Our Sleep Training Method For Our Baby At Ten Months & A Lollipop Baby Monitor Review

This post is in collaboration with @lollipopbabycamera, all opinions are my very own.

After three kids, you would think I would have had the whole sleep training thing down pat for this third baby but with each kid I found myself taking a different approach. The topic of sleep training for babies in the hopes of helping to coax your baby to sleep by themselves can be somewhat controversial. Some parents swear by it, others believe that letting a baby cry it out is harmful. I can honestly admit that my old sleep training methods (nothing) for the first two did us no justice and when we decided we were finally ready to have our freedom back a bit at night sleep training saved us. So, I wanted to share how our sleep training method with Shy at ten months old and give my honest review on the Lollipop Baby Camera that we received to help us monitor her at night 🙂

Why Sleep Training?

Most people think of sleep training for babies as the old traditional way of “cry it out.” Once I got my mindset off the idea that in order to sleep train my kids I would just have to let them cry it out and instead focused on the fact that sleep training was more of an umbrella term that helped reference various techniques to sleep train your baby I was able to accept it better. There is no one formula that works for every parent, but I do know how helpful it can be to gain reference from other parents perspectives and what worked for them. 

Common Sleep Training Methods:

1. Check-and-console or the Ferber Method – this method that involves checking on your baby at various intervals counseling them without feeding or rocking them to sleep. This sleep training method is mostly related to what we did with Shy.
2. Cry It Out – this is the most controversial method and is not for the faint of heart. But it is a proven tactic. Your baby may cry for hours for one to two nights but it usually is proven to be a quick way to teach self soothing according to research scientists.
3. Chair method – this method involves setting a chair close to your baby’s crib and gradually over the next week or two moving it further and further away from them. Some people like this approach because the parent is right near the baby and present. Others however disagree as they easily give in to having the baby watch you as you watch them cry. This type of a sleep training method may confuse the baby experts say. But remember, each parents approach to sleep training is different.
4. Pick up, put down and shush-pat – this is usually reserved for babies younger than six months and involves letting the baby fuss as you put them down but when they start getting overly upset soothe them by patting, picking them up, or shushing. This method is difficult with older babies because they tend to become overly stimulated with this type of routine.

If you are at the point where you’re considering sleep training, you’re most likely ready to get some more sleep or what your doing may not be working for you and your baby. And remember that while not everyone is going to agree with every sleep training method, we all need to get our beauty rest, babies included.

Here is our Night Time Schedule:

My husband and I used to be HORRIBLE at getting the girls’ down at the same time every night and were always kind of just “winging it” to be honest. BUT, we were only doing ourselves a disservice because we were losing sleep and not getting any alone time with each other at night. So I started a routine with all the girls that looks like this:

6:30pm

Dinner time for the girls, Freddy and I usually eat later together since he gets off closer to eight

7:30pm – 8pm

Baths/ Bedtime Routine

8pm 

Tuck the girls in. Lay down Shy in her crib with a bottle (this is our personal preference and I know not everyone is keen on giving their baby a bottle as they fall to sleep but this is what works best for us).

7am 

Everyone wakes up for the day

Here Is What We Did For Shy:

For the first eight months Shy slept in our room either next to us in her bassinet or in the bed with us. She was probably waking up three to four times a night after I weaned her at eight months! It was easy when I was nursing her because I could just have her breastfeed as we slept side by side and that was that. But once we switched to formula, she just wanted to continually eat at night and because we were so tired, we were giving in.

After sucking it up and realizing we weren’t gonna ever get a good nights sleep unless we cut her nighttime bottle habits, we moved her to her room, much to my dismay (it’s hard to cut the cord, ok) lol. But I kid you not, she was sleeping through the night in four days and these are the steps we took:

Night One

We put her to bed at eight o’clock with a bottle. She cried for around ten minutes after she finished her bottle but fell asleep on her own. She woke up three times during the night, the first time she woke up we let her cry for five minutes before going in to check on her and soothe her back to sleep without a bottle. The second time she woke up we let her cry for 10 minutes before going in and this time we gave her one bottle. We did this because we didn’t wanna totally mess her up being in a new room and cutting her all her feedings at once. Then, the third time she woke up, we let her cry for 15 minutes and she soothed herself back to sleep.

Self-Soothing Time Interval: 5-10-15 minutes

Night Two

Same routine. We put her to bed at eight with the bottle. She whined again for about two minutes after she finished and soothed her self to sleep. She woke up twice during the night. This time during her first cry, I let her cry for 10 minutes before going in to soothe her. The second time she awoke I let her cry for 15 minutes and then gave her a bottle again to which she soothed her self to sleep right after.

Self-Soothing Time Interval: 10min – 15min

Night Three

We put her down with her bottle at eight on the dot. This time she didn’t cry after she finished and just went straight to sleep. We agreed that she would not get a bottle this night at all. She woke up ONCE, cried for 5 minutes and soothed herself back to sleep!

Night Four

Same routine once again, and she slept through the night for the first time!

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After night four, she was officially sleeping through the night! Sure there are times here and there with nights she will wake up from teething or something but those are rare and come with the territory. But, she no longer needs us or the bottle to soothe herself to sleep 🙂

Let me assure you however, this was NOT an easy route to sleep training for my mama heart. Hearing her cry and not just grabbing her right away to tell her “mama was here” was hard for me. This took a lot of patience and diligence on our part. But just like consistency with anything else that proves challenging in life, it paid off.

There really is no golden answer for how long to let your baby cry it out before picking them up. But she was tired, WE were tired, and those four days of “training” her to self soothe was the best thing we could have done for all of our sanities! You know your baby best and the amount of time you let a baby cry it out really depends on what you’re comfortable with. Sleep training babies is not a one size fits all approach.

How We Monitored Her Sleeping:

So our house is set up that her room is some distance from our room and we had no baby monitor in the room at all when we first moved her. We slept in our guest room those four nights (which is right by her room) so we could be close. After looking at several baby monitors in stores I decided to go with the Lollipop Baby Monitor. I reached out to them myself and offered to share my experience in exchange for the monitor. They responded quickly and within three days I had the camera set up in Shy’s room 🙂

The great thing about the camera is you can either mount it to the wall, set it on a dresser or even twist it around the baby’s crib with it’s flexible silicone rod. We choose to hang it on the wall as to see a larger area of the room, but I did take some pictures to show you how it looks wrapped around the crib.

Shop the Lollipop Cam Here!

Setting Up the Lollipop Camera:

Set up is super simple and straight forward. The camera comes with all the parts you need to hang it on the wall or to wrap it around the crib. It also comes with special tracks that you can place on a crib bar to hide the outlet cord which is really nice. After you download the app and connect to your home WIFI you can begin playing with all the cool features. Inside the app you can select music to play or sounds, review the event history that went on during the day (how often your baby cried and when), and though it’s optional, you can buy the wall sensor separately that goes with the camera that will send the Lollipop camera information about the room such as temperature, air quality and humidity.

Pros & Unique Features:

• Plays Remote Music & Sounds – Lullabies and smooth sounds such as ocean waves, static & more
• Has the Ability to Have Multiple Screens if you purchase other cameras 
• Cry Detection – Notifies you if the baby is crying right on your phone with a notification
• High Quality Night Vision 
• Multiple devices are allowed to view or use Lollipop with the same account! (Freddy and I both are notified on our phone when ever she cries!)
• Live View Sharing that you can setup with your family and friends (dad, mom, grandpa, grandma, whoever you give access too!) Even if your out and about and your baby is still at home you can see them on your phone which is sooo neat! 
• Able to turn your phone screen off and still hear the noise from the babies room without sucking battery life.
• Built in Microphone that you can literally press a button on your phone and talk to your baby through the Lollipop monitor!

Cons

• You may have to buy a stronger router. It sometimes says that the “connection is weak” and our main router is a bit away from the room, so keep that in mind where you set it up.
• There’s a bit of a visual and audio lag. I’d say it’s about a 1 to 2 second lag which really isn’t that bad.
• This is personal preference, but I wish it had the ability to have an external monitor that you could setup in your main bedroom as well as being able to monitor the baby from the phone. It’s just nice to have a monitor in one place especially if your phone isn’t charged or something.

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All in all, this baby monitor has been perfect for us and I really am so happy that we were able to collaborate with the company to test it out and let others know what we genuinely thought. Also their customer support is soo helpful so if you have any questions for them don’t hesitate to reach out!

Check it out here!

Now that Shy is officially sleeping through the night, we are able to monitor her, and we have everyone on a schedule, we can finally say after three babies in THREE years we are getting some sleep at night! 😀

Hope this helps at least one of you out there reading 🙂

Check out our Cactus Nursery here!

XOXO

Again, we thank Lollipop Baby Camera for sponsoring this post 🙂

Shop Shyla’s room links below: