound machine
We also started using a sound machine pretty early on (probably in week 1, I just can’t remember that time period very well haha)! Our doctor also taught us that the womb is pretty noisy and baby’s sometimes struggle to fall asleep if it’s too quiet.
I didn’t realize the sound machine helped much until baby was around 4 months old. At that point we noticed that every time we forgot to turn on the sound machine, our baby would wake up 10 minutes after falling asleep. Now it’s something I 100% recommend!
Here is a link to the one we got from Amazon BUT I don’t really recommend it because it only works when it’s plugged in. It’s supposed to also work on battery as a portable machine, but that function only lasts a minute or two on ours. So if you have any great portable sound machine recommendations, please let me know, I’m in the market for a better one!
Huckleberry app (free)
Next, I LOVE using the free version of the huckleberry app. This app makes it super easy to track baby’s feeding and sleeping schedules. There are also options to track pumping, baby weight, food, diapers, medicine, and temperature.
Here’s a picture of what it looks like in the app store:
I use this app to track baby’s sleep, and it was so exciting for me to see visual progress. Also, on rough nights when baby sleeps for shorter stretches, it’s nice to look back and see how much progress you’ve made from day 1.
The best part of the app is that you can share it with other users, so my husband has the app installed and doesn’t have to ask me what baby needs if he’s in charge of her. This comes in handy if I need a break, I go to work, or it’s my day to sleep in 🙂
Tips
I’m definitely not a sleep expert, but I also thought I could share just a few general baby sleep tips that you can use in case you don’t have any other resources to use yet! These tips worked really well for me and my first baby, but I have no idea how well they would work for other babies of course. Maybe they can spark some new ideas for you to use for your own family!
Also, most of these tips are recommended by both the Babywise book and the Taking Cara Babies blog. I loved using both of these resources because they had a lot of overlap – which must be a good sign!
1- Sleep, feed, wake pattern
The first tip is to help your baby achieve a pattern of sleeping, eating, and staying awake. Of course other resources can explain this much more in depth, but I think the overall reasoning for this pattern is 1) baby can build habits based off of cues and routine, and 2) this pattern will help baby sleep, eat, and play to the best of her ability.
The habits part makes sense – as humans, we thrive on routine and do a lot of activities simply because they are habit. By the time we’re adults, we’ve built a routine of sleeping during the night (hopefully – bless you, insomniacs and nighttime workers). Babies, who aren’t fully aware of their surroundings, can’t build those routines for themselves. As parents, we can provide babies with cues and regular nap/eat/play/bedtime schedules so that eventually, night sleep is super natural.
The second part makes sense, too. It’s hard to sleep on an empty stomach or play when you’re exhausted. A baby who naps and then wakes up to eat will be full and energized enough to have a great wake window. She’ll be able to play, learn, and explore until she wears herself out, just in time for her next nap!
2- Walk during the day
Another tip, related to habits, is to get outside every day! This helps baby learn the difference between night and day. Her body will eventually be able to build a circadian rhythm. In the day time she’ll expect walking, exploring, and short naps. During the night she’ll learn that it’s time to rest.
3- Let baby fall asleep on her own
Another huge thing you can do for baby sleep is to teach your baby to fall asleep on her own. Once baby learns to fall asleep by herself, when she wakes up in the middle of the night she’ll be able to put herself back to sleep!
Both the book and blog I recommended earlier go into WAY more detail for this tip, and I might even go so far to say that it’s the hardest, most important step to take in order to achieve baby sleep. The next few tips are ‘sub tips’ for helping your baby learn to put herself to sleep:
3.1- Set a 5 min timer for crying
When you hear baby cry, set a 5 minute timer before you go check on her! Don’t worry, it’s okay if babies cry for a few minutes. Eventually, baby will be able to put herself back to sleep in that time. But if you always go and calm the baby immediately, she’ll never learn that she can calm herself down.
3.2- Leave baby in crib/bassinet at first
Once you do go to comfort baby, try to keep her in the crib for a minute before you pick her up to rock her. Changing up her environment a lot by turning on the light, picking her up, adding movement, etc. might stimulate her and wake her up even more!
3.3- At night, try to calm without food
When baby is first born, she needs to eat every 2-3 hours, even through the night! However, as she starts to grow older, she’ll be able to go longer without food. So, when she wakes up crying at night, try comforting her without food. You can try giving her a binky, rocking her, speaking calmly, etc.! Again, there are way more in depth suggestions about these sleeping tips in the aforementioned book and blog!
4- Earlier bedtime gradually
Okay, moving on! Once your baby has learned to put herself back to sleep, she should start sleeping longer stretches. At that point, you can start gradually putting her to bed earlier at night.
Newborns do best when you put them to bed around 10pm. Around 3-6 months, you can start gradually putting them to bed at earlier times. Eventually, they’ll probably have a bedtime between 7 or 8pm!
5- 1 step forward, 2 steps back
One of the hardest parts of the sleeping journey is making progress… and then stalling. Or straight up going backwards. It can be so frustrating to feel great about the direction you’re headed, only to start over in some way!
I think it’s helpful to tackle this journey with a long-term, uber-patient, failure-is-expected mindset! When you feel like you and baby are going backwards, take a deep breath and resolve to try again. And again. And again. You got this!
6- Celebrate each sleep stretch! keep going!
It’s also helpful to celebrate every progress you make! Positive thinking is key. Baby put herself to sleep in less than 5 minutes? High five! Baby slept 4 hours straight instead of 3? Party time! You didn’t scream when baby woke up at 2 am? You deserve an award!
Find the little things to celebrate, and soon you’ll be seeing progress every day.
7- Plan a break if possible
Finally, I highly HIGHLY recommend that you figure out a way to get a break if possible! I assume that as you’re trying to get your baby to sleep through the night, you are ALSO not sleeping through the night – and that doesn’t feel very good! As a human, it’s hard to function on interrupted sleep cycles, especially when they last for days, weeks, and months.
So, here are some ideas:
- if you’re living with a partner, ask him or her to take a ‘weekend shift’. Maybe you can nurse or purchase some formula so that the partner can take care of night feedings. Perhaps they take the ‘Friday night’ shift in exchange for you to make Sunday morning dinner. Or maybe you can take turns doing night feeding every other day or week.
- if you have family or dear friends nearby, ask them to take a night shift. You can set up an air mattress/couch situation for them at your house, or take a playpen/bassinet to their house. Even if you only get one night of great sleep in those first 4 months of having a newborn, it might be just the refueling you need to continue the long journey of achieving baby sleep!
- another option is to get a babysitter for the daytime and commit to sleep for that entire chunk of babysitting! It can be hard to sleep through the day and hard not to tackle chores when someone else watches the baby, but if you haven’t gotten enough sleep in a while, it might be just the thing you need and worth the effort at least.
I hope these tips help give you some ideas of how to prepare or what to try next as you help your baby sleep through the night!
Don’t forget, you an impressive person for taking care of your baby and you are capable of thriving at it!
Best of luck! 🙂
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