Snoo Bassinet
If there is any money you spend on baby sleep related things, spend it on the Snoo. We got ours from our friends Charles and Anne, and we gave it back to them in case they wanted a second child. Astra fit in it until she was 27 weeks old, but the last few weeks of those we stopped using the Snoo's rocking functionality.
The primary utility of the Snoo is that it rocks the baby back and forth on a turntable, responding to noise and upping the tempo, and then responding to silence and lowering the tempo. It's got a standby mode where it doesn't move until the baby makes a noise and then it adapts. And it's got a mode where you can tell it to start doing its rocking. In practice, the way we used it was:
- Place Astra in the Snoo
- Activate the full mode
- Read to Astra till she falls asleep
- Turn off the Snoo
We intended to not rely on it because we were afraid of building a dependency on rocking but, in practice, with the crutch there we couldn't help but use it. In the end, this was a mistaken fear because as Astra grew older she preferred having her hands free of the sleep sack and then wanted her legs free of the sleep sack, at which point we just dispensed with the idea of the sleep sack itself. This meant we could no longer use the rocking functionality since it relies on the sack to keep the baby in place. Removing the rocking did not have much of an effect on Astra's sleep.
If we had had to have paid the $1800 for the device, we probably would have just based on our friends' rave reviews, but it lasts only a few months realistically so it was nice to be able to borrow it and pass it back and forth. It's very sturdy and well-built. I cannot recommend it enough.
