Help Your Baby “Sleep Through The Night”

I am often asked by friends how to best support a breastfeeding mother during the newborn phase in order to get her the much-needed rest her postpartum body desperately requires. 

If you are in the minority and choose not to then there seem to be lots of newborn and baby sleep support but I felt lost when it came to my toddler’s sleep.

It wasn’t until I had had my first child and felt this missing element in my postpartum journey that I had even heard of the phenomenon of Postpartum Doulas.

This list includes the bare essentials plus some “extras” so that you can pick and choose the things that sound good to you!

Early rising is typically defined as baby habitually waking earlier than 6am. A 6am wake time might feel very early to us but it’s actually pretty appropriate for babies and young children. There are some things you can try to tweak though!

Postpartum freezer meals are a great thing to prep while at the end of your pregnancy to be sure you can take care of yourself just as well as you’re going to be taking care of that new baby!

While there are common ages babies and toddlers tend to go through nap transitions, it’s really best to look for the signs vs. waiting for an arbitrary age. Every child is different!

This is such a common worry for parents who aren’t interested in CIO (cry it out) or controlled crying methods for sleep training. They so badly want to be responsive to their babies and worry that if their baby cries in the car it must mean they are letting them CIO.

False starts are emotionally hard, especially if they go on for months and months.

One of my main issues with swaddles, though, is that they can be SO hard to transition out of. You need to stop the swaddle at the FIRST signs of rolling, which can happen by 8 weeks old. The AAP recommends stopping swaddle use at 8 weeks because prolonged use can increase the risk of SIDS if baby rolls over while swaddled.