Top Snoo Tips and Hacks
Top tips to get the most out of the Snoo
What is the Snoo
If you’re reading this chances are you know what the Snoo is, but if by chance you don’t …..
The Snoo is a smart bassinet that was invented by Dr. Harvey Karp. Who for two decades taught pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine. His big breakthrough, for which he was the very successful, The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Baby Sleep Longer, a 2002 book that popularized his theory of the “the 5 S’s” to calm infants: shush, swaddle, swing, suck and side or stomach. The book was an international bestseller and was followed up with The Happiest Toddler on the Block and The Happiest Baby Guide to Great Sleep: Simple Solutions for Kids from Birth to 5 Years.
The Snoo is not cheap, it’s a $1400 device, that also has rental options, but it is very highly rated.
The Snoo was very easy to set-up and the whole experience of putting it together was reminiscent of unboxing an Apple Product. We started our baby sleeping in the Snoo from when we first time he came home from the hospital. It worked fairly well for us at first, but it wasn’t amazing. We didn’t quite see what all the fuss was about, so
I decided to go on a mission to make the Snoo work for us!
and spent hours on forums, watching youtube videos in order to find out from other people what worked and what didn’t.
This has led me to write this article, which I wish would have existed for us when we got the Snoo. Some of these features are for the Snoo itself, others are changes we made either to the bedroom or to our routines. Once we implemented these changes, our son was sleeping for longer stretches and we really did see the value in the Snoo.
Making the Snoo Work for you — Snoo Tips and Tricks
Darkness
This is so important, and I can’t believe we weren’t aware of it earlier. For your baby to sleep through the night, unless you are VERY lucky, you’re going to need total darkness. We didn’t invest in black-out blinds, but instead just got some cheap black crepe paper off Amazon and taped up the window in our bedroom.
We also removed anything with a light or LED on it and made the bedroom a dark place. As a guide to see if it’s dark enough, you shouldn’t be able to see your hand over your face; which we were able to achieve.
Motion Limiter
The Snoo has 4 levels of motion and a motion limiter that will not go past level 2 (this is recommended for premature babies and babies under 1 month old according to the Happiest Baby) We tried removing the limiter at 6 weeks and again at 2 months and then at 3 months. For us and other people we spoke to, their babies didn’t like the extra motion and it seemed to make them more distraught. From our experience, we strongly recommend keeping the motion limiter on the whole time you have the Snoo.
The Magic Button
The Snoo has an app to control the settings and view sleep history and it’s great! There’s a pretty graph daily showing you how well your baby slept and when the Snoo had to kick in.
When putting your baby to sleep in the Snoo, DO NOT USE THE APP!!
It took us far too long to figure this out, but there is a button that you can use to start the Snoo which is far superior to trying to use the app. Once you start using this, even though it’s simple, you’ll see how much of a game-changer it is.
Burp Cloth in the Snoo Sack
From about 2 months, we’d often hear our son slamming his legs down in the night. It sounded painful, but I’m sure it wasn’t, however it did tend to keep him awake (and us too at times.) We rolled up a burp cloth and put it under his knees and it stopped him from slamming the legs down. This hack really helped us
(This is something that manufacturers tell you not to do as it can be a hazard, but we thought it was OK)
Sound Machine
One of the things that helped us and our son sleep was a white noise machine. Yes the Snoo has one, but it’s not loud enough to drown out othere noises in the house. We used a cheap one off Amazon which stopped our son from waking up from random noises in our house.
One thing that we weren’t aware of is just how much noise a newborn makes. The noise machine ultimately helped us get a better night’s sleep too.
Night Light
Although you want to keep the room that your baby sleeps in as dark as possible you are going to need a light to check in on your little one or to see. Rather than use your main light, bedside lights, or your phone (a really bad idea!) We bought this night light which proved to be bright enough to see when we needed to but not so bright that it woke up the baby.
Alexa (or any smart device)
We had some smart automation in our house already, but it was when we had our baby that it really started to make a huge difference to us. In the nursery, we have an Alexa Exho Dot and have a smart plug on our lamp and also on the white noise machine. We control these devices using Alexa which is increadibly useful when your hands are full. Having this in place when using the Snoo made an enormous difference to us.
Snoo Support
The Snoo comes with a support email and phone number for any questions you have. We used it a couple of times and it was great! We were concerened about the amount of sleep our son was getting and then later when we had questions about the motion limiter. I’ve heard from other people that they also give tips and tricks too.
Conclusion
We ended up using our snoo for the first 5 months of my son’s life. After we made the adjustments that I listed in this article, he did sleep better. He would wake up a few times in the night, but from all the research we did, this seemed normal. The Snoo gave us great piece of mind, knowing that our son was always strapped in and couldn’t flip on to his tummy.
We sold the Snoo for $900, so that works out to just $100 per month. I presonally would recommend the Snoo for any new parent, as it did help get our baby to sleep and it does help you to relax. I don’t think that it’s the miracle device for sleep that it’s marketed as, but despite that if I wouldn’t want to go through that time again without one.
