After Infertility, SNOO Helped Ease This Mom’s Fears
For years, Mary Czaplewski struggled with infertility. Several IUIs, three rounds of IVF, and an early-term loss preceded the long-awaited arrival of her son…which, like the rest of her path to parenthood, was hardly smooth. At 37 weeks she was diagnosed with pre-eclampsia, and at 38 weeks she had an emergency c-section.
“To make things just a little more interesting, my milk never fully came in, despite the efforts of some very intense lactation consultants at the hospital,” she remembers. “We spent six nights at the hospital due to my blood pressure never being at an acceptable level and finally left exhausted and terrified.”
Fortunately, SNOO was waiting at home to offer Mary a little respite after all she’d been through.
“My mom was the one who told me about SNOO. She has a background in nursing and midwifery and had seen it at a conference,” Mary says. “I was pretty unfamiliar with it when I found out I was pregnant. Spending all this money on this mechanical bassinet seemed crazy at first.”
In the end, Mary’s mother bought it as a gift.
“It came in a humungous box. It was very overwhelming. We downloaded the app and started playing with it, and honestly, I was hesitant, because without a baby you don’t get a sense of how it will all work,” she recalls. “We left the hospital wondering what it was going to look like. Then, when naptime rolled around, we put him in SNOO, and within two minutes he was sleeping.”
While her son took to SNOO right away, Mary says she needed time to shake off the initial trepidation she felt about using a device that was so new to her.
Once her worries about SNOO fell away, she says she started feeling peace of mind about her son’s sleep, safety, and overall wellbeing.
“With the data you can see how he’s sleeping and how it’s improving over time, which was reassuring. Doing my deep dives, I knew how much babies need sleep for brain development, she says.
When her son was just under 3 months old, Mary returned to work as a high school special education teacher.
“I swear a couple days before I went back to work, he was almost on my school schedule. It was shocking to us,” she says. “I’m a teacher and I’m around new parents who talk about how much they’re up at night. I was almost embarrassed to share how great my child was sleeping.”
And, not long after her son graduated from SNOO, Mary got a chance to revisit everything she loved about it as she prepared for the arrival of her daughter.
“The SNOO was more helpful than we ever anticipated. We were entranced with how it lulled our son to sleep and loved how the app provided up insight on how restful his nights were starting to become,” she says. “I am so grateful for our experience.”
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