A New Mom's Story: 'My Baby Wanted to Be Back in My Body!'
The fourth in a series of profiles of real moms with real challenges…who were helped by SNOO.
Eleanor read The Happiest Baby on the Block before her impatient little daughter, Caroline, decided to be born 3 weeks early. She well understood the book’s main ideas: That snug swaddling, rocking, shushing and sucking help babies calm and sleep. And, that new moms need to give new babies plenty of 4th-trimester care mimicking the soothing sound and motion babies love inside…before they are born.
She wasn’t even thrown for a loop when her usually calm infant suddenly got a whole lot fussier. Caroline’s colicky symptoms ramped up around her original due date, just as Dr. Karp’s baby guide had advised was common for preemies and babies born before 40 weeks.
Eleanor and her husband Francisco worked hard to do their very best womb impersonations, “We wrapped her a lot, and we would take turns walking around the dining room table to calm her down. The best was…I had this shirt with a front pocket like a kangaroo. I would stuff her inside, nurse her and bounce on a bouncy ball…all at same time! I’d be doing this at 2am, about to fall over!”
To Eleanor, the problem was crystal clear: “She wanted to be back in my body!”
Thanks to Eleanor’s incredible dedication, Caroline slept well—but almost exclusively in her mom’s arms. That meant Eleanor slept only in the 45-minute bits and snips that she fit in between sessions of feeding and pacing. Everyone told Eleanor to rest during the day, but she just wasn’t a napper. With every passing day she became more and more sleep deprived.
When Caroline was about 2 months, Eleanor heard about the brand new baby sleeper, SNOO. Bone tired and already a believer in Dr. Karp’s baby tips, she immediately ordered one. And, the change was dramatic. Within just days, her little girl’s sleep improved substantially…and so did hers! They immediately started sleeping in 3 hours stretches and quickly advanced to 5 hours at a time.
“SNOO does a great job mimicking what the baby is used to in your belly—between the noise, the movement, the swaddle,” raved Eleanor.
And she was incredibly thankful for the peace of mind she got from SNOO’s main safety innovation—the special swaddle that keeps babies on the back when clipped into SNOO: “Even when I was just getting 45 minutes of sleep, I would wake up to make sure she was still breathing.”
Not worrying about her baby’s safety let Eleanor get a good night’s sleep. The new mom said that—in the final analysis—the confidence that her baby would stay on her in the middle of the night was what helped her most of all!
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