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I am someone who swears that I never get enough sleep or that I don’t sleep well to begin with. In addition, my husband is a bit of a diva when it comes to his sleep, if I’ll be honest (I love him though!), and is already a light sleeper. So we knew that it was going to be a challenge on us when it came to sleep when we brought our little girl home from the hospital. However, we had prepared! No, actually. I think we prepared pretty well… And it was due to all that unsolicited advice that we got during my pregnancy (you know, the unsolicited advice we often ignore because of it’s redundancy). Hopefully our experience can help you in either the present (if you’re struggling with getting your little one to sleep through the night) or in the future (if so, congrats and good luck!!) We prepared for two phases of sleep 0-9 months that I’ll get into below.
0-3 Months: The first phase was our little girl sleeping in her bassinet in our bedroom. We “swaddled” her every night before bed. We never put a swaddle on her during the day, so from just a few days old, she got used to knowing that putting a swaddle on meant bed time. We think establishing this routine was key in her sleeping for longer periods (2-4 hours) at night than she would during the day (30 to 90 minutes). We used the Halo brand swaddles that can be found here and bought a handful of them. They worked extremely well and were durable to frequent washes and use. In addition, she slept in the 4moms MamaRoo bassinet that can be found here. We like to call this thing the “cheat code” to sleeping with newborns. It has a built-in sound machine with multiple sound settings and multiple movement settings (ours loved the car ride setting). It was the most expensive baby item that we bought, but it was honestly worth every cent… for example, we tried putting her down in a non-moving crib at my parent’s house at Christmas and it was a major struggle. I can’t even imagine trying that every night for the first few months (fortunately we listened to people who told us to invest in the bassinet!) In some ways, we feel like we skipped the “rite of passage” of parenthood of sleepless nights due to having the bassinet, but we don’t care.. our little girl was sleeping through the night at just 7 weeks old! We’d highly recommend this bassinet because it’s a very effective blend of the cheaper, more basic bassinet models out there with the very expensive multifunctional models that exist on the market. BTW we also used waterproof sheets that kept the mattress pad looking brand new (despite 3 months of her spit up and drool!).
3-9 Months: Okay, this is the biggest parent hack I think out there for parents of babies between 3 and 9 months (they make them in two different sizes). I’ve made a post about the 8 most beneficial items to get prior to birth of a child and I stand wholly by each of those items. I also have some lists of things that my husband and I have used for our first baby that aren’t included in that TOP 8, and I can link them at the bottom of this article. But let me tell you – this item, no joke, is the biggest must-have item for any parent of a little one between 3 and 9 months old. Introduce: The Merlin’s Magic Sleepsuit. At a baby shower at our church before our little one was born, a friend of ours that has a baby, hyped up the Merlin’s Magic Sleepsuit as the objective end-all-be-all item to get babies to sleep when we were talking about our inevitable future sleep problems. I kind of just rolled it off at the time, admittedly. But when it was time to move our little one from swaddles and her self-rocking bassinet in our room, we ran into difficulty getting her to sleep in her crib (non-moving crib) in her nursery. We asked another friend who had a baby boy a few months before us and came to find out they were also using the Merlin’s Magic Sleepsuit (can be found here) to get their little boy to sleep in his crib. So, we did what any tired parent does and bought one… and had IMMEDIATE results that first night using it. Our little girl slept a full 10 hours on her first night in her own room. We’ve been using it now for nearly a month and we’ve had maybe 2 or 3 nights where she’s woken up, but each time she was able to easily put back to sleep with a pacifier. This is the type of item that will get you immediate results on your first night- 12/10 recommend buying tonight if your baby is struggling to sleep in their crib! Finally, one last item that we have as assistance in her nursery is a sound machine that can be found here. This is a really affordable sound machine that can be programmed to run for specific periods of time with variations in types of noises. We like to run it with just background white noise for her and it seems to help put her straight to sleep when we turn it on after putting her in. It’s nothing fancy but also not junk and useless. It might not be AS necessary as the sleepsuit, but definitely something to consider if the sleepsuit isn’t cutting it by itself!
P.S. our crib is a pretty standard and cheap Dream-On-Me convertible crib and can be found here. Setup was pretty straight forward, and it only took my husband maybe an hour or so to complete.
As mentioned earlier, here’s the lists that I’ve created that have been very helpful or useful in some way (I focus on natural, chemical-free items).
Baby List:
Momma/Pumping/Child Care List:
Life of Les 
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