What a great response to the giveaway! We had 302 comments and I loved reading all the tips. I chose the winners by random number generator and they are listed below with their comments. Kim, Moira, and Amanda won the Ebook Trio. And Sarah and Marixa won the Etsy Shop gift card. All the winner’s have been contacted via email. Check your spam folder, just in case.
Kim Posted April 9, 2011 at 10:02 am
When using cloth diapers, before pinning them together, twist the front. Cross your arms and grab opposite corners and uncross them. Make sure the crossed diaper is flat and comfy. It gives baby wonderful fit and also provides extra padding for wetting!
Moira Posted April 7, 2011 at 1:26 pm | Permalink | Edit
I am so excited for this giveaway!
Amanda Posted April 6, 2011 at 10:28 pm | Permalink | Edit
this is maybe a bit silly for advice, but grab a soap dispenser that pumps your dishsoap straight to the dish, already foamed and ready to scrub (if you don’t already have one). SO helpful for quickly cleaning pacifiers, bottles, spoons, even pumping supplies.
Sarah Posted April 8, 2011 at 10:17 am | Permalink | Edit
My tip: introduce water to your babies when you introduce solids. I always made water the default baby drink. Then, only introduce juice after they have developed a taste for water. Make sure you only give juice as an occassional treat. All my kids are water-drinkers, and have been since 6 months old.
This looks like a great give away! I would love some new sewing patterns!
marixa Posted April 5, 2011 at 1:56 pm | Permalink | Edit
I’d love to win some of the sewing patterns for nursing/maternity/slings.
My tip: Do what your instincts tell you to do or don’t do.
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I’d like to confess a learning moment I had 11 years ago when my first baby was born. I’d been given the book Babywise during my pregnancy and drank in every word. I knew I would be returning to work when my baby was 8 weeks old and I desperately needed her to sleep through the night. I followed every word in the book faithfully, and my baby cried one night for 3 hours. She didn’t do anything the book said she would and I was desperate and miserable. I prayed that night, that God would send his angels to surround her and comfort her, since I didn’t want to go to her and spoil her. After my prayer I felt a burning flood my whole body and the words entered my mind, “That’s why I gave her a mother.” I immediately went to my child and comforted her.
Later I found out that many of my friends that used the book also had difficulty. One sweet baby had to enter the hospital and have a feeding tube because she was so used to feeling hungry (4 hours was just too long for her) that she refused to eat at all. Another mother had an infant refuse to eat and she had to force feed her with a syringe to prevent starvation. Many, many mothers lost their milk supply after 4 months and had to switch to formula. The nursing schedule in the book just didn’t provide them enough stimulation to keep the milk going. These are just my personal acquaintances, but the book was very popular in my circle of friends. Not one family had a positive experience from it, and one boy in particular who is now a teenager, still suffers an attachment disorder from forced isolation in his playpen from the methods in the toddler book.
I’ve learned to cherish the middle of the night feedings and my babies have all chosen to eat every 2 hours give or take around the clock. The benefit of this is my fertility is absent when nursing is this frequent, often lasting a year to 14 months. This natural spacing has been a big blessing to our family and it ends the first night baby sleeps all night. Much after my first child was born, I learned that God placed a special hormone in mother’s milk to help calm and put the baby to sleep. It appears that He intended mother’s to nurse their little ones to sleep. If a baby does nurse to sleep, mother’s milk also has beneficial bacteria that prevents cavities from forming if any milk is left in the baby’s mouth. I do sleep with my babies until they are weaned, using a net safety rail on my bed to keep them safe. I’ve never had a problem moving the baby to his new bed when it was time, but I know part of that is due to the baby moving into a room with an older brother or sister and not to complete isolation.
I don’t talk about this experience a lot, because I know how and when to feed a baby is a very personal decision. But if any mother out there is feeling guilty for nursing her baby frequently, or to sleep, or for sleeping with her baby, I want to let her know that she has my full support.
Thank you thank you thank you! This post is just the encouragement that I need right now. My son is 11 months old and is still nursing at night and still in our bed. It’s a daily struggle within me trying to decide if should be sleep training him. I love bed sharing but I get so much critisism. Thank you again for the encouragement.
Mary, just wanted to encourage you in your sleep sharing with your son! We’ve shared a bed with all 8 of our children (the eldest was 4 months before I gave up keeping her in a crib in her own bed … only left her to cry once for 20 minutes, and decided it was ridiculous! LOL. But was a walking zombie from sitting up nursing her every 2 hours in a rocker then putting her back in the crib). My children are now 19, 17, 15, 13, 10, 8, 6 and 4 (in a few weeks) and no one sleeps in my bed anymore! With the first, I found she stayed a little longer than the others, because she moved out when the 2nd child was old enough to go together with her. We put a small single bed beside our big bed with a guard rail on it and I move the baby/toddler over when they nurse to sleep … move them RIGHT as they’re falling asleep. If you move them later, they usually wake up! LOL. All my children are very well adjusted and sleep wonderfully now. It wasn’t easy doing this all these years, but we wouldn’t change a thing. We have a wonderful, warm, close relationship with our children! Check out La Leche League for encouragement in this regard! Love from Susan
Angela, I completely agree. I feel like Babywise stole my first few months with Annie. I had this “idea” of how things were going to go, but Annie didn’t read the book. I cried and cried, thinking I was losing my mind because I couldn’t get her to do what she was supposed to. A wise friend told me to just feed her when she cried…..and my world got better. She was crying because she was hungry and I was trying to make her wait until it was “time.”
No one in our house slept well until Annie moved into bed with us. She’s a child that just needs to be around someone – not alone in her room. And now I’m a proud bed-sharer. And I’d challenge anyone that tells me it’s wrong. 🙂
Babywise is stupid. And I think it should be taken off the market. So sorry it affected you this way too. 🙁
Wow! I’ve never heard these perspectives before. I’ve been really blessed by the Babywise approach (at least the infant portion of the series) and do not think it is stupid at all. I do think that those following it have to be flexible, though, and not always try to go exactly by the book. Maybe they’ve updated it since it was first published, but the Preparation for Parenthood book teaches you to nurse the baby to sleep (well, at least when putting them to bed for the night). I think it was just the tool I needed for my little guy who took to it easily right away since I really don’t nap well and needed him to sleep well on his own. I guess all children are different and we need wisdom from God for each child. We’ll see how future children respond. It’s good to hear all of your perspectives in case I need to divert from the plan in the future. I’m sorry all of y’all have been so burned by it but hope that all of the readers considering it don’t just blow it off as ineffective or harmful because it has really worked for our family and so far, our son is thriving. I respect each of you for sharing your experiences and taking a stand for the method that you’ve found to work best for your children.
I think I came to the this conclusion as well over the years. I never read that book, but I love the effects of natural child spacing and having a happy baby (which equals a happy mom!) There are so many benefits which are too numerous to list here!
Or rather I should say, “There are so many benefits which are too numerous to list when I’d rather go to bed!” lol
Angela, THANK YOU for sharing with us! Your comments and very similar experience to my own make me want to cry.. but from relief and happiness that someone else has the same views as me! My girls both did not sleep through the night for a very long time and I had so many people tell me, “Babywise, babywise, babywise”. Which I had read but could not and would not follow to a tee. So I felt so helpless and lost. The only way I could get my first one to sleep, was chest to chest and then next to me. Which I would never mention to anyone for fear of getting chewed out. Now, as baby #3 comes, I feel more confident in my views as a mother and more prepared and ready to defend them as well. We use a cosleeper that hooks up next to our bed, so baby is safe and sound. And tell people that nursing like we do is our means of birth control (since we do not use any). So nursing when baby wants it is good for us as it helps space out our children. Also, we are the ones who have to get up in the middle of the night, not them! So thank you for the encouragement, because it is much needed when you have so many people tell you that you are spoiling your child. Praying for you lots as your next little one is getting ready to come into this world!!
Love hearing your experience, but have to say that Babywise was a huge blessing in our home with all four of our children. We were not regimented and inflexible with it(ex. I had one who was very colicky and could only sleep “on me” for a time, we would go shorter amounts of time if I knew they were in a growth spurt, everything would change if baby was sick, etc). I think the biggest thing for us was the feed, wake, sleep cycle where the baby eventually(some longer than others) learned that he/she didn’t need to eat to be able to sleep. And all of my little ones slept through the night within 3 months and I was a much better mama because I had the sleep I needed. I know that people take any “system” to an extreme and feel that’s very unfortunate, whether it be in feeding your baby or in breast vs bottle feeding or in homeschooling or in parenting style or in finances or in spritual disciplines. We need to use prayer for God’s wisdom and grace and seek out what He wants for each child in our home and try not to make good ideas in either camp laws that God hasn’t given in His Word.
I’m with Lindsay and Jennifer on this one. The key is to be flexible. The book doesn’t know YOUR child like you do. Babywise was very helpful to me with all four of my children and they all have done wonderfully! I recommend it all the time.
I also agree with Lindsay and Jennifer….the Babywise method saved my sanity as a new mother. I took the ideas in the book as a framework (not set in stone) to come up with something that worked for me/us. Both of my babies were sleeping all night by the time they were 2 months old. I definitely recommend the book but flexibility is key.
Thank you for this post!!! I have read Babywise, and every time I picked it up I found myself crying, thinking that I might follow this pattern of parenting instead of my instincts. We recently had our 9th baby, and our 2yo has made things very difficult…so, I’ve been contemplating the Babywise method yet again…feeling like if I could just schedule my baby, then I could handle the 2yo! You have given me freedom to follow my instincts and what I truly believe God wants us to do as mothers! FYI – my baby has slept through the night since about 4 weeks…in my bed…and just last night, she slept until 530 in her bassinet in my room…no Babywise methods used to receive these results!!!
Thank you for the great post! I’ve never read Babywise, so I don’t have an opinion on it, but I do know what works for our family. My girls (now 8 and 3 1/2) both slept safely in my bed when they were infants, and I nursed them both beyond a year. I felt that as long as we all got a good night’s sleep, then that’s what mattered the most.
I’m so sick of people telling me things like how bad it was that my baby slept in my bed, and that she’d be spoiled, etc etc. Both of my girls and I are very close and I always enjoyed cuddling with them in the mornings and it was comforting to me to have them next to me as well. Each baby is different and you have to trust your instincts and do what works for both of you.
Best wishes on baby #6! 🙂
Wonderful! Every baby is so very, very different. I never read Babywise…or maybe I did and forgot the title, but I have had and still do have many similar experiences.
I remember when our first (and second and…sixth) was born, some well-meaning people harped on how important it was to schedule schedule schedule, feeding only six times in a 24-hour period, every four hours by the clock, cutting back to five at three-months, and even weaning by six, laying them down to nap and walking away whether they screamed or not. I remember reading and being told the methods about getting children to sleep through the night. I remember trying them to no avail. I remember the summer we had to stay with my mom while my husband found us a new home 2000 miles away. My mom said if we were under her roof, we would do things her way. Do you know how it feels to listen to your children scream for two hours because they are scared, and you KNOW all it would take is five minutes lying beside Mama to get them to sleep securely? Sometimes they would even wake up crying in the morning, still distraught and lonely. (I don’t allow others to dictate our parenting anymore. I was young.) Even childless women had advice for getting our children to sleep, and STILL DO!!! (We’re having our seventh.) “Let ’em cry. Don’t co-sleep. Don’t spoil them. You’re not an all-night buffet. They manipulate you. It’s your own fault your children don’t sleep through the night at three months.” I’ve heard it all.
What I never heard was that I was the arms of God for that baby. A child needs to feel secure, fed, and warm, just like we need to feel secure, fed, and warm. Even though they can’t define it at the time, what the baby feels is love. Moving a baby from the warm, cozy womb to a cold, heartless crib where they are only fed every four hours REGARDLESS of how hard they cry out of pain, fear, and hunger is NOT right. Period. And another period. A whole lot of periods…….
Many people don’t understand our choices–co-sleeping (side-by-side beds is usually our method), setting up toddler beds in our room for littles as long as they want/need them, nursing on demand, nursing for a long, long, long time, etc. They also never experienced our first child. We tried the methods in the books, thinking maybe these experts knew something our parental instinct didn’t. Nothing worked. The crying never lessened. She would get so worked up she would throw up, and since we were very poor and had to go to the laundromat and didn’t have much in the way of bedding, that was a big deal. When we would try again as she got older, she would climb the crib to get to us–18 months, not three years. You don’t want an 18-month old scaling a crib.
Babies are not little robots. No two are the same. Some are naturally insecure, through no fault of the parents. Why push them away to battle that insecurity on their own? Others would almost rather be left alone. So be it! We don’t have children so we can sleep eight hours a night. Yes, sleep deprivation can be an issue. Although, I seem to get a LOT more sleep when my infants are small than do my friends (or their husbands) who insist on feeding only in a chair or walking a swaddled baby to sleep and then transferring them to a crib. I keep hearing, “I don’t know how you do it?” or “My bed is a no-baby zone,” and then those same people complain about how tired they are or decide to have no more children because they can’t handle the lack of sleep. Meanwhile, I wake up enough to start to nurse and go right back to sleep with a sweet little baby lying on my chest, or shifting her from her adjoining bed to mine and back. (OF COURSE, co-sleeping has to be done responsibly and safely.)
Different methods work for different families, but ignoring the obvious needs of a small baby, or ANY baby, is never right. I wish someone had told me these things 15 years ago instead of learning them ourselves as we go. But at least we can share with others. Thank you for sharing.