Baby

Nest Cam vs. Yi camera – Yi puts Nest to shame as the superior baby monitoring camera

October 15, 2017 by M.B. Grant Leave a Comment

We compare the pricey Nest Cam with paywall features to the inexpensive Yi camera that comes with everything included

Our Yi Dome Camera 1080p HD rating: 5/5

Yi camera: loads of bang for your buck

It all started when Mr. Homeupgraded’s brother got a Yi camera for watching his betta fish.

At the time, we had a Nest Cam pointed into our daughter’s crib for stealthy baby spying. But, after being on the receiving end of a bunch of high quality fish videos and snapshots, we realized that a Yi camera, which retails for about 1/3rd the price of a single Nest Cam, would make a much better baby monitor than Nest Cam.

Since we’re not rich (see: baby), we don’t shell out $10/month for Nest Aware, which is the only way to review footage from earlier or save clips from your Nest Cam.

However, Yi lets you do all that and more – for just the cost of the camera. It saves clips to an optional SD card (which you buy separately) so you can review clips and pick which ones you want to save to your phone. You can also share the stream, and it’s easy to take snapshots with a single button touch – all features that the Nest Cam either doesn’t have, or locks up behind Nest’s $10/month Nest Aware subscription. (Yi offers a cloud service, too, if you want off-site backup and more footage than you can fit onto the SD card.)

Basically, the fish had a better camera than our baby. There was only one thing left to do: we bought a Yi Dome Camera and put it to the test as our new baby spy cam.

TL;DR: The Yi camera put Nest to shame. I think I’m going to eBay my collection of Nest Cams and start over with Yi.

See the Yi camera on Amazon.com

Yi Dome Camera at a glance

1080p HD video (there’s also a cheaper 720p version with the same features)
Complete 360° coverage – 112° wide-angle lens, 345° horizontal & 115° vertical rotation range for that you can navigate manually (through the app) or set up to automatically scan the room – you can also get a Yi camera that doesn’t rotate or pan but the price is the same
High quality night vision (up to 3 meters in pitch dark) thanks to 8 built-in 940nm infrared LED beads, with no LED glare (some cameras have a brighter red ring of LEDs for night vision)
Crying baby sensor sends a “Crying baby” alert to your phone
2-way audio sounds about as good as being on speakerphone
Optional SD card storage – supports up to 32GB card (here’s ours) so you can save videos to the camera
Optional cloud service – for a monthly fee, store unlimited camera footage in Yi’s cloud

Yi Dome Camera unboxed

What’s in the box

Yi Dome Camera itself
White micro USB power cord, with micro usb on one end and usb on the other
USB adapter
Mounting base and screws for mounting the camera on a wall or ceiling
Setup instruction and a couple advertisements for other Yi products

The cord seems to be about 5′ long, which is great for running it behind the baby’s dresser.

Nest app vs. Yi app

Both apps look nice, but if you compare feature sets it’s no contest: Yi beats Nest, hands down.

On the left, you’ll see our Nest Cam app offers very little beyond viewing a live stream of footage. If you pay Nest’s $10/month subscription fee, you’d get little thumbnails representing stored video clips. If you don’t pay their fee, you get half a screen of wasted space and no way to look back in time.

On the right is the Yi Home app, with buttons for useful actions. You can toggle audio muting, record video from the live stream, turn the microphone on/off, take a snapshot that gets saved directly to your phone’s photos, and switch to full-screen mode. There’s the timeline you can navigate to see recent events, and those same events are saved in a list elsewhere in the app. You can adjust whether the camera streams in high definition or standard, and even view its transfer speed with your WiFi.

Here’s a little guide I made for the Yi control menu in the center of the screen. There are even more options, but these are the ones I use most of the time when checking on my baby.

Look at all the things Yi can do!

Yi gives you “premium” features for the cost of the camera – no monthly fee

These features are all available for free on a Yi camera.

There is no free Nest equivalent. Seriously, none – if you want to grab a pic of what you’re looking at through your Nest Cam, you have to take a screenshot with your phone. (And you probably have to turn on device rotation and actually turn your phone 90 degrees if you want the screenshot to be full-screen.)

If you want to see what happened an hour ago, you’re out of luck – unless you’re a Nest Aware subscriber. If you want to save video as something is happening live in front of your camera, there’s no way to do it – unless you’re a subscriber.

Basically, Nest charges $10/month for features you get for free with a Yi camera, and a Yi camera costs about 1/3rd what a Nest Cam does.

More things to love about Yi camera

There’s a full-screen mode in the Yi app and it’s accessed via button in the Yi app. You don’t have to turn off the portrait orientation lock on your phone itself. This makes it very fast to get into full-screen mode and take advantage of every inch of your phone’s screen.

Event timeline or continuous recording

The timeline of events makes it easy to review recent clips by dragging your finger around in the timeline. These events are also saved to the Alerts tab of the app, where you can review and download clips.

Alternatively, you can set the camera to constantly record. It records in a loop and automatically overwrites old footage to record new footage. I’m not sure yet how much footage it holds – I turned on continuous recording 5 days ago and it still hasn’t started overwriting old footage. With a 32GB SD card, it holds at least 5 days worth of footage.

My Yi camera is set to continuously record, which lets me scrub around the timeline to review the past 5+ days worth of footage.

Save clips is easy

If you’re reviewing footage and you see your kid doing something cute, it’s easy to drag the timeline to where you want the clip to begin and record off the recorded footage. The clip gets saved to your phone.

Compare this to Nest Cams, which are really only for live streaming unless you cough up a monthly $10 fee per camera for their cloud backup storage. It’d be nice if Nest would let me back up to an SD card or my local network storage, but no, it has to be their expensive cloud solution or nothing at all. :\

Yi cameras also offer live video recording. If you see something interesting happening, you can tap a button and start recording instantly. This video is saved to the camera’s SD card and your immediately downloaded to your phone.

Share your stream

It’s easy to share your camera’s stream with family or friends. Just have them create a Yi account and then invite them via email. (You can also revoke access just as easily.)

Alert log and crying baby alert

Crying Baby alert. It lags behind the actual cry by about a minute, but so far it has correctly identified cries (and only occasionally mistaken other noises for cries).

The notification comes with an awkwardly formatted timestamp. This cry happened at 12:24pm.

If you want to review all the recent crying baby alerts, they get saved into the Activity Alerts tab for quick review.

A variety of cloud backup options. If you need the extra peace of mind granted by uploading your footage to a cloud, then Yi’s cloud service has several options to pick from.

The most intriguing option is the uploading mode, where you can select to upload only motion detected videos for up to five devices or you can upload a 24/7 stream from one camera. If you have five Yi cameras, that’s a screaming deal compared to what it would cost to have Nest Aware on five Nest Cams. You also get the first month of Yi cloud for free.

Yi’s subscription plans are available in the app itself:

We don’t have the subscription, since we only use the camera to see if the baby’s awake or just making sounds in her sleep. We like to review footage from the past night, but we don’t have much need to monitor her crib 24/7 or make backups of her sleeping.

Yi vs. Nest hardware

Both our Nest Cams and our Yi camera are 1080p. The image quality is great in both daylight and nighttime.

There is, however, one very noticeable difference between the two cameras: the Nest has a ring of red LEDs around its lens when it’s in night vision mode, but the Yi camera does not have these red LEDs.

This is fantastic because our baby would stare at the Nest Cam in the dark, probably because the red ring catches her attention. We haven’t found her staring at the Yi camera in the dark. Whatever Yi did to avoid the red ring of LEDs in the dark, I’m glad they did it.

Also, you can even disable the Yi’s little blue “on” light (through the app) to make the camera completely invisible in the dark.

Things we don’t love

The Yi camera is awesome enough to reward it 5 stars, but there are just a couple things we hope they improve:

The camera can’t look “down” enough to see into a crib without some assistance. Even though the camera has a huge range of motion, it couldn’t look “down” enough to see into a crib that it’s about 2 feet away from. We had to slide something under our camera to get a good view of Peach’s crib. We will probably mount the camera on the wall, eventually, but for now… it’s gotta live on the dresser…with a book halfway under it.

The camera snapshot shown on the app’s main page is stale. It might be hours out of date when you open the app. (It seems to display whatever you were last looking at, or where you left the timeline.)

You have to tap the preview to get an updated image. I suspect this stale image problem is a bug that might get fixed in the future.

The bottom line

It’s like getting all the stuff Nest charges you a monthly fee for, for free – and that’s after you buy a camera that’s 1/3rd the price of a Nest Cam. Even if you need a cloud backup, Yi’s plans are more reasonably priced, especially for multiple devices.

We love the dome camera’s ability to pan the room, and at the time we got it, the dome camera was priced the same as the stationary Yi camera. Heck, you can even get a 4-pack of Yi cameras for less than the price of a single Nest Cam.

Best of all, we think it’s a fantastic baby monitor. The image quality is excellent – even in the dark and through her crib slats, we can tell which way she’s facing, if she’s still got her pacifier in, and listen for her breathing on the microphone. The cry alerts are useful, too.

If you need a great baby or home surveillance camera, get a Yi camera and a 32GB SD card. You won’t regret it.

Shop for the Yi camera on Amazon.com

Fisher Price 4-in-1 Step ‘n Play Piano is a musical baby toy that won’t drive you crazy

January 8, 2017 by M.B. Grant 1 Comment

Sometimes we take a break from home automation and speakers to tell you about a cool new thing in our baby’s life. Today, we’re looking at the Fisher-Price 4-in-1 Step ‘n Play Piano activity center.

5 / 5 stars

Now that our daughter (known as Peach on this blog) can hold her head up, she’s ready to sit in her Fisher Price 4-in-1 Step ‘n Play Piano! We love this musical activity center and best of all, she loves it, too.

The music is pleasing and there’s plenty to do, even with the audio turned off.

Peach is 3 months / 15 lbs in this photo. She’s exactly on the 50th percentile line at her pediatrician visits so she’s perfectly average in terms of size for her age.

Step ‘n Play Piano short demo videos

Here’s my hand pressing and spinning the “drums”, changing the play mode to “Long Play”, and hitting keys while my 3-month-old watches.

Here’s “Long Play” mode, a 10-minute loop of songs (3 songs have lyrics, the rest are just synth goodness). While in “Long play”, you can still hit the keys and hear an audio reaction.

Finally, here’s a quick demo of the individual keys:

Why we love the Step ‘n Play Piano

There’s a lot to love about this musical activity center!

Easy assembly

It took my partner about an hour to put it together (he surprised me with it when I woke up from a nap).

Mostly you just snap pieces together, but you’ll need a Philips screwdriver to open the battery compartment (and three AA batteries). The batteries install on the underside of the “drums” console.

If you get this before you give birth, go ahead an assemble it because even though “an hour” doesn’t sound like a time-consuming project, it will be when your baby is 8 weeks old and doesn’t sleep for more than 20 minutes and you will gaze longingly at its box, wishing it was assembled.

Use it early, use it for a long time

The “4-in-1” refers to this play center’s various configurations.

For your really little baby (like, 4 weeks – 12 weeks), you can use it like a tummy time mat. (Note that the mat itself doesn’t play notes – it’s the base of the play center that plays notes, and the mat just sits on top.)

Here’s a model baby showing us how it’s done.

Once your baby is comfortable sitting upright and holding up her own head (for us, that was around 8 weeks), she can graduate to the chair. At 3 months old, our Peach just kind of sits in the chair and looks around (she doesn’t pick up the toys yet) and every once in a while, she accidentally hits a note on the pad. Fun times, I tells ya.

Later, you can remove the chair entirely and let your kiddo stand in the middle where the chair used to be. Many reviewers say their 2 year olds play with the Step ‘n Play piano so we’re looking forward to a good 2+ years of use out of this thing (possibly longer if we have another baby). The design certainly seems rugged enough to hold up to some good hitting and banging, and it seems difficult to tip over, except by someone well over the intended age range.

Soft chair edge

The edge around the chair is firm but still pretty soft, which is great because at three months old, Peach is still prone to bashing her face into things. The chair spins easily, too.

We also have the Bright Starts Bounce Bounce Baby activity center and its chair has a harder edge and is more difficult to turn, so Peach can’t turn the chair around on her own in that one.

A great-sounding musical toy

All of this toy’s musical notes are electronically generated. There are some toys that click or clack but the notes and songs only play with three AA batteries loaded into the console.

Peach’s dad is very musically inclined so that’s a big part of why we wanted a musical toy for her in the first place. Specifically, we wanted a musical toy where the keys correspond to actual notes, not a full song that plays out. This is surprisingly hard to find, and it’s why we also bought a mini Casio keyboard to play with her instead of any of the numerous “baby keyboards” that play full songs when you hit the notes.

The big plastic keys (red, orange, yellow, green) and the touch-sensitive regions on the base (covered by the printed key mat) make up an F major chord (F A C F). In layman’s terms, this means they sound good when played together.

These “drums” play sounds, too.

Three play modes

[From the manual]

Short Play – Press or spin the turntables to hear drum riffs. Press the piano keys on the upper rail or step on the piano mat to hear musical ditties. Press the music notes for sound effects.

Long Play – Plays approximately 10 minutes of music! Step on the piano mat while music is playing for fun lights. Press the piano keys, spin or press the turntables or press the music notes to hear more sounds!

Baby Makes Music – Spin the turntable to play drum riffs or press for drum sounds! Press the piano keys on the upper rail or step on the piano mat to play piano sounds. Press the music notes for more musical sounds.

Acoustic toys, too

There’s also a bunch of “acoustic” toys that don’t correspond to any digital sound. The little slidey piece and the plastic ball on the guitar don’t generate notes, the mirror is just for looking into, and the rattle makes a nice acoustic rattle sound.

Clockwise, from upper left:

Shake the microphone (it’s a rattle)
Slide the plastic notes (they click)
Press the red, orange, yellow, and green keys to play notes or sound effects, depending on what mode the console is set to
Console (removable, contains batteries): press the yellow button, spin the red one, change the audio mode
Guitar: roll the ball, slide the slider
Mirror: a warping fun-house mirror
Plastic tabs: flip back and forth
Tambourine: another fun rattle toy

Middle:

The squishy seat sits in a larger plastic piece that glides along rails. There’s also a clear plastic tube full of little plastic balls to tumble, a snack tray, and some discs that slide along an elevated track.

The tambourine and “microphone” (it’s a rattle) detach from the base and click into the removable control console.

You can detach the rattle and tambourine like so:

And plug them into the battery-powered console, which is also removable:

Since we essentially live in two places, with regular trips to Grandma’s, this detachable portion is really cool. This is the same part that holds the batteries, and all the same songs play if you turn it on.

Just one drawback

It doesn’t disassemble easily, so don’t count on flattening it to put it away between play sessions. We keep it at our weekend place because there’s no room in our city apartment, but if it folded up we would totally bring it with us everywhere.

Other than that, though, this activity center is great – it’s a safe place to put baby down for a few minutes while you fold some laundry and it looks like it’ll be entertaining our little one well into her toddler years.

Newborn sleep from birth to three months: what worked for us

December 24, 2016 by M.B. Grant 1 Comment

Our beloved daughter just turned three months old! She was born September 2016, at 40 weeks +4 days and 9 lbs 3 oz – full term and healthy. Everything’s been great… except sleep.

Sleep has never been easy with this baby. Hell, I wouldn’t even call it medium or hard difficulty – this baby is (was?) a sleep sadist. (We love her anyway.)

She had her day/nights flipped for nearly two months
She struggled with gastrointestinal distress that resulted in constant grunting and groaning (especially when laying down)
She cried whenever she wasn’t touching another human

We’re not “done” by any means yet, but the 3 month mark seems like a good point to reflect on what worked and what didn’t for us and offer hope to other parents (or at least our future selves if/when we have another baby).

This post is about what our newborn slept in (rocker, crib, etc) at each week, when she slept, what she was swaddled in, and the overall quality of (adult) sleep at the time. This post is over 2000 words long and detailed – exactly the thing I wanted to read when I was bleary-eyed and desperate for hope that my newborn would go the f#*! to sleep.

This is what worked for us: your baby may vary™.

0-2 days old: drowsy newborn don’t care where she sleeps

… but only for an hour at a time.

Peach came home from the hospital at about 30 hours old. She slept in short bursts – twenty minutes here, an hour at most – waking often to demand food and diaper changes.

Stupidly, we spent these days trying to sleep at night and be awake during the day like we always did before. 10pm rolled around, we put her in the crib and hopped into bed like we always did. Cue screaming, crying. The sleep deprivation quickly added up.

Here she is at 2 days old asleep in her Graco Travel Lite and swaddled in a Summer Infant SwaddlePod (and blanket). We got her swaddled and down… but it didn’t last long.

She went back to the hospital at 48 hours of age for a 2 night stay in the NICU to lower her bilirubin level. She was jaundiced and fighting off the effects of ABO blood type incompatibility (I’m O+, she’s A+). I pumped and we supplemented with formula and, curiously, she slept fairly well in the NICU. Her early-life difficulties with eating may have contributed to her poor sleep those first two nights home.

She came back home at 4 days old, healthy and normal, but the weekend she was in the NICU was our last two nights of sleep for a long time.

Days 4 – 9: the sleepless slog

Torture grade sleep deprivation. That’s what the first full week at home with our newborn felt like. 🙁

Of course, our initial plan was for Peach to sleep (swaddled and on her back) in her Graco Travel Lite Pack ‘n Play until she was too big for it, right next to our bed. We would sleep next to her in the big bed and we would be one, big, happy, well-rested family.

The AAP would smile in approval.

Notions we were quickly disabused of:

Newborn sleeps at night. Not ours. 12am-5am was her most wakeful period for nearly two months
Newborn sleeps quietly. Ours grunted and groaned so loud. The white noise machine and earplugs couldn’t drown it out and we gave up on sharing a bedroom. (She outgrew this gradually. Around week 9 I noticed she was mostly over it, and by week 12 she has all but stopped.)
Newborn sleeps on a flat surface. A flat surface was a great way to make our baby shriek.

Around 4 days of age, our newborn lost all tolerance for laying on a flat surface. Instant screaming any time we put her down in the Pack ‘n Play.

We tried everything. We put her down drowsy, put her down awake, put her down sound asleep. All the swaddling and white noise in the world couldn’t save us. We wasted a lot of time and energy trying to make her sleep at night (in her crib) and she just nope’d us at every turn. She also had some kind of horrible gastrointestinal distress that caused her to curl up her legs and grunt whenever she was put down.

I sat in my computer chair (we didn’t have a sofa yet) and held her for hours.

Sleeping in shifts

We gave up on the idea of having us both sleep at night, together. We started sleeping in rolling shifts – someone watched her for 6-8 hours, then we switched.

One of us sat awake with her in the living room meeting her demands for food, clean diapers, and a soft body to lay on. The other one slept in the bedroom with the door shut. We barely saw each other. Dirty dishes and laundry piled up to the ceiling. Meals were scarce. Day and night lost all meaning. Misery and desperation set in. It’s hard to overstate what an assault on comfort and sanity this first week was.

(We love our baby dearly, which is probably all that carried us through this challenging time.)

We Googled every aspect of newborn sleep and saw a lot of people saying the Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play was the only thing their baby would sleep in. By this point I’d have paid a thousand bucks for a night’s sleep.

9 days old: the “bacon chair” saves us all

Our Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play arrived on Peach’s 9th day.

We dubbed it “the bacon chair” for its vibration mode, indicated by a “wavy lines” icon that resembled bacon (or at least it did to us in our sleep-deprived state).

This Fisher-Price Deluxe Vibrating Rock ‘n Play Sleeper is our specific model and the one you’ll see in our photos, but Fisher-Price offers many Rock ‘n Play models, and stock and prices are constantly fluctuating (as we discovered when we bought our second rocker).

It rocks, it folds flat, it’s the only thing our newborn would sleep in!

AAP recommendations be damned, the first time we put her down in it she slept for 4 HOURS straight.

Sweet, delicious sleep.

She LOVED the vibration mode. We had plenty of opportunities to try it with and without “bacon mode” going, and as soon as we flicked it on, she settled.

Our first Rock ‘n Play runs on a single D battery at a time and the battery lasts forever. (Seriously – we got nearly two months out of the first battery, and we accidentally left it on overnight on multiple occasions.)

Curiously, our second Rock ‘n Play runs on a C battery and has an automatic timeout on its vibration mode. It runs maybe 20 or 30 mins before shutting itself off. The C battery died a lot faster than the D battery, despite the auto time-out.

10-14 days old: brief sleeps, no overnights

We still lived and slept in shifts, but the rocker gave the awake person a break from constant baby-holding. It was so easy compared to what had come before.

The AAP doesn’t recommend these inclined rockers for overnight sleep. They’re associated with flat heads and neck problems. But that’s not us – we didn’t achieve “overnight sleep” with this rocker, and we didn’t drop her in it recreationally.

All we got was the ability to put the baby down somewhere without her shrieking.

We made our peace with the risks vs. rewards of using the rocker by doing the following:

We limited Peach to 8 hours out of every 24 in the rocker, and they weren’t contiguous
We stayed next to her while she was in the rocker; the person watching her was either awake next to her or snoozing on the sofa next to her
We turned her head ourselves because left to her own devices, she’d have laid exclusively on the right side of her head
We still put Peach down on her flat Pack ‘n Play mattress a few times a day
No “awake” time in the rocker – the rocker was just for sleeping

This was the only bed where she could have some peace, too – she didn’t scream or struggle endlessly with gastrointestinal distress while she was in her rocker.

2 weeks – 4 weeks old: some chunky naps, but not at night

Around 2 weeks, Peach started sleeping in her rocker for a few hours at a time somewhat predictably. Not at like, a predictable time of day, but she started a cycle of diaper ➔ wide awake➔ feed until drowsy ➔ sleep for an hour or two. However, she was wide awake from 1am ’til about 5am, no matter what we did to encourage her to flip it around.

This is also when we got serious about swaddling. We had been half-assing the swaddling effort until now because it didn’t seem to make any difference, but when we switched to the Ergobaby Swaddler (she was outgrowing the S ummer Infant SwaddleMe Pod) she totally got with the program.

Erobaby Swaddler: part straightjacket, part pajamas – ALL SLEEP

My partner and I continued sleeping in shifts. However, since the baby could now sleep somewhat independently, it gave both of us many more opportunities to catch up on sleep. We actually got to see each other once in a while!

(Any scraps of “free time” went to keeping up with the chore load. Anyone who says “ignore the chores and sleep” must have a lot more clothing, towels, and dishes than we do because if we didn’t keep doing chores, we’d be eating over the sink naked.)

Here’s Peach at [almost exactly] 4 weeks old snubbing her Graco Travel Lite crib in favor of her rocker.

I found it isolating to live entirely on baby’s schedule and the accumulated effects of living this way started to get to me around the end of her second month. I often found my own waking hours at odds with daylight hours and store hours. I had no free time to sit at a computer or do anything that might be described as fun. We had just a few visitors during this first month, and I had to will myself awake for their visits during what would usually be my sleeping time.

It was hard.

One bright spot: my partner’s mother and brother came to stay with us for a couple days and took the night shift, which let us both get somewhat caught up on sleep.

To anyone wondering what you can do to help new parents: care for the baby while they sleep. BEST GIFT ON THE PLANET.

4-7 weeks old: found our stride… sort of

We carried on for the next several weeks swaddling at night, napping her during the day, and just generally doing whatever she needed when she demanded it. We still lived in shifts.

We found our stride in terms of balancing all the new household chores (so much nursing, laundry, bottles to wash, pumping supplies to clean, baby appointments to get to, meals to prepare…) and just basically endured this time with as much patience as we could muster.

Life was just a huge crush of chores and baby care at this time. Every few days we got out for a walk during daylight hours and it felt like the best thing ever.

7 weeks: the baby sleeps at night!

When Peach was nearing 7 weeks old, two things happened:

My partner (her father) went back to work 4 days a week
She slept at night!!

MIRACLE.

Okay, so it wasn’t all the way through (to this day, 3 months in, we’ve never had an “all the way through” night of sleep).

This glorious nighttime sleep happened where all her sleep was happening at this point in her life: her Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play.

She fell asleep around midnight and stayed asleep until about 4am. I nursed her, she slept another hour or so, I nursed her again and then she slept some more. That’s it – not “through the night”, but the mere fact that she slept during nighttime hours (and I slept, too) meant that I was awake mostly during daylight hours for the first time in nearly two months. As with all things sleep-related with this baby, things got better, then went back a little, then got better again. Over time, the trend was towards better and better sleep every night and longer naps.

(The next night’s sleep was crap, but then the next one was okay, and it kind of went from there.)

9 weeks: she sleeps on her back in her Pack ‘n Play!

Driven mostly by concern that she was sleeping in the rocker too much, my partner put Peach down in the Pack ‘n Play one night on his watch and – amazingly – she slept flat on her back for most of the night. (She still woke twice for feeding, but she fell back asleep afterwards.) She was swaddled, gently placed on her back (butt first, then head), pacifier’d, and shhh’d.

She finally slept the way the AAP wants babies to sleep.

Sleeping on her back success kit:

Graco Travel Lite Crib with the default pad (covered in a pillowcase)
Ergobaby Swaddler
LectroFan white noise machine
MAM Newborn Start pacifier
12 hour diaper
a hat

Now, we’d tried all this stuff before – so I think the key to success here was her age. Her feedings had gotten bigger around this time (we had just gone up from 2oz bottles to bigger bottles holding 4-5oz) for her non-nursing feeds, we’d become better at burping her (or she got better at burping?), and she just got easier to put down for sleep.

Quick note on diapers:

We bought these “12 hour” Huggies diapers on accident. (We just meant to go up a size.) But once we overcame our sleepiness long enough to read the box, we realized these might be good for overnight use. They hold a literal ocean of pee and our baby doesn’t seem bothered by it. As far as we can tell, she stopped waking due to a wet diaper.

I wish we’d considered a different diaper brand earlier – if your newborn isn’t sleeping so well, try changing your brand or style of diaper.

10 weeks: back in the bedroom – and at night!

Emboldened by our success getting her to sleep on her back, we did something daring: we both slept in the bedroom (together! at night! in the same bed! not on the sofa!)

And… it worked! She slept fine without one of us on the sofa next to her. A 10 weeks old, we finally had a baby sleeping at night in her crib and waking just 2-3 times before morning.

The mornings are still a little rough – both of us would rather sleep a good 9 hours without any middle-of-the-night interruptions, but this is so much better than anything that had come before.

Oh, and we got a new swaddle:

Somewhere around 11 weeks it became apparent that she was busting out of her Ergobaby Swaddle, so we switched to the SwaddleMe Original Swaddle in Large size. It’s easy to put on and cute to look at. (Two swaddles is plenty, unless your baby is particularly leaky).

12 weeks: sleeping in the Pack ‘n Play, napping in the rocker

So here we are in late December with a baby that’s just over three months old.

Her routine is much more predictable, give or take a couple hours on any of these:

6:00am – awake for a big morning feeding and diaper change
8:00am-9:00am – sometimes she falls back asleep during this time
9:00am-12:00pm – awake time (I read to her, play with her, feed her, etc)
12:30pm-3:30pm – the big afternoon nap (this is when I eat, shower, move laundry, etc)
3:30-7:00pm – awake time, usually – unless the afternoon nap runs long
7:00-9:00pm – pre-bedtime nap
9:00pm – fussing and crying, feeding, putting her into her swaddle
10:00pm – 2:00am – first sleep of the night
2:00am – mid-sleep feeding (happens anywhere between 1:30am and 4:00am)
2:30-am – 6:00am – second sleep of the night (sometimes there’s a second waking in here somewhere)

She naps (unswaddled) in her Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play and sleeps (swaddled) overnight in her Graco Pack ‘n Play + Dream on Me mattress if we’re at the apartment or overnight in her Graco Travel Lite Crib if we’re at the house or grandma’s house.

And that’s it! For now, anyway.

The Rock ‘n Play may not be meant for overnight sleep, but it sure helped bridge the gap from her birth to the time when she was finally able to sleep on a flat mattress like she’s supposed to.

I think a lot of her newfound ability to sleep at night is owed to her simply maturing a bit, so the first three months are definitely a time of survival and doing whatever you can to get some rest, wherever you can.

Graco Pack ‘n Play Bassinet vs. Pack ‘n Play Travel Lite with Stages

October 21, 2016 by M.B. Grant 3 Comments

First thing I learned when shopping for an affordable, travel capable crib was that Graco makes a ton of Pack N Play models. You can easily waste hours comparing them all, but I wasted those hours for you and am here to report back.

I own both the Pack N Play bassinet (pictured at left) and the Pack N Play Travel Lite with Stages. The full-size Pack N Play is in the living room, the Travel Lite is in the bedroom.

The full-size Pack N Play is good at being useful for a long time; as your baby grows, you can use it as a play pen. Before that, it’s a huge comfy bassinet.

The Graco Travel Lite crib is good at being smaller – the full-size Pack N Play won’t fit in my bedroom, so the Travel Lite is our bedroom bassinet. However, even though it can also become a playpen, baby will outgrow it sooner.

How they’re alike

Both Pack N Play models are designed for babies ages birth to toddler. Both have a suspended sleep surface several inches from the top edge for babies that are too young to pull themselves up on the edge. This suspended sleep surface is great because it means you don’t have to bend very far to pick up or put down your baby, which you will do like 100 times a day in the early weeks.

There are cheaper Pack N Play models, but they lack the (removable) suspended “bassinet” feature. I wouldn’t want to bend almost all the way to the floor to pick up and put down my baby. If you get the bassinet model, then you’ve got a piece of furniture that can hold your newborn from birth to toddler years.

pack_n_play_bassinet

When your baby grows, the bassinet part can be removed and the pad placed at the bottom of the Pack n Play. Now the bassinet is a playpen, and get over 2 years of usefulness out of a single thing. Cool!

In summary, both the Pack n Play bassinet and the Travel Lite:

Are safe for newborns and infants
Are easy to assemble/take down
Have a foldable “sleeping pad”
Become a playpen if you take out the suspended bedding part

Pack n Play bassinet review, pros and cons

Baby B definitely prefers the big Pack N Play to the Travel Lite. That could be because we use a Dream on Me mattress inside the Pack N Play. This Dream on Me 3″ mattress is noticeably softer and more supportive than the pad that comes with the Pack N Play. However, it’s not so soft and mushy so as to be unsafe – it’s just got a nicer feel to it, especially with a lightly padded mattress cover.

PROS

Fits the Dream on Me mattress, which Baby B seems to prefer sleeping on
Baby can lay at any orientation inside it
Larger play area – 39.50 x 28.25 x 29.00 inches
Will last longer into baby’s childhood
Cheaper than the Travel Lite (despite being larger and generally more useful)
Folds up easily, travels fairly well (that is, in a car – I wouldn’t carry this thing recreationally)
Wheels on one end for easy moving
Looks nice, lots of color palettes available
Big enough to use it as a makeshift changing table that baby can’t roll out of

Baby B is 10 lbs / 4 weeks old in this photo. As you can see, there’s plenty of room for her to grow and still sleep in this Pack N Play. When she starts pulling herself up, we’ll lower the mattress to the bottom of the crib by removing the bassinet insert.

pack_n_play_as_a_changing_table

CONS

Doesn’t fit in our bedroom
Included sleeping pad is hard and rather Spartan; we had to buy a better mattress along with sheets and a mattress pad for it before Baby B would actually sleep on it peacefully
Not a full-size crib, so forget about ramps and bedding intended for actual cribs

Pack n Play Travel Lite review, pros and cons

Honestly, unless your room just can’t hold the standard sized Pack N Play, there’s not much reason to get the Travel Lite. However, if you can’t fit the normal size one, this is the next best thing and way more awesome than similarly sized competitor products, such as a standalone bassinet that baby will outgrow within a few months. At least the Travel Lite can become a play pen (or fairly deep storage, I suppose!) as baby outgrows it; other co-sleepers and bassinets I came close to buying are really only good at being a baby bed.

PROS

Fits in smaller spaces – 20% smaller than normal Graco playards (23.2 x 33.5 x 32.2 inches)
Included sleeping pad is softer than normal Pack n Play’s sleeping pad, but not as soft as a Dream on Me mattress
Includes “canopy” cover
Wheels on one end of it for easy moving

CONS

No obvious equivalent to the Dream on Me mattress that fits in the larger Pack N Play
Sheets for its pad are not readily available; I used a set of stretchy 20″x30″ jersey pillow cases from Target
Baby will outgrow sooner
Pricier than a normal Pack N Play
Only available in one color palette right now

Baby B is about 9 lbs 3 oz in this photo. As you can see, she will outgrow the Travel Lite long before she outgrows the bigger Pack N Play.

Which one should I get?

Unless it just won’t fit in the space you have, get the full size Pack N Play.

It’ll last longer into your child’s life, it’s cheaper, and there are more mattress options if your baby hates the included sleeping pad like mine does. It travels just as well as the Travel Lite crib and is just as portable around your home.

My recommended “Pack N Play starter kit”

graco_recommended_pack_n_play_set

Here’s my exact Pack N Play setup, mattress and all.

This particular combination of play yard, mattress, sheets, and pad is the result of a couple hours exploring Amazon’s “Customers also bought”, checking dimensions, materials, and user reviews. The Dream on Me mattress fits perfectly and snugly – no gaps for baby to fall into.

It’s really easy to accidentally end up on a product meant for a full-size crib, so always check dimensions before buying.

To save you trial and error, here are links to the exact Pack N Play play yard and bedding I use:

Pack N Play bassinet – mine’s “Pasadena”, but as long as yours has the bassinet option it should be similar (if not identical) to mine
3″ Dream on Me mattress – fits perfectly (no gaps) and my baby actually sleeps on it (flat on her back, no less)
American Baby Company 100% cotton sheets – buy at least two so you can always have a clean one ready to go (I have 4)
Waterproof mattress pad for a bit of softness (make sure yours is 27 inches x 39 inches x 5 inches). You can probably get by without a mattress pad, but the Dream on Me mattress has a plastic surface and I think the extra bit of cotton from the mattress pad adds warmth and comfort without adding any hazardous bulk.

Note on mattress safety: Whether you decide to use a supplemental mattress is a personal decision – do your research and don’t use (or stop using) anything that makes you feel insecure about your baby’s safety. Do not use a mattress that does not fit snugly on all sides, and don’t add padding or blankets beyond the mattress and sheets.