Sleep

Jackie Viscusi from Gold Coast Doulas holding a baby outside with two women on either side of her and a home in the background

Meet our new Sleep Consultant, Jackie

Meet our newest Sleep Consultant, Jackie. We love to share interesting facts about our team. Jackie and her family reside in Florida. She works with virtual sleep clients through Gold Coast.

What did you do before you became Sleep Consultant?

I was a creative marketing and script writer and content creator.

What inspired you to become a doula?

My personal experience with postpartum depression and anxiety coupled with a deep interest in maternal mental health. I realized I wanted to dedicate my life to helping other parents through this crazy time.

Tell us about your family.

I have an amazing and supportive husband, Nick, a fun-loving 3 year-old, Gianna, an adorable 1 year-old, Aria, and a hilarious dog named Donny who looks like a terrier and Steve Buschmi had a baby together.

What is your favorite vacation spot and why? 

Hawaii. Cause. How can you not? Beach, breeze, laid-back, mountains.. when can I go back?!!

Name your top five bands/musicians and tell us what you love about them.

Not to be “basic” but who doesn’t love The Beatles? I mean they’re just the best. I love Motown and Oldies, Beyonce, Justin, and Usher, if that tells you my age at all. I think Harry Styles is fantastic. And I also love Odeza, Glass Animals, Jungle & Anderson Paak.

What is the best advice you have given to new families?

Consistency is key!

What is your favorite food?

Gluten-Free pizza. I have celiac disease.

What is your favorite place on West Michigan’s Gold Coast?

I am remote. I would love to visit someday.

What are you reading now?

“The Free Diet” by Dr. Rofrano, a wellness book about “freeing” yourself from pain, fatigue, and fogginess.

Who are your role models?

Gloria Steinem, RGB, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey.

Meet our new Sleep Consultant, Jackie Read More »

Woman wearing a black sports bra and black leggings dose a yoga pose on a black yoga mat in a living room

The Power of Distraction

We often think of distractions as negative. We may get distracted by all the to-dos on our list, and it’s hard to stay focused on work or give our full attention to someone. Our kids may get distracted while getting dressed, or for older kids maybe it’s while doing homework.

But let’s reframe distractions. They can be extremely helpful when used in a healthy manner. For instance, if you are a person who worries a lot, or gets fixated on one idea, sometimes a distraction can help. Let’s say you’re worried about an upcoming work presentation or you child’s teacher conference; give yourself a mental break. Think of something you like to do that you can become completely absorbed in. For me, it’s working out or watching a good show. I can shut off my brain and completely focus on something else. This helps your mind relax and hopefully will tell your body to stop producing stress hormones for a while. For you, maybe it’s going for a run, or mindlessly looking at beautiful vacation homes online. Give yourself that break. Get distracted. But….don’t allow yourself to be distracted for too long. If you find yourself binge watching a show for 3 hours while you get behind on other things, this is not helpful. Set a timer if needed, and once it goes off, you get back to your work. Think of this distraction as hitting a reset button. It doesn’t fix whatever problem you were worried about initially, but you gave yourself a mental break. And sometimes, when you come back from that break, the problem doesn’t seem so bad.

This works for kids too. If they are struggling to figure out a problem in their homework, let them take 15 minutes to watch a show or play a game. Let them reset. Let them give their little brains a break and hopefully they are able to focus when they come back to the table. You know your child, so maybe watching a show isn’t the answer for them. Maybe they need to go play some football, listen to music, or dance – whatever your child can becoming fully engrossed in to give their mind a quick break.

Sometimes we can feel overwhelmed by all the things we have to do; the never-ending lists that just seem to get longer. Parents and kids both can have several tabs open at once in our brains. Kids are thinking about school, a test, play practice, sports, friends, etc. As parents, we know all too well how many balls we are constantly juggling. Our kids classroom party, a big work meeting, piles of laundry, picking up groceries, planning dinner, the house is a mess, the guests coming tonight, the dog needs grooming, the dentist appointment tomorrow, that email you still need to respond to, etc. The best way to shut down some of those tabs could be to distract yourself. It seems counter-intuitive. Shouldn’t you stay focused and get working on all this stuff?

If you can step away from all of it for a little while and let your brain be silent, sometimes you might find you come up with answers. Have you heard the saying, ” We come up with our best ideas in the shower.”? That’s because typically we are doing a mundane task that we don’t have to think about, and we don’t have distractions. So leaving technology behind is key here. Go for a walk, drive your car, or take a shower without distraction. Let your mind go. You’ll probably notice you come up with great ideas, solve problems, and figure out how you want to respond to that email while you let your mind work in silence.

For parents who have trouble falling asleep, distraction can be helpful too. If your mind is racing at night when you’re trying to fall asleep, use a distraction that will shut your mind down. For me, I have to write down ideas or problems that are keeping me awake so I can revisit them tomorrow, otherwise I cannot fall asleep. Once they are written down, only then can I turn off my brain and relax. If I wake in the night thinking about the problem again or I have an idea, I have that notebook by my bed to write it down, get it out of my brain, and fall back asleep.

It’s important for parents and kids to try and stay off technology right before bed. Parents, alcohol and caffeine intake can negatively affect sleep too. Sugar is a culprit as well, so watch how much sugar you and your kids eat after dinner. I have other blogs detailing out the ideal sleep environment, but a dark, cool room is important no matter your age.

If you find you’re prone to anxiety or depression, and you also aren’t sleeping well, make sleep your #1 priority. Sleep deprivation has all the same symptoms as anxiety and depression, as well as lowering your immune system, so get your sleep on track, talk to a therapist, and work on ways to find healthy distractions.

Alyssa Veneklase is a Certified Infant & Child Sleep Consultant, Newborn Care Specialist, and Certified Elite Postpartum & Infant Care Doula. She is currently a real estate agent working with her husband, but continues to teach three classes at Gold Coast Doulas – Newborn Survival, Becoming a Mother, and Tired as a Mother.

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The Power of Distraction Read More »

Woman holding a popsicle kneeling down to hug a child in the grass surrounded by people

Connection and Compassion Are Key

I’ve said it a lot; there is no one-size-fits-all solution to sleep, but this applies to parenting in general as well. Many parents will read about certain techniques, and even follow specific scripts with older children, but if they don’t work, parents feel like they have failed or there is something wrong with their kid. They try a technique that their friend used, or read a book, or hear about something that is really popular. What they aren’t considering is that it will work for some kids, and it won’t work for others. Or maybe it will work for a little while, until your child catches on, and then you need to change your approach again.

No matter what age, you need to tune in to who your unique child is.

Connection means different things to everyone. I’m not a ‘hug it out’ type of person when I’m upset. I need space. My daughter needs lots of hugs and lots of attention when she is sad. When she is upset, she needs space and then she needs to talk. My husband needs peace and quiet, time to think. Your child is a unique individual with different needs, desires, and fears than you, your partner, and your other children. Just as we wouldn’t expect one technique to work for all adults, we can’t expect that when dealing with children.

Sometimes, to connect with your child, you may need separation. Many parents don’t understand this idea. They think if they are not hugging or physically touching, or at least near their child when they are upset, they are abandoning them. But when a child is more upset, more frustrated, and the situation escalates when you are near them, separation may be what they need. How this is executed will make all the difference. The words you use, your tone of voice, and your body language all matter. This is how you connect.

“I love you. I am going to step outside the room and wait here.”

“I am also feeling frustrated so I am going to take some deep breaths in the hall until I calm down too.”

Obviously, what you say and how you separate will vary depending on the age of your child and their temperament. Connection and compassion are key. You are here to help them, not punish them. When they are acting out, throwing a tantrum, or won’t go to sleep, it is never helpful to make them feel bad about it. For most little ones, they are not doing this intentionally. They need your help to get through this sad or scary or frustrating moment. They need your help in dealing with these completely normal emotions. Notice I said the are normal. We can’t expect our kids to never feel anything other than happiness. This is unrealistic and extremely unfair. They are going to get angry, sad, frustrated, scared, and nervous. How will you help them cope with these feelings? Instead of ignoring them or disregarding them, allow your child to feel the emotion and then deal with it in a healthy manner.

Sometimes your child will have these emotions toward you. They will get angry with you about something, and that’s okay. You are the parent, and they are the child. Your role is not to make them happy all the time or be their best friend, Your role is to create a safe and loving environment in which they thrive and feel supported. And sometimes that means allowing them to feel all their emotions. We also shouldn’t label emotions as “good” or “bad”. You don’t want your child to feel guilty because they are experiencing sadness or anger. These are normal emotions. You want to teach your child how to acknowledge that emotion, and deal with it in a healthy way. Ignoring it is not helpful. Discrediting it is not helpful. Shaming it is not helpful.

Try telling yourself this:
I have a really good kid who just happens to be struggling in this moment. I am their helper, not their punisher. They need my support, not my anger or frustration. Acting in anger causes stress in them which makes them act out more. It creates guilt and shame.

When I relate this idea specifically to sleep, this is why an in-person consult, with one-on-one support, and a custom sleep plan are so important. When one technique doesn’t work, you have an expert to guide you through other options. It’s also important to note that some babies and children need space sometimes. Stepping outside the room when things get hard is often good for both of you. Children sense anxiety and stress in parents. It changes how we act and talk which can change the outcome of the entire situation.

When we model this behavior to our children, we are showing them how to deal with strong emotions in a healthy way. It’s great for our children to know that we also have bad days. We also get frustrated, angry, or scared. We can help them figure out how to handle these big emotions.

They are always watching. They are always listening. What will they learn from you?

Alyssa Veneklase is a Certified Infant & Child Sleep Consultant, Newborn Care Specialist, and Certified Elite Postpartum & Infant Care Doula. She also teaches a Newborn Survival Class, Becoming a Mother series, and Tired as a Mother.

 

Connection and Compassion Are Key Read More »

Sleeping baby wearing a white onesie on a white bed

Top 5 Tips for Encouraging Baby to Sleep Through the Night

 

Kay Vorce, CED-PIC
Gold Coast Sleep Consultant

Certified Sleep Consultant

If there is one question I get all the time, it’s this one: How can I encourage my baby to sleep through
the night while still responding to their needs?
First, let’s define what that means. If your baby is sleeping 6-8 hour stretches, that’s considered sleeping
through the night. Although babies need 10-12 hours of sleep overnight (along with naps), your baby
may technically “sleep through the night” by sleeping 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. I don’t know about you, but
that’s hard to celebrate unless you also want to go to bed for the night at 8:00 p.m.!
The good news is that there are things parents can do to encourage a healthy chunk of sleep at the right
time, but there are some factors to consider: Age, weight, and habits.
Here are my top 5 tips for getting your baby to sleep through the night, with parents getting the most
sleep out of it too!

1. Keep your expectations realistic.
A newborn (8 weeks or less) needs to eat frequently. Expect your baby to wake every 2-3 hours
for feeds. If they don’t wake that often on their own, check with your pediatrician about setting
an alarm overnight for feeds. It’s very important that your growing baby gets the calories they
need in these vital early weeks.
These are the exhausting days. The trifecta of physical recovery, sleep deprivation, and hormone
adjustments in the post-birth period can bring on a myriad of complex emotions. Consider hiring
a postpartum doula. A postpartum doula can provide overnight newborn care while a mother
gets the vital rest she needs to stay physically and emotionally healthy. Don’t try to just survive
this period, reach out for help and support, you won’t regret it.
Once your baby has regained their birth weight and is closer to 2 or 3 months old, 4-6 hour
stretches become more realistic.

2. Don’t neglect the daytime calories.
Sometimes a baby will sleep A LOT during the day. Your baby is a perfect calorie regulating
machine. While this may be great for getting things done, keep in mind that the calories a baby
does not consume during the day, they will wake for overnight. Don’t be afraid to wake your
baby for a feed if they’re still napping and they’re due a feed.

3. Place a feed before parent’s bedtime.
If your baby is 12 weeks or under, consider a “wake and feed.” This technique combines a feed
with a short awake window to build sleep pressure, with the goal of a long sleep placed at a better time for parents. Wake your baby an hour before you’d like to go to bed and combine the
feed with some kick and play time in lower light, then put baby to bed for the night.
If your baby is 16 weeks or older, do a standard “dream feed” with no awake window. Just rouse
baby enough to take feed, then back to bed again.
The goal here is to help maximize sleep for the parents. If that doesn’t happen, ditch the
technique, and just aim for a filling feed at bedtime.

4. Start working on laying your baby down awake.
When your baby is under 12 weeks, and especially in the first 8 weeks, they’ll need total
assistance to sleep. But that doesn’t mean you can’t help them off to sleep while they’re laying
down in their own safe sleep space! Get your baby nice and drowsy in your arms, then try to pat
their bottom and “shush” (white noise is great here) them off to sleep once they’re laying down.
You can gradually pull back on how drowsy you’re getting your baby as they get older. A baby is
far more likely to sleep through the night when they recognize the environment is the same one
where they first went off to sleep.

5. Don’t rush straight to a feed overnight.
Your baby will make all sorts of sounds overnight, so try not to rush straight to a feed at every
sound or wake. If your baby is under 12 weeks, wait a minute or two before responding—your
baby may fall back asleep. If your baby is 12 weeks or more, a healthy weight and tracking well
along a growth curve, it’s worth a try to see if you can resettle your baby without a feed. The
amount of time is whatever you’re comfortable with, but I’d suggest trying to resettle with
motion, white noise and/or a pacifier for no more than 30 minutes before going to the feed. If
you’re exhausted, aim for just trying this one time a night.

Top 5 Tips for Encouraging Baby to Sleep Through the Night Read More »

Michelle Valley holds her children on each hip

Meet our new Sleep Consultant, Michelle!


What did you do before you became a sleep consultant?

I am a Pre-K teacher for Great Start Readiness Program in Kentwood

What inspired you to become a sleep consultant?

I was inspired to become a sleep trainer after living with my sister when she had her first kid and seeing the impact lack of sleep has on a family. After she hired a sleep trainer her and her husband’s life turned around and she said it was the best decision she ever made. I want to help families get their sleep back so they will be healthy and happy parents.

Tell us about your family.

I have two sisters and 4 nieces and nephews that are my world. I help out with my niece and nephews often and love having them for weekends at times.

What is your favorite vacation spot and why? 

Naples Florida because I have been going there since I was a kid and it holds so many special memories with my extended family. I love the beach, bike rides, walking around downtown, playing tennis, and the warm weather to escape the Michigan winters.

What is the best advice you have given to new families?

Regressions will happen. It is important to know this is normal and not to give up or give in. Stick with the plan 100% no matter how tough the night may be. Things will get easier with consistency from both parents.

What do you consider your sleep consultant superpower to be?

I can connect to all different kinds of people and make them feel comfortable in the sleep training process

What is your favorite food?

Sushi

What is your favorite place on West Michigan’s Gold Coast?

Saugatuck, I love the people, downtown, hikes, and beaches

What are you reading now?

12 Hours’ Sleep by 12 Weeks Old

Who are your role models?

My role model is my papa (grandpa) because he showed me how to prioritize life. He built a successful business while being an active father and grandfather. He gave back to the community and shared his success with the less fortunate.

Meet our new Sleep Consultant, Michelle! Read More »

Father holding his baby while baby holds onto his finger

Newborn Sleep – What New Parents Should Expect

New parents often have unrealistic expectations about sleep when they bring a baby home. Some parents think they will get to sleep a lot because a newborn sleeps a lot. I’ve heard other parents say they don’t think they will get any sleep for weeks or months. I’m here to tell you that neither of those are true.

Yes, a newborn does sleep a lot. Yay! But they also need to feed often. Like every hour or two in the beginning. All day and all night! So while your newborn may sleep 19 hours in a day, that sleep is happening in several short chunks of time throughout a 24 hour period.

For a breastfeeding mother this is especially hard. She will be feeding her newborn every couple hours and that feeding could take 45 minutes. Let’s put that into perspective. Your newborn wakes to eat at 2:00am. You are done feeding at 2:45am, burp and change baby’s diaper, get baby back to sleep, and now it’s 3:00am. Your newborn feeds every 2 hours so that means you have one more hour to sleep until you start this whole process over again. Yikes!

Once a newborn becomes more efficient at feeding (or is bottle fed), they can often go three hours between feedings. This allows you more time to sleep between feeds.

Fathers/partners often wonder what they can do to help an exclusively breastfeeding mother. If/when a mother decides to start pumping, someone else can take over some of the feedings with a bottle. This can be a huge relief to mothers in the night and allows for one longer stretch of sleep. Partners can also help with diaper changes after a feed so Mom can get back to sleep sooner. They can also make sure mom is well fed and hydrated.

For bottle fed babies, fathers/partners/doulas/caregivers can help with feeds in the night while mom sleeps. For instance, mom feeds baby at 9:00pm then goes to sleep. Someone else does the 11:00pm feed, and mom wakes at 1:00 for the next feed. That allowed mom to sleep for four hours. It doesn’t seem like much now, but when you’re sleep deprived, a four hour stretch of sleep is the best gift anyone could give you!

For the first several weeks, there really is no predictability to a newborn. They will sleep a lot and eat a lot, period. If your newborn sleeps for hours at a time without waking to eat though, this is not a bragging right. This is something to call your pediatrician about. Babies need to eat frequently! On the other hand, if your baby doesn’t want to sleep and cries a lot, you should also call your pediatrician.

You get through the first 4-6 weeks or so, you’re sleep deprived and feel a bit hazy, but you start to notice that there are some predictable patterns happening with your baby. For instance, they are feeding approximately every three hours and can stay awake a little bit longer after feeds. What does this mean? They are slowly adjusting to a natural circadian rhythm. Every living thing has a rhythm. Our bodies naturally wake when the temperature warms and the sun rises (we produce serotonin to make us feel awake). When it’s dark and cool, our bodies are ready for sleep (we produce melatonin to make us feel sleepy). 

Follow your baby’s cues during this time. When you notice signs of tiredness, get them into the basinet for a nap. Try to keep them awake for a bit after feeds. Think of this pattern – eat, awake, sleep, eat, awake, sleep. This will do two things for parents:

1- Separate feeds from sleep. This is the number one reason parents call me for help. Their baby is used to only falling asleep while feeding or being held and they can’t sustain that long-term.

2- Awake time after feeds allows for lots of stimulation which makes baby tired for a nap. As a baby gets older, they are more alert and interested in their surroundings. All this mental and physical stimulation helps tire them out for naps.

So what does this mean for parents? Now you know in the initial weeks home with a newborn, don’t expect much sleep. Sleep when you can, limit visitors, and accept help! But after a couple months, you should see some predictability. This is when a baby becomes more efficient at feeding. More calories in during the day means longer stretches of sleep at night. Read that sentence again… I’ll wait. Focus on good feeds during the day and fewer at night as your baby gets older. A hungry baby doesn’t sleep, so good feeds are extremely important.

Your baby will slowly be able to stay awake for longer stretches during the day, creating a predictable nap routine. This allows parents to plan their days knowing when their baby needs to sleep.

Every family is different and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to sleep. If one parent stays home and does not need a predictable schedule, they may feed on demand and take naps during the day when the baby takes naps. If this works for that family, great! If both parents work, they usually need more structure, so having a predictable feeding and nap schedule, along with a set bedtime and wake time for the baby, is usually necessary. And some families will fall somewhere in between, where they want some structure, but the ability to be flexible. No matter what your parenting style is, don’t be afraid to ask for and accept help. If you need someone to come during the day to watch your baby so you can nap or shower, who do you have that you can ask? A friend or family member? Do you have postpartum doulas in your area? How about overnight sleep? Do you have someone that could stay overnight and help you with feeds so you can get extra rest?

Bottom line, it will be okay! You have resources that can help along the way, use them if you can. There are tons of free feeding support groups. Find other mothers or parents who you can talk to. Hire a sleep consultant if needed (a good one isn’t scary, I promise!). Check with your insurance plan to see what’s covered. You may be able to hire a doula or a lactation consultant. You may be able to take some newborn, breastfeeding, or sleep classes. Knowledge is power, so take the time to find resources that fit your budget and personal needs. 

You’ve got this!

For additional information about pregnancy, birth, parenting, and sleep, check out Ask The Doulas Podcast on whatever podcast platform you listen to.

Alyssa is co-owner of Gold Coast Doulas, co-founder of the BECOMING a Mother course, a Certified Elite Postpartum & Infant Care Doula, a Newborn Care Specialist, and a Certified Infant & Child Sleep Consultant. She offers custom sleep solutions to families across the country to help new parents find balance and rest.

 

Newborn Sleep – What New Parents Should Expect Read More »

Alyssa Veneklase, Postpartum Doulas of Gold Coast Doulas, assists a mom of triplets

Gold Coast Doulas is Expanding Our Reach!

We have been listening to our clients and trusted health practitioners, and we are expanding our day and overnight postpartum and sleep consulting services to Northern Michigan and Southwest Michigan starting in April of 2022. Michigan postpartum doula services and support will expand along the Gold Coast of Michigan, covering 300 miles of the western shoreline.

Gold Coast Doulas is proud to announce that we will serve beach towns from Niles in the Southwest to Harbor Springs in Northern Michigan. Our doula agency is focused on exceptional service and support for families. We are currently looking for exceptional postpartum doulas who reside in Southwest and Northern Michigan.

In a recent article from Petoskey News, the Charlevoix Area Chamber of Commerce President comment “Adding to any health services in the area is beneficial for our residents, and helps our region be somewhere you can truly live, work and play year-round.”

Northern Michigan postpartum doula lakeshore cities covered in the expansion include: Bay Harbor, Harbor Springs, Charlevoix, Cadillac, Suttons Bay, Petoskey, Traverse City, Frankfort, Manistee, Ludington, Silver Lake, and Pentwater.

Southwest Michigan postpartum doula lakeshore cities include: South Haven, Benton Harbor, St. Joseph, Stevensville, Lakeside, Coloma, Union Pier, Sawyer, Three Rivers, New Buffalo, and Niles.

Gold Coast Doulas has always had the intention of expanding and have been deliberate in our expansion plan. In Northern and Southwest Michigan, Gold Coast Doulas will focus on providing postpartum services like feeding, sibling care, household tasks like light housekeeping, meal preparation, and running errors. The primary focus in these lakeshore cities is on day and overnight postpartum doula services and sleep support. Gold Coast Doulas will continue to offer birth services, lactation, and classes to our West Michigan clients.

If you are interested in partnering with us or becoming a day and overnight postpartum doula, contact us at info@goldcoastdoulas.com.

 

Gold Coast Doulas is Expanding Our Reach! Read More »

Bebcare Baby Monitors - DSR Digital Safe Radio - Ultra-low Radiation

5 Tips to Build a Low EMF Emissions Home for Your Baby

Guest blog post by Andrew from Bebcare Low Emissions Baby Monitor

Parents are deeply concerned about the safety of their baby. Why wouldn’t they be? Your baby is your bundle of joy and the most precious. With the abundance of wireless devices these days, EMF radiation is a hot topic amongst parents. In this blog post, we will walk you through what is an EMF and 5 tips to create a low EMF emissions environment for your baby.

What is EMF?
EMF stands for Electromagnetic Field. That sounds complicated! Well, it is kind of, but it’s actually elementary college physics. Electromagnetic field is present throughout the universe and is an essential part of our everyday life. There are many forms of EMFs, some are good EMF, while some are bad EMF, just like cholesterol in your body. Visible light, WiFi signal, microwave, and cellular signals are all different forms of EMFs. Your ability to see things is due to electromagnetic waves interacting with the retina in your eyes and turning that into an electric pulse in your brain. That said, an example of bad EMFs would be high power waves coming from high power electrical cables or even what scientists call “ionizing radiation” from powerful sources. To put it simply, exposure to these bad EMFs causes significant health problems because the EMF waves ionize your cells and may cause cancer. X-ray is a common example of ionizing radiation, which is why you do not want to be doing X-ray scans often.

Why is EMF important to your baby’s safety?
Parents should exercise the highest level of caution when it comes to baby safety. Depending on where you look, there are scientific studies that have linked exposure to EMF with the development of cancer, including the W.H.O. classification of EMF as possibly carcinogenic to humans in 2011. Furthermore, there are scientific studies that indicate correlation between exposure to EMF and learning disabilities such as ADHD. Nevertheless, it is a controversial subject with stakeholders making arguments on both sides.

5 Tips to build a low EMF emissions home

Place WiFi Routers Far Away from Your Baby
The further away the source of wireless emissions, the lower its EMF power. WiFi routers are one of the most common sources of wireless emissions at home or office with health side effects. You should consider placing the router away from children or yourself. Power is often measured in Volts per meter (V/m) or milliWatt (mW), meaning you want to purchase a router with a lower power rating.

Put Your Phones Away from Your Nightstand
One of the most common mistakes is putting your smartphone on the nightstand next to your bed. This exposes you and your family to several hours of constant exposure to wireless radiation as you sleep. Try placing the phone at least 15 feet away, or even putting it into Airplane mode.

Install EMF Shielding at Strategic Places
EMF shielding can be an effective way to create an EMF safe zone within your home. Metal panels have the ability to block out Electromagnetic waves from entering into this safe zone.

Pick a Home that’s Far Away from Power Plants and Wireless Towers
Cell phone and communication towers emit the highest doses of wireless radiation. The long term effects of constant exposure to such high doses of EMF radiation are not well understood by the scientific community. It is wise to choose a home that is far away from these sources of high energy wireless signals.

Use a Low Wireless Emissions Baby Monitor
Your baby monitor acts as the communication bridge between your baby and you. Therefore, it’s of utmost importance that the baby monitor operates in a safe, ultra-low emissions manner. Bebcare baby monitors utilize DSR Digital Safe Radio technology, which emits less than 10% of wireless radiation compared to other products.

Get the lowest EMF emissions baby monitors at bebcare.com with 10% DISCOUNT using discount code: goldcoastdoulas

Check out our BECOMING A Mother course! It’s a self-paced, online series to help reduce fear and gain confidence in pregnancy, birth, and early parenting. With recorded video lessons, monthly live chats, and a supportive FaceBook community – it’s everything we wish we would have known before we had our babies! We’d love to see you there!

Kristin & Alyssa

 

5 Tips to Build a Low EMF Emissions Home for Your Baby Read More »

baby sleep tips

How to get my baby to sleep through the night.

This is probably the most commonly asked sleep question for parents, and unfortunately there isn’t an easy answer!

There are many factors involved when attempting to answer this question. It can depend on things like:

  • How old is your baby?
  • How much do they eat?
  • How often do they eat?
  • Were they premature?
  • Do they have any health concerns?

But first, it’s important to understand how much newborns are supposed to sleep, and how that changes across the first few months of life.

How much do newborns sleep?
If you have a newborn, the answer is you cannot get them to sleep through the night. If your newborn does sleep through the night, this is not a good thing! You need to talk to your child’s pediatrician immediately. If you are struggling with feeds, reach out to a Certified Lactation Consultant. A newborn needs to eat every 2-3 hours, so sleeping through the night is not conducive to your baby’s growth or your breastmilk production if breastfeeding. A typical newborn is not going to be awake very often, only to feed and then cuddle for a few minutes before falling asleep again. So this means, yes, a typical newborn sleeps most of the day and night, but not several hours in a row. Like I mentioned, they need to be eating frequently, so after they feed (typically every 2-3 hours), they will sleep until they wake up hungry again. This means they may sleep for 1-2 hours at a time, then wake to feed.

how much does a 3-4 month old baby need to sleep?How much does a 3 – 4 month old sleep?
If your baby is 3-4 months old, it’s possible they may sleep through the night, but most do not quite yet. A 3-4 month old baby that is at least 12 pounds and eating well throughout the day, could give parents a 6-8 hour stretch at night. A baby’s ability to sleep this long at night is also dependent on their daytime feeding, activity, and nap schedule. At this age a baby’s circadian rhythm is ready to be set and they will thrive on a routine. This is the perfect time to reach out to a sleep consultant. Sleep training at this age involves very little crying and most babies are ready and willing to jump right into a sleep routine without much fuss!

How much do older babies sleep?
Some babies, even at 9 months, may not sleep a full 12 hours overnight without a feed. This is normal. Babies come in all shapes and sizes so we cannot expect them all to have the same needs or patterns. A smaller baby that eats less during the day is going to need more feeds in the night for a longer period of time. A larger baby that has big feeds during the day may start sleeping through the night much sooner than most.

the 'cry it out' sleeping method

Do I have to use Cry It Out?
Many parents, exhausted after months of sleepless nights, will resort to cry it out at this point. Please note, this is not necessary! No amount of crying will help a baby fall asleep if they are hungry and/or do not have a good daytime nap routine. Small amounts of crying are normal and necessary, but attempting CIO on your own with no other change to feeds or naps usually ends in frustration.

The problem with a question like this (How do I get my baby to sleep through the night?) is parents are often searching for a one-size-fits-all answer and there just isn’t one. That’s why a sleep consultant is so beneficial. They can assess your individual baby’s needs and your sleep goals to create the perfect sleep plan for your family. A sleep consultant that does not ask questions about your baby, your goals, or your parenting style and then doesn’t offer different methods to try based on your answers, is not going to be the most successful option.

As a sleep consultant, you can see why it’s so hard for me to answer this question with a blanket statement. I don’t know you or your baby to give you the best answer for your family. But I know you clicked on this link looking for help, so I’ll give you some very basic tips by age that will hopefully get you on the right path. You can also check out this blog post that lists my favorite sleep products!

Newborn Sleep Tips
From day 1 there are some things you can do to get into some healthy sleep habits early. That way, when your baby’s rhythm is ready to be set, it will happen easily because you’ve already been working on these habits.

    • Put your baby to bed on a hard, flat surface (a crib or basinet). This is not only the safest place for them to sleep, but it gets them used to sleeping in the space where you ultimately want them sleeping later. They can sleep in your room near your bed for as long as you like, but this creates an easy transition when they are ready to be moved to a nursery. They just move along with the crib they are already familiar with.
    • When you put your newborn down for a nap, make sure the room is dark, cool, and use a sound machine.
    • When you wake your baby up, make sure to give them light. You’re unknowingly helping to set their natural circadian rhythm. High five!
    • With newborns, focus on feeds. Don’t worry too much about how much sleep they’re getting and when, just make sure they are getting enough to eat and growing well!
    • As your baby gets more efficient with feeds and can stay awake longer, see if you can separate feeding from sleeping. Make them two separate activities instead of always happing together. Eat, awake, sleep, repeat!
      • One way to help soothe your baby to sleep without feeding is Shush Pat.
    • In these critical newborn weeks, the support of an overnight postpartum doula can be so beneficial for parents. Mothers can heal, bond with baby, rest, and focus on feeding. Fathers or partners can get extra rest, learn newborn care tips, and ways to be supportive and helpful to a new mother. Postpartum doulas are there to offer judgment-free support to every family, day and night.

newborn sleep tips

3-6 Month Sleep Tips
Like I mentioned above, around 3-4 months, your baby is ready for a more structured routine. Babies thrive on routine and even if you’re not a schedule-oriented person, you can figure out ways to have a routine instead of a schedule. The easiest way to do this is have a set wake time every morning, a set bed time every night, and try to get 3 naps in per day at around the same time.

    • You still want to have your baby sleep in the dark and wake up to light.
    • Feeds are still very important. A hungry baby doesn’t sleep for long.
    • At this age your baby’s cries should be sounding different to you. Learning to listen to your child and understand what they are communicating to you is key to building a trusting relationship and is critical for sleep success.

6-12 Month Sleep Tips
If you’re still struggling with sleep at this point, don’t wait any longer to seek help from a professional and experienced sleep consultant. I promise you, the right sleep consultant will offer your family life-changing results and it won’t be scary! Find someone that listens to you!

    • This is often when solids are introduced. As your baby eats more solids, milk feeds will decrease. This is normal.
    • Don’t offer food at dinner first as this disrupts night time sleep while food digests.
    • Routines are especially important at this age. Babies are really observant and knowing what to expect and when will help with nap time and bedtime.

12 months + Sleep Tips
For toddlers, sleep can become even more difficult if they never slept well as a baby. They are now walking and talking and can put up a fight for naps and night time.

    • Routines are still crucial, if not more so now than ever! A toddler expects things to be the same each night.
    • Set boundaries and stick to them. It’s important that all caregivers are on the same page.
    • Don’t let your toddler stay up too late.

If you are struggling with sleep, we would love to speak with you! We offer virtual consults nationwide.

Alyssa Veneklase is a Certified Infant & Child Sleep Consultant and Co-owner of Gold Coast Doulas.

 

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Kristin Vorce

Meet Kristin Vorce, Certified Sleep Consultant!

We are a little late in the game announcing Kristin to you! She’s actually been working with us for a few months now (oops, sorry Kristin!). Let’s learn a little more about Kristin, her family, and her background.

What did you do before you became a sleep consultant?
Prior to becoming a sleep consultant, I worked in the field of brain injury rehabilitation as a recreational therapist for over 10 years. I have a vast amount of experience helping people develop achievable goals and take the first step toward change.

What inspired you to become a sleep consultant?
When I had my 3rd baby, who was a challenging sleeper, I was overwhelmed with all the resources for new parents in regard to baby sleep. I thought to myself, “I just wish I had someone who could look at everything going on and help me with what to do.” I was inspired to use my therapist skills to become that person to help other parents navigate their way through the vast arena of baby sleep.

Tell us about your family.
I am a busy mom of 3 and stepmom to 1. My kids range from 12 to 2 years old, so I live simultaneously in both the toddler and tween world! My husband, Mike and I have been married for 4 years and we live in East Grand Rapids.

What is your favorite vacation spot and why?
Northern Michigan, hands down! We love to go camping in the summer and spend many weekends exploring our awesome state parks. Last year we took our bikes to the top of Mackinac Island—what a view!

Name your top five bands/musicians and tell us what you love about them.

Hillsong United – One of the best concerts I’ve ever been to!
Adele – Seriously, that voice?!
Coldplay – Just the right blend of chill and rock
Cory Asbury – The lyrics speak straight to my heart
Justin Beiber – I’m not ashamed to admit I always turn it up!

What is the best advice you have given to new families?
New parents tend to be hard on themselves. The best advice I’ve given is to be kind to yourself. Speak to yourself like a good friend. You love your baby more than life and you are doing such a great job!

What do you consider your superpower to be?
My superpower is communication. My strength is taking something complex and making it easy to understand.

What is your favorite food?
I absolutely LOVE Indian food! Saag Gosht anyone?

What is your favorite place in West Michigan’s Gold Coast?
Sleeping Bear Dunes/Glen Arbor. From skiing in the winter to the wineries and sand dunes in the summer- it’s such a treasure and I love building memories with my family here.

What are you reading now?
I am currently reading, “Transforming the Difficult Child” by Howard Glasser. It’s all about pointing out the positives to our kids, which can work wonders in children (and adults!). 

Who are your role models?
I strive to model my mother-in-law’s, Jill, servant heart. She always puts others first, even when it’s hard.

I strive to achieve the organizational level of my husband! He is also extremely calm in a crisis, and I learn a lot from him. 

 

Meet Kristin Vorce, Certified Sleep Consultant! Read More »

Bebcare

Bebcare – A safe monitor for your baby’s nursery

A while ago I recorded three videos about electromagnetic emissions and creating a sleep sanctuary for your child. You can find all three on our YouTube channel. I spoke with Lisa Tiedt, a Building Biologist at Well Abode. She used science to physically demonstrate to us how baby monitors, sound machines, and wifi modems emit frequencies that are unhealthy for our bodies, but especially for our children who are at critical stages of growth and development.

I was recently introduced to Bebcare. Their baby monitors are the lowest emitting monitors on the market. Most wireless monitors emit pretty strong doses of radiation, the same as a microwave, all day long even when the monitor isn’t in use. You can probably find the health hazards in very fine print at the bottom of the manuals from other brands.

What Bebcare has done is create a monitor with 91% less emissions when in use, and when it’s idle there are zero emissions. Zero! It only turns on when your baby cries.

They have a few different monitor options: Bebcare iQ, Bebcare Motion, and Bebcare Hear.

Bebcare iQ is their most sophisticated model with infrared night vision, 360 degree pan and tilt capabilities, lullabies, room temp, breathing sensor (mat sold separately), and white noise silencer. It also has a two-way talking capability so you can reassure your child from afar and minimize unnecessary trips back and forth to the nursery. All this is tracked on an app you check from your phone.

Bebcare Motion is their traditional baby monitor with camera and wireless monitor that works over 900 feet away. It still has a lot of the great features the iQ does including two-way talk, night vision, lullabies, zoom, pan and tilt.

Bebcare Hear is (you guessed it!) an audio monitor. With no video, this monitor keeps it simple and focuses on crystal clear audio over 2,000 feet away. That means you can safely listen to your baby while you’re on the other end of the house. There is a night light, lullabies, and two-way talk on this model as well.

Stay tuned for an upcoming podcast with Lisa from Well Abode and someone from Bebcare. We will actually be testing one of their monitors and talking about our results, asking questions to the Bebcare team, and talking about practical uses for the different monitors. Let’s find out how Bebcare stands up to the competition!

If you’d like to purchase one of Bebcare’s monitors, use discount code goldcoastdoulas at check out or just follow this link to receive 10% off!

 

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safe sleep

Creating a Safe Sleep Space: Routers

Alyssa Veneklase talks with Lisa Tiedt, Building Biologist and owner of Well Abode, about creating health sanctuaries in our homes.  You can watch this video on YouTube.

 

Alyssa:  Hi.  It’s Alyssa and Lisa here again.  This is Part 3 of our series on how to create a low EMF sleep space, and we’ve kind of narrowed it down to three main culprits, which are sound machines, monitors, and then routers?

Lisa:  Yeah.  The router that you have in your house.

Alyssa:  Even though routers aren’t usually in bedrooms, we’re still going to talk about them today.  We put one across the hall, so it might be very close to a bedroom, and we can kind of see how that affects the sleep space.  So do you want to tell everyone again just briefly what a Building Biologist is in case they didn’t watch the other two videos?

Lisa:  Yes.  A Building Biologist is a person that assesses any built environment.  It could be a home or an office or a school for anything that directly impacts the health of the people that work, sleep, or live within those spaces.  And we look at air quality — that’s a very broad topic, but air quality, creating a low EMF environment, as well as water quality, too.  Of all the homes that I have assessed, the three top culprits are just the ones that we’ve talked about today: the sound machines, the baby monitors, and the routers that are typically in a room that shares a wall or is in close proximity to a sleep space.

Alyssa:  So do we want to measure this room with no router and then kind of see how things change as we get close to the router?

Lisa:  Yes.  So we’re in Alyssa’s daughter’s room.

Alyssa:  This is my daughter’s room, and there’s no router in here and we actually don’t have one in this part of the house, but we plugged one in across the hall just for this video.  But a lot of people will have an office maybe across the hall or maybe the bedroom is near the living room where it’s plugged in.

Lisa:  Or it could the bedroom’s on the second floor, and the router could be in the basement right underneath.

Alyssa:  So it could be going up and down this way?

Lisa:  Yep.  The three materials that actually stop radiofrequency radiation are metal, steel, and brick.  But it passes directly through building materials such as windows, drywall, plywood, wood, things of that nature.  So even having a router in close proximity spills over into all those other spaces.  And, again, the sleep space is the most important, and we’re here today to create a sleep sanctuary.

Alyssa:  All right.  Should we look at the numbers?

Lisa:  Again, we’re looking at radiofrequency radiation.  We are looking primarily at the middle number here, and it says 3,680 microwatts per meter squared.

Alyssa:  What’s our ideal?

Lisa:  An ideal for RF is 10µw.m², so you want to be in the double digits.  So we’re at 3,810µw.m², and we want to get to 10.  So we’re going to go across the hall where the router is on.  You can see that the numbers, as we get closer to the router, are beginning to increase.  And so obviously, distance to source matters, but as we get close to —

Alyssa:  Oh, so now we’re up to 188,000µw.m²?

Lisa:  So we’re now up to 188,000µw.m².  We get closer and closer.  We’re at —

Alyssa:  Over a million µw.m²!

Lisa:  Over a million!  And if you look at the router here, there are two numbers.  There’s 2.4 gigahertz (GHz) and then there’s 5 gigahertz (GHz).  So both of these frequencies are active in a router that you get, just any router.  It’s automatically turned on by the manufacturer.

Alyssa:  And that’s the 5G that is faster?

Lisa:  Yep.  And so now, you know, we’re up to 1.5 millionµw.m² of radiation.  So one thing that you can do — obviously, distance from source matters, so in your daughter’s bedroom, we started at 3,600µw.m².  We’re now at 1.5 millionµw.m².  So it’s really good that your daughter doesn’t have any router in her bedroom.  There are different shielding options.  This happens to be a fabric one.  You can get a metal one like we showed you with the baby monitors that’s just in the shape of a rectangle instead of a cylinder.  And so you can see now that this has taken it down to around 10,000µw.m² — A router shield will reduce EMF’s from WiFi by ~85% to 90% 24/7.

Or upgrade to the JRS Eco Wireless routers reduce radiation pulses by 90%. The JRS Eco 100 models even take it one step further and automatically switch to a completely radiation-free Full Eco stand-by mode when no wifi devices are connected and automatically detect only your paired devices. 

Alyssa:  So it went from 1.5 million µw.m², almost, to about 10,000 µw.m².

Lisa:  So that’s exponential reduction.  We still — again, we want to be in single digits.  We want to get to 10 so even this is kind of too high for a safe sleep space.  And so one of the really cool things that you can do is get this particular router which has a manual on/off button bur turning off at night.

Alyssa:  So most routers don’t have an on/off button?  You would have to completely unplug it?

Lisa:  Most routers, you’d have to pull the cord out of the wall.  The other kind of ingenious thing that you get is — this company actually sells remote outlet switches.  They come in sets of one, three, and five.  And what this allows you to do is plug this switch into a wall and then you plug the router into the switch, and with the remote outlet switch at your bedside table — and you can see here.  You can actually turn the router off and on.  So now — and this is kind of still shutting down, but now it went from 1.4 million µw.m² to around 10,000 to 1 million µw.m².  Now, this is still picking up — I think probably your smart watch, but essentially, it’s going down and down.  And then the other thing even better that you can get so that you don’t have radiation coming from your router all the time is to actually hardwire. The best option is to manually turn off WiFi and Bluetooth on every device and use hardwired grounded & shielded Ethernet cables to get Internet connectivity. This eliminates EMF’s from WiFi with your devices.  

Alyssa:  Okay.  So keep your router as far away from your bedroom as possible?

Lisa:  Yes, and turn it off when you sleep.

Alyssa:  And turn it off when you’re not using it, especially during sleep.

Lisa:  Yep.

Alyssa:  All right.  Thanks!

Lisa:  Thank you!

Research 
To learn more about the health impacts of man-made electromagnetic fields (EMFs), check out the BioInitiative Report. It has a 19 page Summary for the Public & Charts which is the preeminent summary. The full 1,500-page report authored by an international panel of M.D. and Ph. D. scientists and physicians, analyzes +3,800 scientific, peer reviewed studies showing adverse health hazards of electromagnetic radiation, especially with children. Diseases and disorders include cancer, neurological diseases, respiratory diseases, behavioral disorders i.e. ADD and autism, immune dysfunction, Blood-Brain Barrier permeability, reproductive failure & birth defects, chronic fatigue, insomnia, depression, headaches, muscle/joint pain, chronic inflammation and many more.

 

Creating a Safe Sleep Space: Routers Read More »

Safe sleep EMFs

Creating a Low EMF Sleep Space: Baby Monitors

Alyssa Veneklase talks with Lisa Tiedt, Building Biologist and owner of Well Abode, about creating health sanctuaries in our own homes.  You can watch this video on YouTube.

 

Alyssa:  Hi, again.  We are in our series of how to create a safe sleep space, and I am Alyssa, talking to Lisa Tiedt again.  She is a Building Biologist, and I’m a sleep consultant.  So we’re talking about — we’re in my daughter’s bedroom.  She’s seven and a half now, but this was her nursery, and it’s a small space, as you can see.  So a lot of the sleep clients I work with have small or smaller nurseries, and when you have things like sound machines and monitors and maybe even a router in the room, how do you position things to make it the safest possible?  So first why don’t you tell us again what a Building Biologist is, and then today we’re going to be talking about monitors.

Lisa:  Yep.  So a Building Biologist looks at any built space, whether it’s a home or a school or an office building, and looks at it for anything that directly impacts the health of the people who live, work, or sleep within those spaces.  A Building Biologist assesses air quality, indoor air quality, electromagnetic fields, as well as water quality.

Alyssa:  Okay.  So today with monitors, is it electromagnetic fields, EMFs?

Lisa:  Today, we’re focused on how to create a low EMF space for your child’s bedroom.  Safe sleep or healthy sleep is one of the most important things that you can do for your child’s health because sleep is the time where the body is naturally rejuvenating and renewing itself every day.

Alyssa:  So I know that when — so when this was a nursery, the crib was there, and I think had the monitor probably as close to this bed as it was — I mean, it was very close to the crib, which I think most parents with a video monitor think we have to do to see them better.  So let’s talk about what that little guy is doing to us right now.

Lisa:  Yes.  So how to create a low EMF space for your child, there — we’re looking at the radio frequency category of manmade EMFs, and baby monitors project or emit radiation.  And so I’m going to turn the RF meter on right now.  We are paying attention to — mostly to that middle line that says max, in a safe sleep space, the number that you want to get to is 10.  If I am Finnley and my head is right by this video baby monitor, it is at around, you know, a half a million microwatts per meter squared.  And so this is —

Alyssa:  So 445,000 and you want to have 10?  Not 10,000.  One zero, 10.

Lisa:  Ten, like double digits, 10.  And we’re at about a half a million here.  And if you’re paying attention to nothing other than even just to numbers, you can see that, you know, one baby monitor can put the entire bedroom —

Alyssa:  In the extreme zone.

Lisa:  In the blinking red extreme, extreme zone.  So one of the very — in terms of steps that you can take, distance from source always matters because the radiation drops off with distance.  So if you absolutely have to have a video baby monitor, move this as far away from the bed space as you possibly can.  Secondarily, what you can do is actually shield the baby monitor.  This is just a case that I bought at the Ace store in my neighborhood.  This is all metal.  They sell plastic ones.  Plastic ones don’t reflect the radiation, so you’ll have to get a metal one.  This was about five dollars.

Alyssa:  And it’s just a little pencil case, right?

Lisa:  And it’s just a little — yeah.  It’s just a little pencil case.

Alyssa:  It looks like an Ikea thing that I have to put utensils in.

Lisa:  Yep.  So what you can see now is this reduced the radiation from the video baby monitor from —

Alyssa:  So are we looking at the top number now?  So it’s holding — the middle number is what it was before?

Lisa:  Exactly.  So the middle number is the peak hold number, and then the top number is the real time number.

Alyssa:  So we went from 500,000 to about 8,000 to 9,000 — it’s going down to 7,000 µw/m².

Lisa:  Around 5,000 to — 5,000 to 10,000. That’s a 70% decrease!  And then even — and then another step down would be instead of getting a video monitor, you would actually just get a baby monitor that has audio only and not video.  So you can see here that the video monitor — now we’re paying attention to the middle number again — was at 500,000 µw/m².  An audio monitor only is about 125,000 µw/m².  So it’s several — you know, four times magnitude less than what the video monitor is.  Because this particular unit would be plugged into a wall, there’s also just RF shielding fabric that you can get.  This is a bag kind of made for the size of a router, but you can get teeny tiny ones, and you can see it goes from 123,000 µw/m² to about 5,000 µw/m².

Alyssa:  5,000 to 10,000.

Lisa:  Yep.  5,000 to 10,000 µw/m².  Now, the absolute best thing that you can do — there’s a D-Link baby monitor with video that you can actually have a hardwired ethernet connection, so you can still have a video baby monitor, but it doesn’t produce any RF because it’s not wireless at all.  (The D-Link DCS-5222L video monitor has zero EMFs when hardwired.)  Or, if your house is well-suited for this, just don’t have a baby monitor at all.

Alyssa:  If you’re right next door and can hear your child…

Lisa:  Exactly.  And, you know, if you use one —

Alyssa:  I should say not next door — in the next room.

Lisa:  Right.  In the next room.  You know, just use is sparingly.  Don’t use it frequently.  And then also remember to never leave it on during naptimes and nighttime sleeping because for a growing child, the sleep time is all the same.  And just remember that this is the base station for the video unit.  Just remember that this base station is emitting all the time, as well, and so this is getting up to 1,000,000µw/m².  So if this was in your kitchen, for example, this would be radiating while you guys are eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  So you can shut that off and then see — this remaining is still coming from the station at the bed, but you can just see that either completely unplug these or turn these off.  Don’t leave these on in the kitchen —

Alyssa:  All the time when you’re not using it.

Lisa:  — or your master bedroom when you’re not using it.

Alyssa:  Right.  Great.  Thanks!

Research 
To learn more about the health impacts of man-made electromagnetic fields (EMFs), check out The BioInitiative Report. It has a 19 page Summary for the Public & Charts which is the preeminent summary of known EMF health impacts on the human body. The full 1,500-page report authored by an international panel of M.D. and Ph. D. scientists and physicians, analyzes +3,800 scientific, peer reviewed studies showing adverse health hazards of electromagnetic radiation, especially with children. Diseases and disorders include cancer, neurological diseases, respiratory diseases, behavioral disorders i.e. ADD and autism, immune dysfunction, Blood-Brain Barrier permeability, reproductive failure & birth defects, chronic fatigue, insomnia, depression, headaches, muscle/joint pain, chronic inflammation and many more.

Additional info: We found a new baby monitor after this video recording that is the lowest emitting monitor on the market! Check them out at Bebcare!

 

Creating a Low EMF Sleep Space: Baby Monitors Read More »

safe sleep

Creating a Safe Sleep Space: Sound Machines

Alyssa Veneklase talks with Lisa Tiedt, Building Biologist and owner of Well Abode, about creating health sanctuaries in our homes.  You can view this video on YouTube.

 

Alyssa:  All right.  Today, I’m here talking to Lisa Tiedt.  She’s a Building Biologist, and, as you know, I’m a sleep consultant, so we’ve partnered a few times to talk about how to best create a sleep space, not just for a newborn but for toddlers, as well.  So tell us what a Building Biologist is.

Lisa:  A Building Biologist is a person that comes into any built environment, which could be a home, an office, a school, and it assesses it for anything that directly impacts the health of the people who live or work within those spaces.  So the type of things that we look at are air quality, reducing manmade electromagnetic fields (EMFs), as well as water quality.

Alyssa:  Okay.  So what do want to talk about today?

Lisa:  So for today, what we really want to do is create a sleep sanctuary for you and your family.  We have taken a look at three things that are typically in a child’s sleep space that really increases the EMFs in that space.  We want to get those as low as possible because those are challenging to the central nervous system, the immune system, the brain, the heart, and all the inner cellular communication because all of those require or rely on frequencies, as well, electrical pulses within the body.

Alyssa:  And as we’ve talked about before, sleep is the time when your body kind of regenerates.  So if you don’t have a safe space for your body to actually rest and regenerate and rejuvenate, then that’s when all of those disruptions happen because they’re being bombarded by all the things we put in the rooms, right?

Lisa:  Yep, that we don’t think about.  Sleep is the absolute most critical time for your body to be in homeostasis.  So you just want your child’s body to be able to naturally do whatever it’s trying to do in terms of rejuvenation and development.

Alyssa:  So a sound machine is one thing that I recommend to every single sleep client.

Lisa:  Yes.

Alyssa:  So we’re going to talk about different sound machines today, and then she actually has her little handy — what do you call that?

Lisa:  It’s a gaussmeter, and it measures AC magnetic fields.  And for a sleep space, you want to be anything less than 0.2 milligauss (mG).

Alyssa:  Okay.  So do you want to get right into it and tell us about —

Lisa:  Let’s get right into it.

Alyssa:  Okay.  I’m going to move this a little bit.

Lisa:  So I have an example of a sound machine here that is particularly high in EMFs and specifically AC magnetic fields.  So first I’m going to turn on the gaussmeter, and it’s at 0.3mG, which is a really good measurement for a sleep space.  Now, this is the Dohm sound machine —

Alyssa:  But didn’t you say we want to 0.2 or lower?

Lisa:  Yes.  So this is kind of coming down here.  We’re at about 0.25mG.  And there’s other things that are happening within the building that’s affecting the sleep space, too, but we’re just going to focus on the sound machine today.

Alyssa:  Okay.

Lisa:  So when we turn this on, you will see that the —

Alyssa:  Whoa.

Lisa:  These Dohm sound machines are particularly high in EMFs.  So this one is measuring at about 900, 920.  920 milligauss!  And we want to be at 0.2.  So the Dohm machines, if you want to create a sleep sanctuary for your child, is not one that I recommend.  If you have one of these, I would actually exchange them for a different model.  I have two examples here that are really low in EMFs.  The first one here is the HoMedics.

Alyssa:  Which is, by the one, the one I recommend to everybody.

Lisa:  Which is — okay.  Great!

Alyssa:  Even before speaking with you!

Lisa:  Oh, excellent!  Excellent.  So we’re totally on the same page.  I’m going to turn this on.  So the milligauss here is 0.15.   So this is just a pristine environment for your daughter, and when I turn the HoMedics sound machine off, it does not increase the field at all.  So this is one that I recommend, and obviously, there is, you know, different sounds that you can do here.  The other one that I recommend is called the LectroFan, and both of these you can get on Amazon.  This one has the same effect as the HoMedics brand, which is essentially nothing, in terms of increasing the AC magnetic field.  The other thing that I like about this one is you can charge it and — it’s portable.  You can take it with you in the stroller or whatever.  So these are just a little bit of a different kind of use case.  But this is just one example of — with a little bit of information, what you can do to help lower the EMFs within your child’s sleep space and help them help their body develop and rejuvenate as it wants to.

Alyssa:  Thank you!

Lisa:  Thank you.

Research 
To learn more about the health impacts of man-made electromagnetic fields (EMFs) check out the BioInitiative Report. It has a 19 page Summary for the Public & Charts which is the preeminent summary. The full 1,500-page report authored by an international panel of M.D. and Ph. D. scientists and physicians, analyzes +3,800 scientific, peer reviewed studies showing adverse health hazards of electromagnetic radiation, especially with children. Diseases and disorders include cancer, neurological diseases, respiratory diseases, behavioral disorders i.e. ADD and autism, immune dysfunction, Blood-Brain Barrier permeability, reproductive failure & birth defects, chronic fatigue, insomnia, depression, headaches, muscle/joint pain, chronic inflammation and many more.

 

Creating a Safe Sleep Space: Sound Machines Read More »

baby sleep tips

My Favorite Sleep Products

During sleep consultations I am often asked what my favorite products are. While I have many, parents must realize that my favorite sleep sack or swaddle may not be their child’s favorite!

I will list several products in this blog and tell you why I like them, but you know your baby or child best. Use your judgment to decide which might work best for them, but unfortunately it sometimes means buying a few products to find the right one.

Baby Monitors

Most parents choose to use a baby monitor, but there are so many options! Function is definitely a factor, but what about safety? Did you know wireless monitors emit radiation? Some of them emit as much as a microwave! There is one monitor brand that stands out above the rest, Bebcare. They have three great options. Check them out and do some comparison shopping of your own!

Sound Machine

White noise is important for sleep. In utero, it’s actually pretty noisy! Think back to the sound you heard during your ultrasound. All that loud swishing is what your baby heard 24/7; the sound of your blood flowing and your heart beating. Recreate that level of white noise for your baby when you put them to sleep. Keep it fairly loud so they don’t hear a door slam, a dog bark, or the doorbell ring.

My favorite is the Homedics sound machine. It’s inexpensive, has a couple great sounds (rain and ocean…stay away from the jungle sounds!), and can be used with batteries.

Swaddles and Sleep Sacks

Love to dream
This sleep sack is great for babies who love to suck on their hands. It’s snug enough to help with the Moro Reflex but allows baby’s arms to move so they reach their hands to their mouths.

Swaddelini
This soft and stretchy swaddle is made locally here in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It has great compression around the chest to make baby feel snug and safe, while allowing the legs room for movement and the arm tubes hold baby’s arms down by their side. Here is a tutorial on how the Swaddelini works!

Muslin wraps
Muslin wraps for swaddling are the most common way to swaddle a newborn. They are inexpensive and effective. For some tutorials on different swaddling methods with a muslin wrap, check out a basic swaddle and a houdini swaddle.

Miracle Blanket
The Miracle Blanket is a great option for babies that can bust out of a normal swaddle. I reference this swaddle above in my houdini swaddle method.

Wake up clock

The LittleHippo Mella clock is great for older kids who tend to get out of bed too early. It uses gentle colors to let kids know when it’s time to wake and a different color when they can get out of bed. There is a face on the front of the clock that tells them if it’s time to sleep (eyes closed). You can choose to use the alarm clock or not, and it has a couple sounds to choose from for a sound machine.

Magnesium

My friend Mitch Shooks, Owner of GRIP Center, recommends magnesium lotion as part of your bedtime routine. Here’s what he has to say:

One of my favorite tricks to help parents get better sleep is to help them get their kids to sleep better. Magnesium supplementation is one of my favorites to help children fall and stay asleep. When my children were very small, finding a supplement to boost their magnesium intake was impossible until I came across a topical magnesium lotion. It’s the same form of magnesium we get from epsom salts but with much better absorption through the skin. While epsom salts were practical to put in baths for the babies, as they got older it got more difficult to keep up a daily dose. 

I have used topical magnesium lotion for years with our kids and almost every client with small children. We make it part of our nightly bedtime routine. When we would change the last diaper and put on PJs we would use half a pump for our littles under 6 months and massage it into their legs and feet. As they got older we would use 1-2 pumps and give them a little back massage with the lotion right before bed. For kids that have a hard time staying asleep and often get out of bed, we found that after a few weeks of regular use they could sleep through the night. It’s completely safe, has zero downsides, and is often the most deficient mineral in our diets. If your littles have a hard time staying asleep, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend using the topical magnesium cream as part of a healthy bedtime regime.”

You can contact Mitch directly to inquire about the lotion.

Bassinets

I get asked alot about the SNOO. I think about half of the clients I work with have used or are using the SNOO for their baby. In theory, it’s amazing! It does all the things a baby needs to fall back to sleep. It gently rocks them and uses sound to soothe. It’s usually the best thing a parent has ever purchased for the first 4-6 weeks. After that, parents say that “it just stopped working for my baby!”. Well…yes and no. At that age a baby is beginning to produce their own melatonin (the hormone that makes us feel sleepy). When a baby begins to produce their own melatonin, they begin to show us some signs of early sleep patterns. This means they are in the beginning stages of setting their circadian rhythm – knowing when it’s time to eat and sleep and be awake.

The biggest downfall with using the SNOO (which isn’t a problem with the SNOO itself) is that parents think because they are using it, their baby is just going to magically sleep all night. Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy. A baby still needs to have a feeding and sleeping routine or the SNOO does you no good after a while. If a baby’s circadian rhythm isn’t set, no amount of rocking and shushing will get them to sleep. Healthy sleep habits in addition to the SNOO can be a winning combo to help your baby achieve great sleep for several months instead of weeks!

My recommendation for a crib or basinet would be to find one that makes the most sense for your family. If you only have one bedroom and you will be room sharing, a small basinet that can go near your bed would probably work best. (FYI: Most parents tend to do this for the first several weeks or months regardless of how many bedrooms they have.) Whether your baby is in a crib or basinet, in your room or in the nursery, my one and only concern is your baby’s safety. They must sleep on their back on a flat surface with no blankets, stuffed animals, or crib bumpers (unless mesh). Do not let your baby sleep in a swing or bouncy seat that is inclined.

Sleep Consultations

Although a baby isn’t ready to sleep long stretches yet by 6 weeks, there are some really simple things parents can do at this age when they notice sleep going awry.

Some very basic sleep hygiene rules for a newborn can be extremely helpful in setting yourself up for sleep success down the road.

  1. Follow your baby’s cues for sleep. Don’t try to keep them awake for too long. A newborn might only be able to stay awake for 1 hour at a time. Don’t listen to those who tell you that you need to keep a newborn awake for long periods of time during the day so they sleep at night. Sleep does not work that way for a newborn! Let them sleep when they are tired and don’t try to keep them awake for longer than they are able. This causes overtiredness.
  2. Focus on full feeds. The first few weeks with a newborn will be all about establishing feeding habits and bonding. Don’t even think about a schedule at this point. Once you start to notice healthy feeding habits are formed, you can begin to focus on full feeds vs. all day snacking. If your baby can only go 1 hour between feeds, it’s usually a good indication that they are not filling their tummy during a feed. What does this have to do with sleep? Everything! If your baby needs to eat every hour, they will never get more than a 30-45 minute stretch of sleep at a time. If you can make sure every feed is a full feed, your baby will be full and that allows them to sleep longer without a wake up.
  3. Try not to feed to sleep. If you can separate feeding from sleeping and make them two completely separate activities, you won’t ever get to the point where your baby requires a feed to fall asleep. Please note that the first few weeks, there will be no stopping your baby from falling asleep while feeding. This is normal and completely fine! But as your baby can eat more efficiently and stay awake a bit longer, feed in a well lit room to make sure they get a full feed while awake. Then move them to their dimly lit sleeping area to start the bedtime routine. Put them into the crib or basinet drowsy but awake.

Most babies who are around 12-16 weeks and/or 12 pounds are ready for a sleep consultation. Please reach out if you’re struggling to get your baby on a good nap routine or struggling with overnight sleep.

Keep in mind that a sleep consultation does not mean your baby will sleep 12 hours through the night! Some 5 month old babies are able to while some 9 month old babies still need a feed in the night. Our consultations are customized to your baby; there is never one right answer for all.

Together, as a team, we work to find the best solution for your baby and your family as a whole. We work based on your sleep goals and follow your baby’s cues to determine what they need.

To learn more about our sleep consultations, contact us for a free phone call to see if our plans are right for you. We work with clients locally and nationally as our sleep plans are done via phone, email, and text. Once stay at home restrictions are lifted, we will be offering in-person consultations again locally which can also be combined with overnight doula support to allow parents optimal sleep.

Our custom plans give you my full support for up to 2 weeks! I believe this is the only way for parents to be successful. We are there the entire way to offer guidance, assurance, answer questions, and tweak plans when needed based on how your baby is responding. We are a team!

Gold Coast Doulas is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. 

 

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mother and baby

Top 10 New Parent Essentials

Did you notice that this list doesn’t say “Baby Essentials”? Nope, it’s not an error. YOU are the single most essential thing in your baby’s tiny life. While you process all the feels over this game changing reality, I’ve got your back with some advice on essentials that will ease your transition so that you can experience a little more rest, comfort, and peace of mind. 

#10: A comfortable chair and a selection of board books
You’re going to be spending a lot of time in this place over the next several years, feeding, snuggling, consoling, reading, and likely sleeping. Start building your collection of books early and add to it often. Your baby will love the sound of your voice, they will love the expressions on your face, and most of all they will love the time spent on your lap, together. Begin cultivating a love of reading and language from the beginning!

#9: Stroller
The sheer number and price range of strollers on the market is staggering. This market reflects the many priorities of consumers. As a Michigan Mama, I often take into consideration the age of the baby when they are born because it determines the need for a car seat system. For example, any baby born around October isn’t going to see too much stroller time before May, so a carseat system isn’t too important and a bassinet, even less important. On the other hand, a baby born in May will need the additional support and a parent will likely enjoy the ease and mobility of a safe travel system.

#8: Baby Bjorn
Sometimes a stroller isn’t ideal; maybe you enjoy trail walking or you simply prefer that intoxicatingly sweet fresh baby smell right under your nose. In that case, consider a Baby Bjorn Carrier.  My 4th child basically lived in this from 6 weeks to 6 months, maybe longer, no one’s judging. Bottom line, get yourself a way to hold a baby while also having the ability to answer the phone, make dinner, or fold a basket of laundry.


#7: CuddleBug Wrap
Similar to the Baby Bjorn, the CuddleBug Wrap allows for close proximity and easy access to kisses, but is considered a soft wrap. This wrap is breathable, yet structured enough so that it provides great support inside or outside. Unsure how to use a soft wrap? No worries, contact Gold Coast for referrals to places where you can learn how to baby wear and sometimes even borrow them for free.

#6: Summer Deluxe Baby Bather
I love running a bath, closing the bathroom door so that all the warmth stays in, and then placing newborns through older babies in this baby bathing seat. Now, if you’re looking for bells and whistles, this seat may not be for you, but I’m a simple gal who likes portability, fast-drying washable mesh, and a fresh smelling baby.

#5: Pacifiers
Sucking is an innately soothing practice for a baby. Why not have one or two on hand to try? My favorite is the MAM, but try not to overthink it.

#4: Swaddle Wraps
I Love the Aden by Aden and Anais 100% cotton wraps for Summer Babies. A tight swaddle gives babies a safe and secure feel, which often lends itself into better sleep. This alone qualifies the wrap as something you should buy several of.

Pro Tip: Some swaddles have zippers on the bottom that allow for easy access to diaper changes and also mean that you don’t have to un-velcro during the night, buy these! 

#3: Black Out Curtains
In order to help shape healthy sleep habits, it’s helpful to be able to make a room pitch black during daytime sleep. Daylight sends a physiological message to our brains to wake up and can impede daytime naps.

#2: White Noise Machine
No, not the kind that has birds chirping or sings lullabies. A low, steady, white noise that has the ability to sound like a dust buster when employed. This single purchase will add hours of sleep to your life and that, my friend, is precious.


#1: (DRUMROLL….) A DOULA!
Doulas are for “that kind” of parent… you know the kind who welcome support, encouragement, peace of mind, rest, and stability during a vulnerable time. Use one and then recommend that your girlfriend, sister, brother, neighbor- use one, too! 

This blog is written by Jen R., a local doula in the Grand Rapids area.
Gold Coast Doulas is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. 

 

Top 10 New Parent Essentials Read More »

Parenting and Sleep: Podcast Episode #98

Laine Lipsky, Parenting Coach, talks with Alyssa today about the negative effects of sleep deprivation on children and parents.  You can listen to this complete podcast episode on iTunes or SoundCloud.

Alyssa:  Hello and welcome to the Ask the Doulas Podcast.  I am Alyssa Veneklase.  I’m excited to be back with Laine Lipsky, parenting coach.  How are you?

Laine:  Hi!  I’m good.  How are you doing?

Alyssa:  Great!  So when we talked on the phone last week, we talked a lot about sleep, and we didn’t intend to talk about sleep, but I told you that I was an infant and child sleep consultant, and then you were like, oh, gosh.  The way sleep deprivation affects some of the families that you’re working with — it kind of created some interesting thoughts.  I’d love to hear some examples of how some families you’ve worked with and how sleep deprivation has affected that whole family, because I see that when I work with — I’m hired to help children sleep, but obviously, these parents aren’t sleeping, either.  That’s why they’re calling me.  And then sometimes even when I get the children sleeping, these parents are, like, I still can’t sleep.  It’s like if they’ve been two years without a good night’s sleep, they have to retrain themselves.  So even though I’m not an adult sleep coach, there’s still a lot of rules from children that apply to us as adults that I kind of have to remind them of and tell them to be patient with themselves, just like they had to be patient with their child to get them into this new rhythm.

Laine:  Yeah.  It is such a big issue, and I can speak from personal experience.  I have, hands down, the champion worst sleeper ever.  He is now a teenager, so for anybody out there who thinks that they could take me on, like, my kid on, when he was a baby, I challenge you to a duel, a sleep duel.  A sleep-off.  Whatever you want to call it.  My son — so I’ll just start by saying my son — he would go to sleep.  We did all the “right things” for sleeping, and when we would put him down at night, he would go through the night and wake up every 45 minutes.  And I was a nursing mom and I was not intending to cosleep, but because of his wake cycle, and nobody — nothing could get him back to sleep.  He had something called silent reflux.  It was really hard to diagnose.  It was really concerning.  We ended up cosleeping, and I — we had to out of absolute necessity.  So every 45 minutes — so literally, when I would put him down — and that’s in heavy quotes; “put him down” for the night, I would start weeping because I knew that there was just this huge thing ahead of me called “night” which was going to be really, really painful and difficult.  And you and I said we both know that, you know, sleep deprivation is a form of torture in prisons and there’s — I firsthand have been through it, and I work with people who have been through it.  So I just want to start off by saying, like, I feel anyone’s pain who’s walking around feeling like their body hurts, their eyes burn, they’re short-tempered; they’re not making clear decisions, and especially on top of it, we’re recording this podcast during this COVID lockdown time.  All of that stuff is just on, you know, steroids right now because we’re also stressed out about the uncertainty that surrounds us.  So my heart goes out to anybody who’s struggling with sleep right now, and it’s so widespread.  The impact of a parent being sleep deprived and maybe both parents being sleep deprived is just such a trickle-down effect.  And so, yeah, I can tell you a lot about clients who I’ve  had, but I just wanted to start off by saying that I have total empathy for somebody who is going through that.  It’s a really important issue.

Alyssa:  Yeah.  You almost forget how bad it is, and then you have one night of bad sleep, and you remember.  Oh, my goodness; how did I do this for weeks, if not months?  And some of my clients, for years.  You know, for two years.  It’s devastating to relationships to where I –you know, they’ll say — or even six months.  Six months old; I had a long maternity leave.  I need to go back to work, but I haven’t slept in six months.  Or I went back to work after three months, and I have not been productive at work for the last three months.  It affects everything.

Laine:  Right, or people driving to work totally sleep deprived.  That’s dangerous.

Alyssa:  It’s worse than drunk driving.  I mean, statistically, I think there are more driving deaths related to sleep deprivation than drugs and alcohol combined.  Combined!

Laine:  Wow.

Alyssa:  Yeah.

Laine:  I didn’t know that.  So I say a lot, joking not joking, in my practice, if parents were able to get on top of sleep early on in their families that I’d be out of a job because a lot of what I see are behavioral issues that are stemming from a lack of sleep.  And you just think about how you feel when you are tired, when you’re cranky, when you — you know, when you feel that way as an adult, you’re able to sit down.  You’re really able to say, I’m feeling really — at best, you’re able to say, I’m feeling really cranky.  I’m just really tired.  You’re able to maybe take a nap somehow, magically.  You’re able to have a cup of coffee.  When we think about our kids — or, you know, maybe people have a glass of wine to take the edge off.  There’s no taking the edge off for the kids.  They don’t have that.  Maybe it’s nursing.  I guess that would be the closest thing.  But there’s no edge — they’re just edgy all the time.  And so in a family system, what I see is that when kids are not rested and parents are not rested, we’re not dealing with the actual people.  We’re dealing with the tired versions of those people.  And so one of my very first questions when I speak to people about their parenting is, how is your sleep.

Alyssa:  That’s great.

Laine:  It’s that essential.  And because I shared a few minutes ago about my own son and my own sleep struggles: we defied the parenting books at the time to schedule our day or create a schedule around feeding.  I was, like, forget feeding.  Who’s going to eat when they’re tired and cranky?  Like, does eating feel good when you’re tired?  That’s not a solution.  The solution is sleep.  And so we quickly learned — and I don’t know if this is what you teach, but you’re so flexible.  You teach a lot of different things to people.  But had you been my sleep coach at the time, or sleep consultant, I would tell you that we were scheduling our day around our son’s wake-up time.  Like, that’s what we — we’re scheduling our day around his sleep needs.  His feeding seemed to be fine, but his sleep was just crazy off the charts.  And I think part of that is temperament.  I think a lot of it is.  And to this day, he doesn’t — well, to this day, he is a teenager, so he sleeps crazy amounts, but up until he started that whole sleep routine as a teen, he still needed less sleep than everybody.  He still needs less sleep than me.  And that’s where I see in families the real — when it’s upside down, when a parent has high sleep needs and a child has lower sleep needs, that’s a red zone for me as a parenting coach.

Alyssa:  Yeah, it’s really hard because in the podcast we previously recorded where you said there’s no one parenting style; there’s no practice style — but the same with sleep.  There’s no one — or there are some best practices, but there’s no best parenting style.  Same with there’s a lot of sleep methods, but there’s no one right sleep method for everybody.  So when I give someone a sleep plan which says, you know, based on your child’s age, this is what a child typically — what a nap schedule typically looks like or a feeding schedule typically looks like.  Most parents want to go by the — just down — and I have to remind them, we’re not watching the clock.  We’re watching your baby.  Your baby’s cues tell us, how long is their wake cycle?  Can they stay awake for an hour and a half before they get tired, or can they stay awake for two and a half hours before they get tired?  That will determine feeding and sleep schedules, not this list, not the clock.  So they just want me to hand them this guide that miraculously works, and it’s just not that easy.  We really have to watch Baby’s cues to understand what your baby needs, because if a typical baby needs 15 hours and yours only needs 14 hours, what does that mean?  Let’s try some things.  What is this going to look like?  A later bedtime?  An earlier wakeup?  A shorter nap?  Troubleshooting together is why I think finding a good sleep coach is the only way to be successful because you can’t just read a book because then you are looking at this sleep guide in a book saying, okay, oh, my gosh, it’s 2:03.  I’m three minutes late.  You should have been down for a nap.  But your baby’s not tired.  So then what?  Who answers that for you?

Laine:  Yep, and to have somebody help you watch that, because just like with parenting advice, you know, the old adage is that — the old whatever you want to call common wisdom or whatever that you might get from your own parents often doesn’t apply.  Sometimes they do.  Like, if you’re lucky, you know, like a baby will sleep when they’re tired.  Well, not if you have a baby who’s really high-strung, temperamentally speaking, or who’s overtired.  Their form of being really tired is wired, which is the case in my kids.  Right?  He didn’t get that dreamy, dazed-off look when he was tired.

Alyssa:  He didn’t give you the sleep cues of yawning and rubbing his eyes?  Mommy, I’m tired.

Laine:  There was no book that fit my child, and so to your point, I had to learn to read him and I had to stop reading the books.  And I didn’t do it perfectly.  You know, I still don’t do it perfectly, but just even that shift in my mindset of, like, oh, I need to read my child, not the books.  It’s the same thing that I say to parents about parenting, which is, learn to read your child and take in the information but, you know, information overload is overwhelming and we’re just being inundated with it now, and it’s conflicting information.  It’s like, you know, I’m a sports coach by training.  Then I apply all of that to parenting.  If there are too many voices in your huddle, right, the team gets off track and doesn’t know what they’re doing.  You need to have one clear voice in the huddle and for each parent, it’s going to be them.  Their family is their huddle, and the more clear that the leader can be, right, the captain — you’re the captain of your team — the better everybody is going to respond to that, or at least you’re going to know whether it’s working or not.  So what I find is happening with parents is they get in their, you know, best-meaning selves, they want to be informed.  They’re getting, like, flooded by information and they don’t know how to parse that out and to make it work for their child.  So is that something that you — how do you talk to parents about that?  Like, how would you help — that’s what I hear a lot from parents is, like, I don’t know what to do.  How do you handle that?

Alyssa:  A lot of the times, parents will come to me and say, we’ve tried it all.  We’ve done all of the methods.  All of them, even ones that I don’t agree with, right, like just crying for two hours.  But they’re so desperate.  They’re, like, this is what my pediatrician told me or this is what the book says.  I’m just going to try it.  Well, there’s so many methods, but they can be done incorrectly, and maybe that method’s not the right one for your child.  So if they’ve come to me and said, I’ve tried Method X but then I read through their intake form and I’m like, well, no wonder that didn’t work.  Here’s what we’re going to try.  Or we get into something and they’re like, hmm, but my sister has a baby who sleeps really good, and this is what they did, and you’re not telling me to do that.  I’m like, well, that’s their baby.  So you do.  You have to tell them — like, I love the coach analogy.  I am your coach.  We’re a team.  We’re doing this together.  I’m not coming in and just telling you what to do.  I’m doing this based on your family’s needs.  And then I educate you so that you can go and do it yourself because I’m not with you everyday for the next several months or years.  So I educate them so they have the tools moving forward to do exactly what they need to do.  And I also love the coaching analogy, the sports analogy, because for older children, I explain to them sometimes that it’s even with the emotional aspect.  You know, we talked in the last podcast about how we can’t just make our kids happy all the time.  Experiencing a wide range of emotions is normal, and we need to help them learn how to cope with those.  This comes into play a lot with sleep because you hear your child cry when they’re tired, and it’s this automatic — we just feel this distress.  But sometimes those same cries during the day — you take a toy away or you have an overly tired child who just wants to cry about everything — you can ignore them during the day a lot easier than you can at night.  But we need to help them cope with these emotions.  So it’s — what do I say to them?  You’re not in this to play the game for them.  You have to help teach them how to play the game themselves.  Right?  Like, we can’t hop in and do it for them all the time.  With sleep, we’re coaching them.  That’s my basic — I forget where I was going with that, but…

Laine:  You were talking about how coaching as an analogy was working for — yeah, for helping them learn how to do it and being — I think you said it; like, not doing it for them but coaching them to do it, and that the older they get, I think you were talking about, that maybe that was a piece of it, too.

Alyssa:  Yeah.  I mean, a baby needs a lot more help and it takes a lot longer.  When you have a two-year-old, it’s a lot different than a six- or nine-month old.

Laine:  Right.

Alyssa:  You know, they’re talking, walking, moving.  They’re a little bit more — they’re smart.  They can be tricky.  They know how to get you to stay in that room a little bit longer.  There’s no thirstier child than one you’re trying to get to bed.  Mommy, I’m thirsty.  Mommy, I’m hungry.  Mommy, I need this.

Laine:  Yeah, so does that — does your advice for parents change depending on all the things?  You know, the child and the parent, whatever — because that’s a classic one that comes up for people.  Like, my child has all the excuses and can crawl out of their crib and can crawl out of their bed or whatever.  Do you have some wisdom to share with people who are really —

Alyssa:  Bedtime routines.  Bedtime routines are so important.

Laine: For the kids who don’t — for the parents who are like, we have a bedtime routine, and it involves bath time and books and me putting my child in bed, and then my child’s coming out of bed, like, a zillion times before they stay in bed.  That’s the bedtime routine, and they’re sick of it and they don’t have any recourse.  And I’ll tell you something, Alyssa: some of my clients have gotten some of the worse advice from pediatricians, including people to, like, lock their child in their rooms.  That’s come straight out of the mouth of a pediatrician, and just, like — I want parents to know that if advice that you’re getting from a source doesn’t feel good, then it’s not good.  It has to feel good to be good, and it should be something that is aligned with your values, something that’s aligned with your personality and also that will work for your child’s temperament because it just breaks my heart to hear people on the phone, and I hear it all the time, people crying; well, I did this and it felt terrible, but my pediatrician told me to do it, so I — you know, thinking that they were doing the right thing.

Alyssa:  So when they work with me, I have them fill out an intake form for that reason.  I want to know, what is your parenting style?  What’s your child’s temperament?  What have you tried in the past?  What’s worked; what hasn’t worked?  And what is your end goal?  So I will make a plan based on that.  Not what I think you and your child need to be doing, but what is your goal as parents?  Maybe you have a one-year-old still breastfeeding exclusively, and you just to cut that down.  You don’t want to eliminate all night feeds.  Twelve months probably could sleep all night without a feed, but if you’re okay; you just want to have two feeds instead of five — okay.  Let’s work our way back.  Let’s eliminate a few of them and see how it goes.  And typically, you know, at that age, we would probably end up eliminating all of them, but then it’s also the opposite.  I might have a four-month-old client whose parents are, like, I need my baby to sleep all night.  Well, okay.  At four months, your baby probably still needs to eat at night, so let’s talk about what a realistic overnight looks like for this age.  So sometimes the expectations aren’t quite — you know, they might be a little bit unrealistic.

Laine:  Right.  Same thing with parenting.  We want our five-year-old, three-year-old, to set the table and then go up to bed by themselves.  And I’m like, yeah, no.  That’s not — that’s not a thing.  Or it could be, but it’s very rare.  So maybe you get this question a lot or this issue a lot that comes up; maybe this is a good place to overlap a little bit.  I hear from parents a lot that they have some shame, like, a lot of shame that they don’t know how to parent, that they should know how to parent.  Some people are more forthcoming and say, you know, well, I was raised by parents who I’m not looking to emulate.  I want to be parenting differently than how my own parents parented me, and I don’t know how.  There’s not so much shame there, but when people are, like, trying to do it differently and they can’t; they think that they should know how to do it naturally, and it’s not coming out the way — it’s like when you have a picture in your head and you start drawing, and it’s, like, nope, that’s not what’s in my head.  Not at all.  Right?  I get that a lot.  I hear that a lot from parents who are really struggling with this internal sense of, I should be able to do this.  Do you get that with people who are — especially around sleep and in this culture of, well, just let them cry it out, or they’ll sleep when they’re tired.  Do you find that parents struggle with that?

Alyssa:  Yeah.  It’s kind of like breastfeeding, right?  We think it’s going to be this natural thing, and then when we really struggle with it, we think that there’s something wrong with us when nobody tells us as new moms that breastfeeding is really hard.  Same with sleep.  It’s just something that our bodies want to do naturally, and people tell you that newborns sleep all the time.  Well, they do for a little while, and then they don’t.  So when it hits the fan and you don’t know what to do, they start reading books.  It’s this downward spiral of, well, I read this book and it didn’t work, so I gave up and now, like you, you just end up cosleeping if you don’t want to, and I have clients who have been cosleeping for three years, and the parents haven’t slept in the same bed for three years.  Some families, that works.  They do that by choice and it’s fine, but the ones who are calling me, it’s not because they love this situation.  They’ve gotten there by desperation, and somebody’s not happy.  So every family is so different, and I always warn people: if any sleep consultant comes in and says they have a plan and just one plan, or if it includes cry it out, you just say, thanks but no thanks.  There is no one plan.  If there was one way to do this, I could write a book and tell everyone what to do and be done.  Right?  And same with you.  Every family is so different.

Laine:  Well, what I see is that when people are willing to take a plan, kind of no matter what, it means that they’re actually going to start — they’re going to start walking down a path of, I’m going to do whatever works to get the behavior I want, no matter what.  And that’s a path, from a parenting perspective, that’s a path of very authoritarian, very old-school parenting style.  Right?  Where it’s going to be harder if you’re not really showing flexibility; you’re not going into it with empathy.  It’s going to be harder to develop those skills and that mindset toward your child and toward your parenting style as your child gets older.  Right?  So something that I think gets lost when parents are willing to pick up a solution — and I get why they do.  Right?  Like, I get why they pick up the, “I’m just going to let them cry and figure it out,” because they are at their wit’s end, and it’s overwhelming to think about it being a process.  They want it to just be a simple solution.  I get the temptation there.  However, my cautionary tale to parents is, if that’s the way that you approach sleep, it’s likely going to inform how you’re approaching parenting in general, and that is — I rely on the science for this and I don’t come to this with judgment.  The science absolutely tells us, and the research tells us again and again, that when you’re parenting with an authoritarian style of parenting of, we’re going to do this no matter what, and you’re lacking empathy in that, you’re going to get certain outcomes for your kids in the long term, and they’re never the outcomes that parents want.  You know?  Like, if I were to ask you, what are the outcomes you want for your daughter?  What are your outcomes that you want for your daughter when she’s — push it out 20 years.  She’ll be 27?  What kind of woman do you want her to be?

Alyssa:  I want her to be kind and successful and learning from me, right?  Maybe running her own business.  Yeah.  I want great things for her.  Right.  Right.

Laine: Independent, right?  You want her to be emotionally healthy?

Alyssa:  Right.

Laine:  Attract emotionally healthy partners?

Alyssa:  Right.

Laine:  Right?  All that stuff; resilient, gritty.  Right?  All that stuff; self-assured.  All that stuff are the outcomes that we know — we know that a certain type of parenting, a certain parenting path, gets.  There’s not one right way to walk the path, but there is as path, and that’s what I call best parenting practices.  Right?  We know.  The research is telling us again and again, and if you’re not walking that path, you are walking another path, which is to get insecure kids who are, you know, not as successful as they could be in the three big categories, which is work, school, and relationships.  That’s just research.  So I feel so passionate about having people start as early as possible making parenting choices that feel right to them to get the outcomes that they want.  Never had somebody raise a hand in my course or my class or workshops that I run saying, I want my child to be insecure.  I want my child to attract dysfunctional partners.  Never, right?  I would love to talk to that person.  I think; maybe I wouldn’t want to talk to that person.  But we don’t want that.  That’s not our natural instinct, and it’s so — I like to think of the really early years of being a parent as training for the parents of how you want to be a parent.  And then it sort of morphs into, how are we training our kids?  How are we guiding and shaping them?  But the early decisions, how we respond to them as infants, how we respond to them when they’re really little, when they’re preverbal, especially — that’s training ground for us.  It’s essential training ground for parents for how we’re going to be.  How are we going to listen?  Are we going to ignore?  Are we going to jump every single time?  What is the sweet spot?  What is the sweet spot for each particular parent?  There is a sweet spot.

Alyssa:  We talk a lot about that, and I like the term “sweet spot” because there are some parents who are fine ignoring, and then there are some who are jumping every time.  And when you really talk about listening — they’re like, well, my baby’s just crying.  What do you mean, listen?  I’m, like, crying is communication.  And they are — they can’t verbalize it, but there are different cries.  Especially as a baby develops, those cries actually do sound different, and even before they sound different, take a look at what happened when your baby started crying.  Was there something that you can actually take note of?  A loud noise; maybe a dog barked and it disrupted something, or the sun moved just enough, and it’s shining right in their eyes.  Taking note of what maybe happened to cause the crying instead of saying, oh, my baby must need food, or my baby needs to be held.  Because some babies, as much as we want to hold them all the time, are a little bit — they just don’t need it.  They need their own space a little bit more.  And those are the ones who will cry.  You know, grandma comes over and gets in their face and wants to pick them up right away, and then grandma feels bad, and I’m like, no.  I call them space invaders.  You just invaded the baby’s space.  Move in a little bit slower.  Give them time to adjust.  My daughter was like that.  She needs to assess everything that’s going on in that room before she decides where she wants to go and what she wants to do.  If someone comes at her, game over.  Babies are the same way.  They have little personalities.  I mean, it takes a while to figure them out, but —

Laine:  But in those early stages, they’re little mammals, and they’re responding from that part of their brain and their being that’s the most developed, which is that limbic part of them, which is able to convey — like, my dog right now is conveying a message, right?  She’s not using words, but I know what she wants.  She’s sitting by the door.  She’s having that little howl-cry, plaintive cry.  I know she wants to go out.  I also know that she’s already been out.  She doesn’t need to go out, and when she does go out, she’s been super destructive lately.  And it’s going to get louder, and she’s going to get upset.  And if she were to — to be clear, because I never want to be at all misquoted or confused as saying kids are or should be treated the way that animals are treated — if she were a child, I do not believe in ignoring kids.  I would be going over there.  I would be getting down on her eye level, and I would say, oh, I know that you want to go outside and you’re so upset, and I see you’re so frustrated.  And while leading her away, because if she’s not — while setting a boundary.  We’re still not going outside.  Let’s do something else.  So it’s not just bait and switch, which I know that there’s a lot of parenting programs out there that are all about just redirecting a child’s behavior.  But we’re not looking at just behavioral creatures.  We’re looking at emotional, one day fully formed, human beings.  Right?  So the behavior is one piece of it, and to your point a moment ago about what parents are doing, it’s not just the what; it’s also the how.  Like, how are you walking into your child’s room?  Are you flinging the door open while they’re crying and being, like, oh, my gosh — because your babies are going to pick up on that energy, too.  Right?  So being responsible for our own energy before we engage with our kids, whether they’re crying or frustrated or being pissy or whatever it is, being responsible for our own energy is an essential piece to how they’re going to then react to us.  How we respond to them informs how they react to us.  It is a cycle, for sure.

Alyssa:  Yeah.  We talk about that.  And, you know, they can pick up on our anxiety, especially around sleep.  Like you said, you can go this whole day; you can drink your cup of coffee, have a glass of wine at night, but then all of a sudden you knew: it’s night.  And you just feel this anxiety around sleep that you almost can’t help, but then your child senses that, which makes going to sleep even harder.  But then you’re also sleep deprived, so of course you’re more anxious because you’re sleep deprived, and it’s just this vicious cycle.  Probably 30 percent, maybe up to 50 percent of the parents I work with probably have some form of postpartum depression and/or anxiety, because I’m working with a lot of new moms.  And that just escalates.  That’s another vicious cycle.  If you have it, sleep deprivation makes it worse.  But even if you don’t have it diagnosed, maybe you have sleep deprivation, which is causing depression-like symptoms without being actually depressed.  It’s just really hard.

Laine:  But it doesn’t matter.  If the symptoms are the same, it doesn’t matter what it is.  You have to treat the symptoms, right?  I was talking to a sports psychologist the other day, because I’m always curious about how sports training and sports psychology overlaps with parenting.  It’s just this intersection that I find really fascinating, and it’s where I lean in with parenting.  Let’s treat it like sports training, in the sense that you’ve got to be prepared for it.  You’ve got to do some real training for it.  There’s a pre-game.  There’s a game time situation.  There’s a post-game.  You know, it makes sense to me because I grew up around athletics.  But — oh, what were you just saying about —

Alyssa:  Oh, depression and anxiety.

Laine:  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.  Thank you.  So this sports psychologist, who also now works with women who are postpartum and have postpartum depression and/or anxiety, she was, like, oh, sleep deprivation — it’s not only, like, tied to it; it can be the cause of it.  You know, back to this thing about sleep deprivation being a form of torture: it can absolutely trigger anxiety and depression.  And I just was, like — I mean, I knew that, so when she said it, it wasn’t earth-shattering news to me, because I’d seen it — but to hear her say that with such, like, authority — I was just, like, wow, yeah.  That’s a real thing.

Alyssa: The hormone shift that’s happening anyway after you have a baby — like, it’s the largest hormone drop of any mammal, I think, when you have a baby.  And then add sleep deprivation on top of that, which as a human species, we can handle a little bit of it.  Our bodies are made to handle a little bit of that after having a baby, but not months.  We just can’t handle it.

Laine:  And certainly not years.  So what would you say to somebody — like, what would be advice that you would have for somebody who is struggling with sleep during this particular moment in time; the COVID situation; the unique time that we’re all going through around sleep, because, you know, people wonder, you know — they worry.  They worry and they wonder, and I remember that feeling of, like, I know sleep is the most important thing.  My baby’s brain is growing, and I have all this information about it, and I was definitely one of the more anxious people around sleep.  I was like the sleep police.  And I was also facing people who were saying, oh, it’s no big deal.  It’s no big deal.  So I felt like I was fighting the other side of it, which made me more vigilant.  So it was hard to find that balance for myself.  But I’m wondering, like, what would you tell somebody who is feeling like, I know sleep is super important, and I’m in this, like, bizarre situation at home where I’m working from home and there’s, like — there are noises around.  There’s not quiet.  It’s not ideal.  So I’m struggling with sleep, and we’re in this bizarre time.  Like, can you put anybody’s mind at ease?  Like, beyond saying, like, well, your child’s not going to die.  You know, they’ll survive.  For people I work with, that bar is too low.  You know?  They want to be raising thriving, really healthy — like, optimizing their child’s childhood experience.  Right?  So do you have any just blanket wisdom or anything that could help them have their minds put a little bit at ease?

Alyssa:  Yeah.  I mean, you said it.  Sleep is so important, and I think especially right now with a worldwide pandemic with this virus, proper sleep helps build our immune systems, so let’s try to get proper sleep.  And even though we’re working from home — you know, like we said in the last podcast, let’s change your perspective.  Instead of saying, maybe my kid won’t sleep enough because I’m here and I’m working and there’s all these noises.  Let’s shift that and say, well, I’m home.  I have a lot more opportunity.  I don’t have anywhere I have to be at a certain time.  Let’s focus on sleep.  Instead of letting my kid say, oh, you don’t have a schedule and you can stay up until 10:00 now, let’s continue a pretty consistent bedtime routine, especially for kids — you know, you have teenagers; different story.  For babies and toddlers — even my daughter; she’s 7.  We walk back there at 7:30 at night.  We brush teeth, put PJs on, we read a book, and I walk out at 8:00.  So a 30-minute routine is pretty good.  It gives you plenty of time to do kisses and cuddles and, you know, that’s plenty.  But it’s so important because someday school will start again and work will start again, and it’s going be really, really hard on these parents who have to get back into a rhythm.  So if you’ve gotten out of that rhythm, maybe you can slowly work your way back to getting them.  And it’s hard.  Like, here it’s summertime, which means at 8:00 when I leave her room, it’s still light out.  But she’s still tired, so I just make it as dark as possible.  But try to keep a consistent routine, and that’s a wake up time and a bedtime.  And then if you have a younger kid who’s still napping, sound machines; make it dark in that room; crank the sound machine, and do what you can to keep the house as quiet as possible.  And then you had mentioned some of your clients have kids who are crawling out of cribs.  If you can wait until a kid is 3 to take them out of the crib, that’s better, because developmentally, they’re — before 3, they don’t really understand that this is a bed and I shouldn’t crawl out of it, and then you’re kind of having to shut the door and lock them in the room, which nobody wants to do.  You’re essentially making — I tell parents who have to do that, consider the room now a crib.  So you have to look at everything in that room and make sure nothing can fall on them; they can’t — there’s no — nothing that can hurt them, and you’re essentially turning the room into a crib.  But before 3, it’s really hard.  But there are some tricks.  If you have a 2-year-old who’s crawling out of a crib and you’re afraid they’re going to hurt themselves, and if they wear a sleep sack and they can unzip it and crawl out of it, flip it around so that the zipper is in back.  Maybe they can’t reach that zipper.  If they’re really smart and can get at that zipper, put it on backwards and then put a little T-shirt over it.  They would have to really work.  They have to pull the T-shirt off.  Just try to make it as hard, but it’s hard to climb out of a crib with a sleep sack over your feet.  I have had some Houdini babies who even that doesn’t work, but for most, even just having the zipper in back, they — even if they can touch it with their hand, they can’t get it all the way down.  So that’s one trick.

Laine:  Houdini babies.  That’s hilarious.

Alyssa:  But make sleep a priority.  Instead of saying, oh, I can’t — I just can’t — there’s no way I can get on a sleep schedule or get my kids back on a schedule.  If you make sleep a priority and have some sort of routine — we need routines as adults, and kids especially need some sort of normalcy and routine.

Laine:  Does it have to be to the minute?  Bedtime is 7:30?

Alyssa:  No.

Laine:  What’s your take on that?

Alyssa:  No.  Give yourself some flexibility, especially for younger babies.  Thirty minutes on either side.  So let’s say a working parent; they need to be up — they need their baby up at 7:00 in the morning because they have to get baby fed and out the door.  Now, on the weekends, let them sleep in until 7:30.  If you go past that, you’re really messing with the natural rhythm of the baby’s sleep cycle that we’ve worked so hard to put in place, that they can sleep, you know, 7:00 to 7:00.  You don’t want them to some days be able to sleep until 9:00 or stay up until 9:00.  Even as adults, every hour of sleep that we lose, it takes us about a day to recoup.  So time differences; if I fly to Seattle and visit my friend, three hours different, it takes me about three days to adjust.  And I can deal pretty well with that, but for a baby, it’s really hard; really hard to deal with.

Laine:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  And parents get really nervous about traveling with babies, and how do I do this?  And, again, this comes back to being aligned with what your values are.  It’s okay to not travel with a baby.  Even though you see people on planes with babies all the time, it doesn’t have to be you.  Just getting really clear about where you stand and what’s important to you and why you’re doing what you’re doing.  What’s your why?  Is it because you feel guilty or is it because you feel jealous, or is it because you feel like you really, really need to go visit your mom?  Those are all really different answers to the same question.

Alyssa:  Yeah, I get asked a lot about travel.  People want to travel with their kids a lot, and sometimes it’s just not conducive to have a three-hour time difference with a baby because you’ll probably have to go to bed really early or get them in bed really early, and that means you can’t go anywhere, unless you have the resources to hire a nanny or you’re visiting parents and they’ll stay.  You know, you can put them to bed at home while you leave.  You know, my client right now, they like to go camping.  Before we part ways, how do we camping with this baby?  And we talk through that.  What does that look like?  Go hiking after the nap; come back at lunch; put the baby down again.

Laine:  Again, I think kids are so different.  They come just so different.  You don’t get to — it’s like getting a dog, right?  If you want to, you can thumb through a book and find your ideal breed, and you can pick the type of dog that’s going to have, likely, like, 99 percent sure, you’re going to have the kind of behavior that you want from that dog, right?  If you go to the pound and you’re going to get some sort of mix so you don’t know exactly what you’re getting, then you have to work with what you have.  And that’s what parenting is.  Parenting is, you work with what you have, and you don’t get to pick.  And so I really — one of my favorite things to caution parents against is comparing other people’s outsides to their insides.  Right?  Like, what is your reality versus what you’re seeing somebody else in that moment having?  If you’re somebody who wants to go camping with your baby, if you have the type of baby that can hack that, there’s nothing inherently wrong or bad about taking a baby camping, unless you’re going to artic.  You know, perhaps that is not a good idea, right?  But if you’ve got an “easy” baby and sleep is not an issue, or you’re happy snuggling together, great.  That’s awesome.  But if you don’t have an easy baby or sleep has been a huge issue in your house, then you’re not the family who’s going to — if you want to have the shit show afterward, you know, and you’re willing to go and take that risk and then it’s a calculated risk — it’s just not fair to then be upset with the baby or be upset with your child for being cranky afterward.  You just to be informed, know what you’re doing, know what you’re getting yourself into when you take those risks.  And I think it’s one of the most empowering things that parents can do, to be really clear about what they are and what they’re not willing to tolerate.  Just like in life, right?  What are you willing to tolerate, and what is your happiness equation?  What are the elements of your happiness equation?  It’s really important for people to know that and to get right with themselves so that they can live their best family life.  And it’s not going to be a blueprint from somebody else’s family.

Alyssa:  Yeah.  Realistic expectations, again.  You know, it’s just maybe sometimes telling them, sorry; I have to let you know that your baby’s not going to — based on working together, this activity you want to do won’t suit your baby — but now.  Maybe later.  Don’t give up on this dream to go camping.  It might just have to wait a couple of years until your child is down to one nap a day instead of three.  And again, like you said, you talked about being fluid instead of, like, having this solid — it needs to ebb and flow.  Be flexible.  Realize that your baby is a human who has separate needs from you, and just because you want to do this, your baby might not want to.

Laine:  Part of the deal of becoming a parent.  There’s sacrifices, you know?  And it’s funny; like, I think that we talk about that a lot, right?  Like, there’s a lot of sacrifices in parenting, or there’s a lot of sacrifices in marriage, or there’s a lot of sacrifices in whatever.  But when it really comes down to it, when that happens, when you’re confronted with the sacrifice, it’s a very hard thing.  It’s a tough pill to swallow.  And I just — maybe a good sort of point for us here is to talk about or to ask the question of, like, what is it that is important, you know, and where are you willing to sacrifice?  What is the sacrifice that you face when you’re a parent, and what are you — how do you respond to that?  How do you respond to the fact that you’re being asked to sacrifice stuff?  You know, it’s a tough one.  I don’t think people have a high tolerance for that, especially in this day and age.

Alyssa:  Yeah.  We want things to go our way all the time.

Laine:  All the time.  All the time.  Well, it was definitely a good conversation.

Alyssa:  Yeah!  We covered a lot!  Well, why don’t you tell people again where they can find you if they have questions about the parenting end, before we sign off?

Laine:  Sure.  I have my website.  You can also find me on Facebook, and I have a very slim social presence right now because most of the stuff I’ve been doing in my life and my career has been live and in person, but I’m slowly building a social presence.  So definitely go to my website.  And feel free to check out my online course.  It doesn’t talk directly about sleep, but it does talk about discipline and the issues that follow, you know, if you’re having trouble with getting kids to cooperate and you’re facing a lot of meltdowns.  It will definitely, definitely help you.  And some of that is probably because they’re underslept, but it will help you anyway.

Alyssa:  But the two go hand in hand.  You know, a lot of times, to help them get to sleep better, they need a little bit of discipline, and then once that — you know, with consistency and the right discipline for that family, the child will understand, this is the new routine.  I can sleep better, and then you no longer need to discipline because then it just becomes part of their routine.

Laine:  Absolutely.  Absolutely.  So, yeah, the course will be — the free class will definitely be of help, and then people can also book a free call with me.  And those are the main ways to find me.  And I want my listeners to listen in to what you’re about to say, too, because I want them to be able to find you.

Alyssa:  Yes, you can find us at our website.  We’re on Instagram and Facebook, and this podcast is called Ask the Doulas.

Laine:  So good.  Thank you so much for having this conversation today!

Alyssa:  Thanks for joining me!

Laine:  My pleasure.  We’ll do it again soon.

 

Parenting and Sleep: Podcast Episode #98 Read More »

Mental Health Awareness Month: Podcast Episode #97

Dr. Nave now works with queens through her virtual practice Hormonal Balance.  Today she talks to us about hormones and how they affect our mental health, including the baby blues and postpartum depression.  You can listen to this complete podcast episode on iTunes or SoundCloud.

Alyssa:  Hi.  Welcome to Ask the Doulas Podcast.  I am Alyssa Veneklase, co-owner of Gold Coast Doulas, and today, I’m excited to talk to Dr. Gaynel Nave, MD, and she works at Hormonal Balance.  Hi, Dr. Nave.

Dr. Nave:  Hi, Alyssa.  Thanks for having me.

Alyssa:  Yeah.  It’s been a while since we’ve talked, but we were emailing a while ago, and we realized that it’s Mental Health Awareness Month in May, and then this week is Women’s Health Week.  So you wanted to talk about baby blues and postpartum depression.  So before we get into that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about Hormonal Balance because last time you talked with us, you worked for — you were at a different place.  So tell us what you’re doing now.

Dr. Nave:  Okay.  Awesome.  So as of this year, I’m in my own practice, as you said.  The name of it is Hormonal Balance.  And so I am an Arizona licensed naturopathic physician, and here in Grand Rapids, I operate as a naturopathic educator and consultant to women, with all gender identities, to basically reconnect to their — who they are and directing their own health, hormonal health concerns.  And that’s the reason why I went with Hormonal Balance, because our hormones affect almost every single aspect of our health, including when we wake up, our mood, our sexual health, all of it.  And for us who are women or female-identifying, the medical community sometimes doesn’t listen to our concerns or minimizes our experience, and so I want to be a part of changing that and, you know, helping women be advocates for themselves and learn more about their bodies, basically.

Alyssa:  Yes.  Awesome.  I love it.  And then you can do — so even though you’re here in Grand Rapids, Michigan, you can do virtual visits, so technically, you can work with anybody anywhere?

Dr. Nave:  Yep, yep, yep.

Alyssa:  Cool.  Well, we’ll tell people how to find you at the end, but let’s talk a little bit about the mental health aspect of, you know, bringing some awareness to it this month.  And then, obviously, you know, baby blues and postpartum depression is something that we deal with on a regular with our clients.  So how do you help your patients?

Dr. Nave:  I call them clients.

Alyssa:  Clients?  Oh, you do?

Dr. Nave:  Yeah, because here in Michigan, because my — there is no regulation for naturopathic physicians, even though I have my license.  I function more as a consultant, so I call the people that I work with “clients.”  And so the way in which I assist them is basically gathering information about their concerns as in-depth as possible because I’m not just going to look at you from the perspective of, oh, I’m experiencing this particular symptom, because nothing occurs in a vacuum.  And so looking at you as a whole, how does what you’re experiencing affect you mentally, emotionally, and physically.  And so we do the full assessment, and then a part of that is talking about and educating you on labs that are pertinent to you.  So there are different types of hormonal labs that are available.  There’s salivary.  There’s urine.  There’s blood.  And so, like, making sure that the one that’s best and indicated specifically for you is what we talk about.  It’s very individualized because each person has a different experience, even if we have the same diagnosis.  Does that make sense?

Alyssa:  Right.  So you’re saying if somebody comes in, you do a pretty thorough — kind of like with my sleep clients, I do an intake form.  Right?  There’s no, like — you’re saying there’s no one blood lab for — oh, there goes my dog.  I should have mentioned that we’re recording at home on speakerphone, and — okay.  So what I was saying is with my sleep consults, I do an intake form because there’s no right answer for every family, so if somebody comes in and needs blood work done or — well, like you said, labs.  Blood work might not be the right lab for them?

Dr. Nave:  Yeah, because there’s — let’s talk about female hormones, for example.  So the female sex hormones — and when I say female, I’m using the medical terminology for it, not like — so, like birth sex.  You have ovaries — versus the gender identify.  I’m still working through how to talk about these medical things and still be cognizant and respectful of the different gender identifies, so please forgive me if I say anything that’s offensive.  So the female sex hormones — estrogen and progesterone — but these hormones don’t just occur in women.  They also occur in men.  So all gender identifies have these hormones involved, but specifically for those who can give birth, estrogen is involved in the building up of the uterine lining of the uterus so that implantation of a fertilized egg can happen.  Progesterone is important for maintaining that uterine lining as well as maintaining healthy pregnancy so that you don’t lose the baby.  Obviously, there are a lot more factors involved.  These hormones, based on how the body breaks down balance specifically as it pertains to estrogen — we have three different types of estrogen, so it’s not just one form that’s in the body, and depending on what lab is done, you’re able to verify all three at the same time.  The one that I’m thinking of right now is the urine test called DUTCH test.  I really enjoy that one.  I’m not promoting it right now, but I’m just explaining why I like it.  So that particular type of analysis looks at all three of those types of estrogen in the body as well as how the body breaks them down.  Is it able to get rid of it effectively, which gives information on the metabolic pathways.  So there’s a lot more information that can be gleaned from — depending on what type of lab is utilized and depending on your specific concern and the way in which your symptoms are presenting; a more investigative or information-bent lab analysis might be indicated, and so being able to speak with someone like myself who is well-versed on the different approaches and all the different options can be really beneficial because then you don’t end up having to do multiple tests, you know, all that kind of fun stuff, or having to get blood drawn if you don’t have to.

Alyssa:  Right.  So what hormones are you looking for when somebody comes in and says, gosh, I think I have postpartum depression?  Is it just hormonal, or do I really have — I guess, where do you as a naturopathic doctor, say, “I think I can help you with hormones,” versus, “I think you need to see a therapist”?  Or do you do both?

Dr. Nave:  So I will probably tell them to do both because postpartum depression, as with any mental health condition, is on a spectrum.  So you have mild, moderate, and severe.  Before we go into that, I think it would be important for us to define a couple things.  Baby blues is feeling down or feeling a shift in your mood, like feeling more weepy, more exhausted, after giving birth, and this can last anywhere from a couple days up to two weeks.  If it extends beyond that time or it’s interfering with your ability to function, then it would be classified as postpartum depression, and postpartum depression can occur in that same time frame as the baby blues, like soon after childbirth, within three to five days, up to a year after giving birth.  And I’m going to read a couple of stats, so bear with me.

Alyssa:  Go for it.

Dr. Nave:  Just for a frame of reference.  So postpartum depression affects up to 15% of mothers, and shifting to 85% of moms is that they get the postpartum blues, so that — these statistics may provide some form of comfort that you’re not alone.  Please don’t suffer alone.  If you’re feeling more down and you need more assistance from your family and friends, please reach out.  If you’re a single mom, I’m sure that there are different groups, like single moms groups, or talking to your doctor or your friends who can be there to provide some emotional support for you during that time.  Please, reach out to people.  It’s not anything to be ashamed of.  A lot of women go through it because our hormones, as I said previously, affect a lot of things, including our mood.

Alyssa:  Right.  I feel like mothers are getting a little bit more comfortable talking about how hard it can be and how maybe bad they feel or these thoughts that they’re having.  You know, you talk to the older generations, like our mothers and grandmothers, who said, well, we didn’t talk about those things or we didn’t need help.  And we’re slowly getting to the point where we’re seeing more and more families look for and seek out postpartum support, which is one of my favorite services we offer because they can work day and night.  When a mom is suffering from any sort of perinatal mood disorder, having that in-home support that’s judgment-free can just be crucial to healing.

Dr. Nave:  I totally agree with you.  I’ve seen it in practice and the research back it up.  Just being pregnant, much less giving birth, is hugely taxing on our body and increased your risk for feeling down.  Some of it has to do with the hormonal changes.  I’m going to go really science-heavy because I’m a nerd and I think it’s fun and interesting…

Alyssa:  Do it!  Teach us!

Dr. Nave:  As I said, estrogen is responsible for the building up of the uterine lining, but it also affects things like our serotonin production, which you might know as the neurotransmitter involved in depression.  Like, if you have low serotonin, then you might get depression.  So the thing with estrogen is that it increases the production of serotonin by affecting a particular enzyme called tryptophan hydroxylase that is responsible for processing an amino acid that we get from our food called tryptophan into serotonin.

Alyssa:  Isn’t tryptophan the one that makes us sleepy?

Dr. Nave:  No.

Alyssa:  Tryptophan isn’t the thing that we eat that makes us sleepy?  What am I thinking?  It’s in turkey and stuff?

Dr. Nave:  Tryptophan is in turkey.  Serotonin and melatonin have the same precursor in terms of amino acid but the thing about their bodies is they use similar substrates or building blocks to make stuff, and just because we have the same building blocks doesn’t mean that we’ll get that particular product.  Does that make sense?

Alyssa:  Kind of, I guess.  In my sleep work, I talk about serotonin and melatonin a lot just for, you know, sleep cycles and feeling alert and then feeling sleepy, but I didn’t realize that a lack of serotonin can cause depression.  I’m trying to, in my brain, you know, the science of sleep, then — it makes sense, then, that people who are depressed sleep a lot, right?  Am I going down the right path here?  Because if you don’t have enough serotonin to make those hormones makes you feel awake and alert — sorry, I’m getting you totally off track by asking these questions.  Sorry!

Dr. Nave:  No, no, no.  I don’t think you’re going off track because sleep is very much an important part of the postpartum depression process.  If Mom isn’t sleeping, she’s at a greater risk for experiencing postpartum depression, and we know that the hormonal changes affect our sleep.  Also having a baby, a newborn baby — if the baby’s up crying, and they’re getting their sleep regulated; you’re adjusting to waking up and feeding the baby, feeling exhausted during the day, and your sleep is thrown off in terms of it not going or being matched up to when the sun rises and the sun goes down.  You’re more trying to sync to the baby, and that can lead to fatigue, which then exacerbates your mood, which makes you then more susceptible to feeling more down.  And then it’s like — one of the things that they mentioned is that babies who have a hard time sleeping — there seems to be a relationship between moms who have postpartum depression — so the baby isn’t sleeping; Mom tends to have a higher likelihood of having postpartum depression, but then the opposite is also true.  So if Mom has postpartum depression, it seems that the baby also as a result has a hard time regulating their moods and being more colicky and all these other things.  So taking care of yourself also helps the baby; it’s important to support Mom, which is why I’m so grateful that you guys have the postpartum doulas, and you guys do a lot of work with supporting moms post-baby.  Sometimes people focus so much on the baby that they forget the mother.

Alyssa:  Oh, absolutely.  It’s all about the baby.

Dr. Nave:  Yeah.  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  So the hormonal mood connection is very complex, and it’s not just A + B = C, you know, because, yes, estrogen influences serotonin production, but there are other factors that then influence, you know, the mood.  Does that make sense?  Specifically, when it comes to the mood changes or the hormonal changes in early pregnancy and postpartum – early pregnancy, we see the estrogen or progesterone levels are shifting because you’re now pregnant, so the body doesn’t have to produce as much of those hormones.  And when we have lower estrogen, which is what happens when you get pregnant, and since estrogen is responsible — or, rather, plays an important role in serotonin, which helps you feel calm when it’s at the normal level — if it’s particularly high, it can lead to anxiety-type symptoms.  If it’s really low, depression-type symptoms.  During those times when the estrogen is lower, there’s this lower mood that can also be accompanied by it.  Are you tracking?

Alyssa:  Yeah.

Dr. Nave:  Yeah.  So that’s the estrogen portion.  So estrogen affects serotonin production and also directly affects the neural networks in your brain.  Now, we have progesterone.  So progesterone: I like to think of it as our calm, happy hormone.  And so when you’re just about to have your period, usually it helps you sleep.  It helps you remain calm.  But if it’s really low, that can lead to insomnia, feeling really agitated and grumpy, and those kind of symptoms can also happen postpartum and early pregnancy.  And so that’s how the hormonal fluctuations can then manifest with the depression.  For the reason, at least in the postpartum stage, that these hormones might drop is that you give birth.  There’s a huge change because the body doesn’t have to maintain the hormones to keep the baby inside.  The baby is now outside of you.  And it really drops off really quickly, and that huge shift can then lead to the baby blues.  Then if it prolongs, your body having a hard time regulating, then that’s when we shift from the blues to the depression.  In terms of what I would do, I would assess what exactly is going on for you.  Do you have physical and emotional support?  Do you have a history of depression or any mental health condition prior to being pregnant?  Have you had postpartum depression before?  How is your sleep?  You know, sleep is really important.  If we can get you sleeping, I think that goes a long way.  Good quality sleep.

Alyssa:  You’re preaching to the choir here.  I think it’s one of the most important things!

Dr. Nave:  The other thing that they mention, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, is that if Mom has any feelings of doubt about pregnancy, that can also influence her feeling depressed because it can get, like, amplified during that time.

Alyssa:  So you’re saying, like, maybe doubting if they wanted to become pregnant?

Dr. Nave:  Maybe, or doubt that she’s capable of being a good mom, because there’s a lot of pressures on moms, you know?  Like, oh, someone will mention, like, oh, my baby’s sleeping through the night, or my baby — you know, they started eating at this time.  So there’s a lot of pressure to meet certain milestones that are from society, and that can amplify feelings of inadequacy that Mom might have had prior to becoming pregnant.  And so addressing that piece with a therapist or someone like myself will be a very important part of supporting her with the postpartum depression and getting her out of the state.  For some women, medication might be what they need to do, and their healthcare provider will be able to assess that.  But it’s not the only thing that’s available.  There’s therapists; there’s hormonal intervention, because if it’s a hormonal issue, if you address imbalance, then women get relief pretty quickly.  There’s having a doula, if that’s something that’s accessible to you, or if you have family members who are close by, asking them to help out some more.  Having people provide meals for you so then you don’t have to cook; having your partner be a part of taking care of the baby and asking them to step up some more to give you additional support.  Basically, asking for what you need is — I know it can be really vulnerable and scary if you’re not used to asking for help, but that can really be important in terms of getting what it is that you need because no one is in your exact position and knows exactly how you need to be supported.  Does that make sense?  Because I can talk about, like, a doula and a therapist and a naturopathic doctor, but you know what you need, and I want you to trust yourself in that knowledge.  You know what you need!  And here are all these different options to provide that.

Alyssa:  So you mentioned something a bit ago, and I don’t know what made me think of this, but how — let’s say a mother came to you pregnant and had postpartum depression before and knew that she — you know, her hormones are all over the place.  How much can you actually do in regard to hormones while pregnant?  Is there any risk to Baby?  You know, risk of miscarriage?  What does that look like for a mom who’s pregnant but knows she needs some help from you?

Dr. Nave:  So in terms of working with me specifically, I wouldn’t want to mess with her hormones during that time.  I would employ other tools, one of which is homeopathy, which basically supports the body’s own ability to heal and regulate itself.  As well as putting a plan in place — basically, working alongside her other healthcare providers to create a plan to support her and make sure that the transition is as smooth as possible.  What does she do if she notices that she’s trending from green and happy, healthy, thriving, into, I’m not doing so hot — what are the resources available to me when I’m at that place?  Who do I reach out to?  Who do I talk to?  What supplemental intervention needs to happen?  Do I need to talk to my doctor about starting me on medication?  There are so many different options, and prevention is always better than cure.  We would talk about what her issues — so she’s coming and she’s had it before — we would talk about what was her previous pregnancy like; when did the symptoms start to occur; what did they look like; what sort of things — what sort of red flags occurred during that time; what was the intervention utilized at that time; what were her hormone levels like?  What else; what were any medications that she was on; what medications is she on presently?  And, basically, maybe even talk about how that pregnancy is different than this pregnancy.  Like, does she feel more supported now?  What were the things that weren’t present in the previous one that she does have presently?  You know?  And basically coming up with a plan.

Alyssa:  Yeah, I like that.  So it’s kind of like what we do, you know, throughout birth.  It’s talking about all those what-if scenarios and what plans do you have in place for if any of these happen.  And then, like you said, once Baby comes home, nobody plans for that.  They’re so worried about the pregnancy and the labor and delivery part that they come home and go, oh, shoot.  What do I do now?  So it sounds like that’s a really healthy way to plan during pregnancy, if you do have any sort of mood disorder, to find a professional like yourself to sit down and say, hey, let’s go over all these things and put a plan in place, and then I’ll be here for you postpartum.  And then we’ll talk about what we can do then.  I like that.

Dr. Nave:  Right, because, as I said, there’s so many different options.  For one woman, maybe hormones, just giving her the hormones, is what she needs, and then I would, you know, work with her other — because I can’t prescribe hormones at the level that would be therapeutic, but I would be able to recommend, okay, that’s what you need.  Let’s talk to your doc.  Hey, Doc.  This is the plan.  If this happens, this is what we’re going to do so that she doesn’t have to suffer.  You know?  Or maybe it’s something else.  Just being able to work with someone who — again, like myself — who is savvy on that in terms of knowing — yeah, it definitely needs a collaborative approach, which is what I’m about.  In my head, in my dream, everyone would have a health team, you know?  People, health professionals, who are all in communication with each other who are just there to support you and help you thrive.  But I think to wrap up, it would be sleep, health, get your hormones evaluated.  If you’re thinking of getting pregnant and you have any mood disorders or any mental emotional concerns, as part of your pregnancy plan, you should be working — ideally, you would be working with a mental health professional as well, just to insure that you have the support that you need and you’re processing stuff effectively, because those concerns, those mental health concerns, can be substantially amplified once you become pregnant, as well as after giving birth.  If you have a mental health condition or if you’ve had postpartum depression before, you are at significant risk for developing it again.  And this applies to — postpartum depression can also occur if you have a loss of a baby, so it’s not just if you’ve given birth, but any form of baby loss can also result in postpartum depression.

Alyssa:  Yeah, I can imagine it would probably be even amplified with that because you still have the hormonal shift, that drastic hormonal shift, and then grief on top of it.  So it probably takes it to a whole new level.  Well, thank you for all of your expertise.  I always love talking to you.  I would love for people to know how to find you at Hormonal Balance, if they want to reach out.

Dr. Nave:  Yeah.  I am on Instagram and on Facebook as @drgaynelnave.  I’m in the process of getting my website up, so I’ll update you on that afterwards, or you can call my clinic at 616-275-0049.  If you have any hormonal or mental health concerns and you want to optimize your health team, you want a second opinion, or you just want some additional support — that’s what I do!

Alyssa:  Thank you!  During this Covid pandemic, can you see people in person, or are you choosing to do virtual only right now?

Dr. Nave:  I’m choosing to do only virtual at this point.  I see clients virtually most of the time Wednesdays through Fridays, actually, from 8:00 to 5:00 p.m., and in person at 1324 Lake Drive Southeast, Suite 7, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49506.

Alyssa:  So once the stay at home order lifts and things get a little bit more back to normal, you’ll be seeing people in person again?

Dr. Nave:  In person, yes.  But for now, we will see each other virtually!

Alyssa:  Thanks for your time!  Hopefully we’ll talk to you again soon!

 

Mental Health Awareness Month: Podcast Episode #97 Read More »

Planning a Nursery

Planning a Nursery During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Today’s guest blog is written by Isabella Caprario, Content Marketing Specialist at Porch.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we all feel uncertainty. We don’t know what will happen or what steps to take next. We only know that the best way to end this madness is to sit at home and take all the necessary precautions to be able to take care of ourselves and our family. Stay home and stay safe.

Being quarantined can feel a bit overwhelming. We may feel stressed or anxious about being locked up in our homes, but it definitely doesn’t have to be that way! We must focus on the positive. I firmly believe that we will become better humans, more responsible with our environment, and above all think more about others than ourselves.

For future parents that still have to continue planning a nursery for their baby during this pandemic, there is no need to panic or worry! In this post, I will give some tips, recommendations, and activities to create the perfect nursery for your needs and those of your baby.

Where to start:
At this point, surely you already have defined the place, space, and distribution of what the nursery room will be like; and if not, the first thing that we should consider is, what is the space/place that would be most suitable for the baby?

To answer this question, the most important things to take into account are the following:

  • A place/room that is close to yours and is easily accessible.
  • The room has enough light during the day, can be darkened for naps and bedtime, and is isolated from any type of noise that may scare or awaken the baby.
  • It must have the right temperature for the baby to feel comfortable and safe in his/her new space.
  • It has to be a pleasant and comfortable space for parents as well.
  • The room must have the necessary space to have everything that the baby requires, such as a crib, a diaper station/changing station, chair for feeding, and a space to accommodate clothing.

Once we have defined the most appropriate place for your baby, we go to the next step which would be to choose a theme, if you wish. This allows you to purchase accessories and decorate the nursery based on that theme.

Getting started:
The best place to get creative ideas is Pinterest. Here you can find color designs and everything you need for your nursery. If you do not already have an account, I recommend you get one so you are able to create a board and save all the ideas that you like the most.

Tip1: “Less is more”. Go for a minimalist look since it helps to make a room seem wider, cleaner, and more organized. It will help you save money and look more luxurious at the same time.

Taking into account how we want to distribute the nursery, colors, furniture, and accessories, we can start planning online purchases.

Choosing the right furniture:
Since we currently can’t leave our homes during the pandemic, luckily, we can still shop for the furniture and accessories that we need. Online stores are still open and many are offering sales!

First of all, we must create a list of our favorite online stores. Creating this list will help us to make a comparison of prices and items between stores. Once this comparison is made, we can remove from the list those stores that have very high prices, those that do not offer a wide variety of products, or those that are lower quality.  It is up to you how you prefer to discard possible online stores.

Tip 2: Use an excel spreadsheet to organize your options. Write down the description of the product, where you found it (online store link), delivery time, delivery cost, how many units are available (enough stock), and price. This planning will help you with budget reduction and delivery time frame.

Also, keep in mind that some online stores will guide you when choosing furniture and accessories and can create a package with discounts and other extra benefits that will help you save money if you place your order in advance.

Get ready for some DIY Projects:
There is no more perfect time than now for some DIY projects at home. A DIY project can be quite therapeutic and will also keep you occupied throughout the day. Your mental health will thank you.  You can exploit your creativity and forget for a moment about what’s happening outside. It can also help you relax and feel productive.

Some DIY ideas to try:

  • Baby blanket arm knitting tutorial. This so much fun and easy to do at home. You will find tutorials on Youtube and Pinterest.
  • Nursery name sign. You can show how creative you are with this activity.
  • Make a nursery mobile. Here you can find different materials you would like to use, like paper, or glitter, etc.

Tip 3: Keep in mind that you should look for DIY projects that you can make at home with the things that you already have. Do not do very large projects that might make you feel overwhelmed because you lack the necessary materials or it’s simply not coming out as you would like.

Planning your nursery is a very fun and relaxing activity, despite being in a difficult situation. It’s better to smile and spread that happiness and positivity to your family and your baby on the way.

Isabella Caprario is a SEO Marketing Specialist and does Content Marketing at Porch. She has an International MBA, and her hobbies are reading, writing, and music. 

 

Planning a Nursery During the COVID-19 Pandemic Read More »

COVID-19

COVID-19 Reduce Your Risk!

 

Reduce Your Risk by Megan Mouser, NP.
March 31, 2020

STATISTICS COVID-19
With statistics regarding the novel coronavirus changing daily (and even hourly), the most up-to-date information can come from Michigan Department of Health and Human Services as well as the Centers for Disease Control. To date, at the time of this publication, there have been over 163,000 cases in the U.S. alone with over 2,860 deaths. Michigan appears to be an emerging epicenter for COVID-19, making our efforts to reduce the spread of this virus even more emergent.

WHAT ARE WE SEEING? WHY SHOULD WE BE CONCERNED?
Locally we are beginning to see an increase in cases. Today there are 108 presumed positive tests with 119 tests pending. You can find local updates for Kent County on the Access Kent website.

With coronavirus being a new (novel) virus, very little is known about best practices. This is why you are seeing information and decisions varying day to day. The clinical picture for those suffering from this virus can range dramatically from very mild symptoms (including some with no reported symptoms) to severe illness resulting in death. Current treatment options are fairly limited, however new therapies and studies are emerging. Even with recovery from the illness, long-term consequences are possible. Coronavirus is also very easily transmitted, even without an individual ever presenting with symptoms. This is why socially distancing and practicing preventative measures is so important! In regards to healthcare resources here in West Michigan, we are preparing for a large influx of possible patients from this virus which will put a strain on our healthcare resources if we do not slow the spread. We are already beginning to see this in the metro Detroit area.

GENERAL RECOMMENDATIONS
We cannot stress enough the importance of washing your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds (if not available, use hand sanitizer with at least a 60% ethanol or 70% isopropanol alcohol content), covering your mouth and nose with your elbow when coughing or sneezing, avoid touching your face, cleaning “high touch” surfaces daily, limiting your contact to only people in your household, and practicing social distancing by remaining at least 6 feet apart from anyone else if you absolutely must go out.

I also think it is important to recognize that this is a very stressful time for many of us and it is important for our overall health to make sure that we are taking care of ourselves including getting adequate sleep, regular exercise, eating a nutritious and healthy diet, getting out for some fresh air (while maintaining social distance), reaching out to our support systems, and allowing yourself some “slack” regarding loss of control and frustrations.

In regards to specific populations, this virus does pose a higher risk to people who are older or have other serious chronic medical conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, or lung disease. Women who are pregnant are also considered at increased risk, however to date limited data is available regarding this illness during pregnancy. Coronavirus has not been shown to cross into amniotic fluid or into breastmilk at this time. However, if a pregnant woman became ill with the virus, additional precautions would certainly need to be taken at the guidance of your healthcare team. While on the topic of pregnancy, we can rest assured that healthcare providers and hospital staff are working diligently to reduce the risk and spread of COVID-19. While locally there has been visitor restrictions in place at the hospitals, your support person (as long as healthy) will be able to support you through delivery and hospitalization at this time.

Infants are also considered to be more at risk for not only COVID-19, but illness in general due to underdeveloped immune systems at birth. I would encourage all new parents to continue to practice not only standard precautions (including hand washing, cleaning surfaces, avoiding sick contacts, etc.) but also to continue to restrict visitors to the home after delivery to only members of the household. While this is certainly a time to celebrate your new addition, our primary goal is a healthy baby and family!

As for older children and teenagers, we know that this is very challenging time with the cancellation of schools or daycares and changes to routines and schedules. The risks for these age groups from coronavirus continues to be present, therefore as difficult as it can be to enforce and practice social distancing, it is imperative for parents to not only model this behavior but to also help our children understand why this is necessary. In a time of uncertainty, parents can continue to lessen anxiety in children by discussing together as a family, remaining calm, and continuing to offer love and support.

As a community we all share responsibility to continue efforts to reduce the significant risk from COVID-19!

Reputable Resources:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Michigan Department of Health and Human Services 
World Health Organization

Megan Mouser is a board certified Family Nurse Practitioner serving the Grand Rapids area since 2014.  Born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, she completed her Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing through Northern Michigan University and went on to obtain her Masters of Science in Nursing through Michigan State University.  She has over a decade of experience working with infants and children in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and most recently seeing both adults and children in her outpatient family practice office. She also volunteers her time teaching graduate students as an adjunct clinical faculty member with Michigan State University School of Nursing’s graduate program.  Megan is passionate about preventative medicine and creating strong relationships with her patients and families in order to provide personalized, high-quality healthcare. Megan resides in Grand Rapids with her husband Matt and two golden doodle rescues “Max” and “Marty”. In her free time she enjoys spending time with her family and friends, traveling, being in nature, cooking, and gardening.

 

COVID-19 Reduce Your Risk! Read More »

swaddelini

The Swaddelini Swaddle: Podcast Episode #93

Liz Hilton, founder of Swaddelini, tells us about the unique process she uses to create her amazing swaddle and why her swaddle is different.  You can listen to this complete podcast episode on iTunes or SoundCloud.

Kristin:  Welcome to Ask the Doulas with Gold Coast Doulas.  I’m Kristin.

Alyssa:  And I am Alyssa.

Kristin:  And we’re here today with Liz Hilton, who happens to be a birth and postpartum client of ours.  She has an amazing product to talk about.  Tell us about your swaddles and where you came up with the idea and more about how we can put it into action!

Liz:  Well, first, thank you so much for having me on your talk.  My product in Swaddelini.  It’s inspired by my firstborn son, Thomas, who was a little Houdini.  Veritable little Houdini; got out of all his swaddles and would constantly wake up from the Moro reflex.  I’m really excited about my next baby that I’m going to be having a couple weeks here because now I’m equipped with a swaddle that is easy to use and protects against the Moro reflex and is completely kick-proof and escape-proof.

Kristin:  You’ll have your own baby model!

Liz:  I know!  I’ll have my own little cute baby model!  My Instagram Swaddelini is going to blow up with pictures of my new baby.  But yeah, what’s different about it is that typically swaddles involves a lot of wrapping or cumbersome closure systems like zippers, Velcro, or God forbid, snaps.  So mine just goes on and off like a sock, and I’ve incorporated some light compression therapy into the chest area to give the sensation of a hug all night long.  So I’ve actually trademarked that as Hug Technology.

Kristin:  Love it!

Liz:  And the individual tubes help keep the arms down for the Moro reflex.  It encourages that sleep safe position of being on the back and arms at the sides.  And then when you need to change the diaper, there’s an easy access diaper flap so you can change the diaper without having to take the swaddle on and off.

Kristin:  That’s such a pain to remove the swaddle and wake the baby!

Liz:  Yeah!  And it’s also adaptable, so with any baby product, you want it to adapt because all babies are different.  Every baby is different.  Every mom is different.  So some babies like their arms out.  Now, part of the thinking behind that is so they can self-soothe when they do wake up from the Moro reflex.  The idea with the Swaddelini is that that won’t happen as often because their arms are encouraged to be down.  But if your baby insists on having their arms out, you can just leave their arms out.  You’re still going to get that Hug Technology benefit.  Probably my favorite thing is that this swaddle is easy to put on, but also doesn’t restrict motion.  That’s one thing that doctors have been telling moms is, you know, don’t swaddle your baby.  It will cause hip dysplasia.  And that’s just because some swaddles, there’s no stopping point when you’re wrapping them or pulling the Velcro.  It’s very easy to do it too tight.  Whereas with this, it’s a four-way stretch knit.  It’s soft.  It’s stretchy.  And there’s no risk in that.  And even though the baby feels hugged all over, they have freedom of movement.  So if, for example, you’re breastfeeding, the baby can, while wearing the swaddle, can kneed your breast but can’t scratch.  Same when they’re sleeping; they can touch their face, but not scratch it.  So that’s another benefit.

Kristin:  And you have different sizes, so as they grow bigger, their swaddle size is based on how many pounds the baby is?

Liz:  I’ve done it that way.  I’ve said the small is good for 6-12 pounds and the large is 12-18 pounds.  The reason I did the larger one is just because there’s that transition where your baby’s kind of rolling over their side, and you’re, like oh, my God.  Is it going to happen?  Are they going to roll over?  Am I going to wake up and my baby’s on their front?  You have all these fears.  What I say is with the larger one — or even with the smaller one, if your baby is toying with rolling over sooner before they’re out of the smaller size, just take one arm and leave it out.  And then one they’re rolling over a lot during the day, you can take both arms out.  If your baby likes to sleep with their feet out, leave the feet out.  My niece slept in her large swaddle between month 8 and 11 until she was ready to get out.  She was smaller, though.  She was a smaller baby, so that’s why she went so long.  But she just didn’t want to leave it, but it was a nice transition.

Alyssa:  And they’re made out of different things.  I’m very curious what the process is and how you make them, too.  We talked a little bit about it on the phone, but I thought it was very cool how you make these.

Liz:  Yeah.  I have two very distinct designs.  The first one I did, I made out of just a bunch of synthetic fibers that I’ve used for compression garments that I’ve made for kids with, like, CP or lymphedema.  And so that helps with the light compression at the chest.  So that part is the same.  For the rest of it, it’s a moisture-wicking nylon-polyester blend.  It feels very lightweight, but it’s actually very cozy and very soft.  You can feel that.

Alyssa:  So soft!

Liz:  Yes!  But at the end of the day, it is a synthetic fiber, right?  I learned very quickly that some moms like natural fibers.  So after much research, I found a supplier of bamboo, and they make this bamboo in a mechanical process versus chemical.  You’ve seen a lot of maybe bamboo-rayon products.  This is not that.  This is just a natural bamboo made in a nonchemical process, and I pair it with a really exciting new fiber.  I’m actually the first in the industry to license this.  It’s called 37.5 because what it does is it regulates your body temperature to put it at a perfect 37.5 degrees Celsius.  So that is why the bamboo swaddles are a little cooler to the touch.

Alyssa:  So adult swaddles will be next.

Liz:  Actually, if you go on my website to the About section and watch my videos, I have my husband in an adult swaddle.  Yeah!  I just made one for a marketing thing, and then I told my husband, hey, will you get in this so I can do a video on YouTube?  And he was, like, you’re going to put it on YouTube?  No, I’m not doing this!  And I’m like, um, I had your baby.

Alyssa:  I’m asking this one thing!

Liz:  Yeah.  So there’s now a video of him in an adult swaddle!

Alyssa:  It sounds really cozy, actually.  I think I would wear one.  I love that it’s easy.  Can you explain putting it on and how it goes on?

Liz:  You basically just scrunch it up like a sock, and then you go in feet first and you get the Hug Technology over the butt area, and then you have it over the chest.  And then you go through the easy access diaper flap.  So stick your arm through that opening at the bottom, and then go through one of the arm tubes and then grab the hand.  Put that hand in yours, and just slide it down so that the arm is in the tube.  And so now their arm can move around, but it just encourages the arm to stay down at the side.  And then you just do that on the other side.  So these arm tubes are very, very stretchy, and their hands are absolutely free to move around.  And then the top naturally curls the opposite direction from their face.  But I also had this product tested at world-class third-party laboratories, where they do a suffocation hazard test.  They literally roll my product up in a ball, put it over a fake infant face, and they measure the CO2, and mine has passed every time.

Alyssa:  That was my question.  You know, you walk in, and it’s like this.

Liz:  That is absolutely fine, and if you wanted to do a suffocation hazard test on any product that you buy, what you do is roll it up and put it against your face and breathe.  With the design, though, it does naturally curl away from the face.  So if you put your baby to sleep like this, they wake up like this.

Alyssa:  And then demonstrate poopy diaper time when you don’t want to wake the baby.

Liz:  We’ve got this flap here, and again, it’s very, very stretchy.

Kristin:  As a doula, I love that.  It’s so easy.

Alyssa:  And do you recommend just like this doll has, like a onesie underneath this?  That’s all you need?

Liz:  Definitely.

Alyssa:  The right temperature?

Liz:  Even just a diaper and socks is fine.  I get that question a lot.  It’s really what you’re comfortable with, what your baby’s comfortable with.  If they’re really tiny and maybe they’re sliding, if their arms are so small they’re sliding out, you can put a onesie, like the sleeves on it, and that friction between the fabric will keep it on.  So then you get access to the diaper.  You do the diaper.  And then you can put it right back on, and you don’t have to take it off.  And then taking it off also is very easy because you just pull it down.  It’s actually easier with a real baby.  You can do it all in one motion.  I’ve gotten that a lot where moms say, oh, I didn’t know it was going to be this easy.  That’s always good!

Kristin:  And you have different designs.  You brought some samples with you.  There’s a fun funky orange and pink and…

Liz:  It’s interesting you say that because the design is pretty much the same.  The only difference is the colors and the fibers.  The blue, pink, orange, and gray here are all in the moisture-wicking synthetic fibers, and these more neutral colors, this neural white-pearl and this cloud-gray are the bamboo.  The best-selling ones are the grays, the grays in both the synthetic and the bamboo, and then orange.  Everyone loves neutrals.  The way this is made is a really interesting process.  One of the benefits of the Swaddelini is that it’s seamless, and it’s seamless because it’s actually manufactured in one piece, in one process, using 3D knitting.  Kind of like the Nike Flyknit shoes.  It’s the same technology, and I have a machine that knits all of these in my garage.  I make them all myself.  I don’t have some manufacturer in China that I outsource this too.  So it’s very, very local.  And it’s actually my life’s work.  I’ve been a 3D knit programmer for over ten years now and working primarily in technical knitting, knitting solutions for office furniture and automotive and aerospace and stuff like that.  But when I had my first baby two and a half years ago, I had an idea to use that same process to solve my swaddling problem.  That became Swaddelini.

Alyssa:  That’s amazing!  You said there’s a couple tiny stitches you have to do yourself at the very end?

Liz:  At the very top because it’s all made with this one end of yard.  At the very top, you have to pull it through a loop and then that’s the final thing that I do.  And I sew on these cute little tags with washing information and stuff like that.

Alyssa:  Yeah, what is the washing information?

Liz:  For the synthetic fiber, I recommend cold.  It will shrink up a bit, but honestly, if that happens to you, let me know.  I can work something out with you because I don’t want someone to get it and have it shrink.  I recommend that, and then air drying it is fine.  But for the bamboo ones, I actually prewash them in a natural, unscented detergent, so they’re already preshrunk.  They won’t shrink anymore.  You can wash and dry them in heat, but I still recommend cold just for longevity.

Alyssa:  Things look better.  I wash all my stuff in cold.  They just last so much longer.

Kristin:  Thanks, Liz!  We appreciate you coming in!  How do people order or find you?

Alyssa:  Well, if you’re a Gold Coast client, you can get a discount.  But for everyone else, what’s the best way to order these?

Liz:  On my website, but if you want to learn more about my product before you buy it, I highly recommend going on my Instagram, @swaddelini, because I have a lot moms on there that have shared their videos of how they use it because every mom might use my product differently.

Kristin:  It’s great for the visual learners.

Alyssa:  I’m going to add this to my newborn class repertoire because I think some people get overwhelmed with the old-fashioned swaddle, and like you said, if you have a really strong baby, they’re popping out of this thing.  So this is a great option, and they’re super cute!

Kristin:  We will definitely check in with you after, since you’re a client of ours, and we can see how it’s working with your own baby and also hear your birth story.  We love hearing personal stories!

Liz:  Well, I’m really excited to have doula support this time because I didn’t last time, and I definitely regret it.

Alyssa:  Yeah, we can have you back in to talk about that and how it was with doulas.

Liz:  That would be awesome!

 

The Swaddelini Swaddle: Podcast Episode #93 Read More »

Sleep Deprivation

How Sleep Deprivation Impacts New Parents

Becoming a parent is one of the most exciting and scary milestones of a person’s life. It’s likely your emotions will run the gamut from excited anticipation and joy, to fear of the unknown and uncertainty about what’s ahead and how you’re coping with parenthood. Managing night time feeds, tending to your baby throughout the day, and trying to keep up with your other responsibilities as you acclimatize to parenthood can make sleep difficult. While this is somewhat expected, sleep deprivation can have a serious impact on the health of new mothers and their babies, so it is important to get as much rest as possible.

The importance of sleep for new parents
The diminished quality and quantity of sleep that new parents often experience can result in physical and mental fatigue and an increased risk of postpartum depression. Prolonged lack of sleep or poor sleep quality can also increase the risk of diabetes, weaken your immune system, reduce attention and focus, and impair hormone production, causing weight gain, loss of libido, and moodiness.

Because our bodies require sleep to function correctly – and a specific amount of sleep that allows us to cycle through the various sleep stages several times throughout the night – a dip in the standard or quantity of hours we accumulate asleep in bed can have a far-reaching impact on our health and quality of life. One recent study found an association between poor sleep quality and postpartum depression.

There are two main phases of sleep – NREM (non-rapid eye movement) and REM (rapid eye movement, when dreams occur). Throughout these stages, specific changes and functions are carried out in our bodies and brains. NREM phases are when most of the physically restorative processes of sleep are performed. Our muscles and cells are repaired, our immune system is boosted, and the deep sleep of stage three NREM is what’s needed to wake feeling refreshed in the morning.

REM sleep occurs around 90 minutes after we first fall asleep and NREM phases are complete. This is the dreaming phase and the time that our brains process the salient and emotional experiences from waking life. When our body doesn’t get the required amount of sleep, it is unable to consolidate all the emotional and experiential data we have collected while awake, neither is it able to complete the physically restorative processes we need to feel refreshed and energized. That’s why we feel fatigued, forget things easily, and may find it difficult to manage our emotions.

Tips for getting the right amount of sleep
While some disruption to your sleep is to be expected as you adjust to the new normal; the good news is that there are a range of tactics and strategies you can employ to still get the amount of sleep your body needs.

Create the right environment for sleep:
When you do head to bed, it is important that you are able to drift off to sleep as quickly as possible so you can maximize your sleep time. To create the right environment for good sleep, keep your bedroom cool and dark. Light affects our melatonin production and signals to our brain that it’s time to get up. Turn the baby monitor down too so their snuffles and murmurs don’t disturb you, but you’ll still wake if they cry out for comfort. If you do have trouble falling asleep, try a wind-down relaxation or mindfulness meditation that will help calm your mind and body.

Share the responsibility:
Taking care of a baby is a 24/7 job that requires constant activity and emotional resilience. No one should expect that they can do this on their own.

Negotiate a schedule with your partner that lets you share nighttime feeds, diaper changes, and those evenings when baby just doesn’t want to go to bed. It’s necessary to ensure you have the right support so the sleep and health of you, your partner, and baby don’t suffer.

Accept help:
Have you ever heard the African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child”? This isn’t just about the direct interactions; it’s all the support functions that are needed to raise a happy healthy child too. Don’t be afraid to ask for help with the cooking, cleaning, endless laundry, groceries, or just holding your baby for a while so you can have a shower and dress! The everyday, mundane tasks that were so simple pre-baby can take monumental effort to complete once there’s a baby in the house. Most people know this and will be happy to lend a hand.

Embrace the nap:
Babies rarely sleep for more than four hours at a time. While this is a major contributing factor to those interrupted nights, the multiple two to three-hour naps your baby takes through the day provides ample opportunity for you to rest too – if you let yourself. Resist the urge to catch up on chores and instead take a half hour nap that will help manage your fatigue. Avoid sleeping longer than 45 minutes though as this will adversely impact your night’s sleep.

Christine Huegel is on the Editorial Team of Mattress Advisor, covering a variety of topics pertaining to sleep health in order to help people get their best night’s sleep.

Image via www.pexels.com.

 

How Sleep Deprivation Impacts New Parents Read More »

Sleep Consultant

Megan’s Sleep Story: Podcast Episode #80

Megan Kretz, one of Alyssa’s sleep clients, tells us about her sleep training journey with her daughter at 9 months and again at 19 months.  She says that as a working mom, it meant spending a little less time with her daughter, but that it was all worth it because the quality of the time spent together improved drastically.  Everyone was happier and healthier!  You can listen to this complete podcast episode on iTunes or SoundCloud.

Alyssa:  Welcome to Ask the Doulas Podcast.  I am Alyssa, and today I’m excited to be talking to Megan Kretz.  You were one of my past sleep clients, and then again recently.

Megan:  Yeah, thanks for having me on!

Alyssa:  Yes, we’re going to talk about sleep today.  So remind me of how this journey began and what was happening before you called me.

Megan:  So we reached out to you about when my daughter was nine months old with just all sorts of life problems as a result of my daughter’s sleep habits and our sleep habits, as well.  A lot of it was definitely a struggle because we almost created the environment, the problem, that we found ourselves in.

Alyssa:  Unknowingly.

Megan:  Yes, unknowingly.

Alyssa:  I mean, you don’t realize it when you’re doing it.  You’re in survival mode.

Megan:  Right.  Before the age of eight months, my daughter had had five ear infections, and so we were in and out of doctors’ offices, on and off antibiotics, and because of that, she was in a lot of pain.  She was seeking comfort because we could never get her comfortable.  So in doing so, we just ended up creating all these really bad sleep habits.  Falling asleep with us, on us, whatever we could do to allow mom and dad and baby to get some sort of rest.  Up probably eleven times at night breastfeeding, and then wouldn’t take naps during the day; was up all day except for two 45-minute naps at the age of six, seven months old.  Where our thoughts were going at that point was that she wasn’t developing properly without proper sleep.  We couldn’t go on date nights.  Nobody else could put my daughter down to sleep except me, not even her dad.  We couldn’t go two hours for a movie on the couch without my daughter waking up, and it was getting to a point where, looking into the future, I don’t know how we would have gone much longer with the way that things were.  And I had heard about you guys before, and finally I ended up going on the website, and I saw that you guys offer the sleep consultations.  I was hesitant at first, but oh my gosh…

Alyssa:  Didn’t she take to it, like, the first night?

Megan:  Oh, yeah!  The first night when we went through all of that — but I felt super needy with you.

Alyssa:  No, you weren’t at all!

Megan:  Texting you all the time!  The first night, we had to go in and out, in and out a lot, but by the second night — she was almost there on the first night, and the second night, she was like, bam, done.  She was like, I got this, Mom!  I’m going to be your sleep champ from now on!

Alyssa:  And kids always surprise parents.  They want to sleep so bad, and once we just get them on a schedule, it just happens so much more quickly and easily than a lot of parents expect.

Megan:  A lot of other working parents might find themselves in the same situation or scared on what they’re going to end up doing.  I learned that so much of her night sleep is dependent on her daytime sleep and her nap schedule.  She went to a daycare facility, and they had also used the same crutches we had to get her to sleep, and I was just nervous about that whole transition and really needing her to take proper naps in order to accomplish what we needed to at night.  And in the end, we sorted out some schedules.  We had some people that came and helped us and pulled her out of daycare for a week.

Alyssa:  Yeah, I remember that.  You had somebody stay at the house, because that first week is pretty critical, and when you have two parents working full time, you can’t just take a week off.

Megan:  No, you can’t!

Alyssa:  To have your baby sleep.  That’s not feasible.  But yeah, you had a trusted babysitter come over, right?

Megan:  Yeah, and I don’t remember how many days it was.

Alyssa:  Oh, you had a doula come, too, for a couple days, didn’t you?

Megan:  No.  Well, you…

Alyssa:  Must have been another client.  Sometimes they’ll hire a doula to come stay either during the day overnight.

Megan:  I remember you said there are so many days that it takes of consistent behavior development to actually –

Alyssa:  Until it becomes a habit.

Megan:  Yeah, until it becomes normal for them.  So we just had to get through that, and we did.

Alyssa:  Well, and especially because she was going to daycare.  Daycare can totally muck things up, especially if it’s a large one and not an in-home daycare but a large one where they have 20 kids and maybe 15 of them are in the nursery, and they’re just, like, this is naptime, and if they’re not sleeping, we get them up, because we don’t want them waking the other babies up.

Megan:  Well, that’s what part of the problem was is that she was in the nursery, and there’s 12 other babies in that room, and they all share a crib room together.  And they couldn’t get her to sleep, and then she was waking up other babies.  It was all downhill from there.

Alyssa:  So they just say, all right, nap’s done.

Megan:  Yep.

Alyssa:  But after that five days of a consistent pattern, then she’s going to go back to daycare, and her body’s already on the schedule and already has a rhythm set, and it’s much easier to go back into that daycare environment and tell them, now she sleeps from this time to this time, and if she wakes up early, here’s what you have to do.

Megan:  And daycare, you know, they made their own adjustments for what worked for them, too, so I gave them our schedule, but then they actually removed her from a crib and put her on a toddler sleep mat.  They’re raised little beds, and I had to get a doctor’s note, but at the age of ten months, nine months, she was actually the only child in the room for months that slept on a cot.

Alyssa:  Oh, so she was in her own room?

Megan:  She wasn’t.  She was blocked off from the other kids.  So yeah, she was in a room by herself, but she was kind of blocked off with some shelving units so the other kids didn’t get all up in her business when she was sleeping.  But she was on a cot, and that worked best for her because they found that she was anxious in the room with all the other kids in the cribs because all of her past memories were coming up, so changing her sleep environment was also to let them work according to the sleep plan, as well.  So it ended up working well that way, and she ended up moving up into the next toddler room already on the cot where most babies have to go through this learning period for that.

Alyssa:  So I remember in the beginning, you kind of struggled.  You had this tug-of-war within yourself of, gosh, she’s sleeping amazing now, but now I miss these cuddles that I get at night.

Megan:  Yeah, I remember that!

Alyssa:  It was like, we have to find a balance here.  It’s hard to go from being used to her there all the time, but that’s part of the problem is that she’s there all the time and nobody can sleep.

Megan:  And at night when I’m giving her cuddles, she’s giving me cuddles, too.

Alyssa:  Yeah, it’s hard to just let that go.

Megan:  And then don’t forget about the readjustment to milk supply.  That was a big thing, as well.

Alyssa:  Yeah, breastfeeding changes.  Your body eventually fixes itself…

Megan:  But it takes a little while and some uncomfortable days.

Alyssa:  Yeah, you’ll wake up leaking everywhere.  I’ve told moms to sleep on towels for a couple nights if needed!

Megan:  Oh, yeah, been there, done that!

Alyssa:  Yeah, so we talked about, early in the morning when she wakes up, get some cuddles in, and then spend the weekends, like Saturday and Sunday mornings, just make that cuddle time in bed to get all that oxytocin, all these great hormones that you guys are sharing when you get these cuddles.

Megan:  It’s funny that you say that because it’s almost a tradition now that she’s older.  She calls her pacifier her “oh, no” because when she can’t find it and she’s upset, it’s an oh, no situation.  So she has to leave her “oh, no” in her crib, and then we go and get a bottle of milk, and I ask her if she wants to snuggle.  Sometimes I get her out of the crib and she’s like, “Snuggle!” because that’s our time together.  So we do that when we’re reading books before bedtime now, because we no longer breastfeed or give her a bottle before bed, so we just read books and snuggle for five, ten minutes, and then in the crib she goes.  And then in the morning it’s a good cuddle time, and I wake up a little bit early and get ready before she’s up so that I’m not rushed for time to get ready.  Either my husband or I will devote that time to her.

Alyssa: That’s really smart.  I was just talking to somebody earlier about the fact that sometimes kids are just waking up because they want to see you, so especially as a parent who works full time, you already have this guilt of, I haven’t seen my child all day, and now they’re sleeping all night by themselves, which is great, but when do I get to see them?  When do I get to cuddle them?  So when you do a nighttime routine and then in the morning, put that phone away.  Don’t make the TV part of this process.  Put that kid on your lap; cuddle; kiss.  Read the book, whatever.  Just get all the snuggles in you can.  They get 30 minutes of your undivided attention, and they don’t know if it’s any different than eight hours. To them it’s just that mom and dad are here and loving on me, and that makes all the difference in the world.

Megan:  I agree, and it was hard being a working mom when we were going through all of this because the time with her became less because the night wakings weren’t there.  But the quality increased.  Her behavior got a lot better.  And I am a better mom by being a working mom because I can devote my attention better if I have some things that I do on my own, if I have a work life, as well.  So I didn’t want to give that up, but readjusting and figuring out the quality time was a lot better when she was rested and herself.

Alyssa:  That’s the key, yeah.

Megan:  And it really shines this whole idea even more when we recently went on vacation, and it was a struggle because we were in a new environment.  She was in her own bed, but we had to share a room with her, and although all that went fine, her behavior was like she was truly in the terrible twos.  She’s only 21 months old now, but everything changed because we tried to stick to the schedule, but you’re on vacation, so there’s only so much that you can do.  So immediately on the day that we returned from this week-long vacation, and she’s sleeping in her own environment and we’re right back to the same routine, it was immediate behavior change, and it just solidifies even more how important a sleep plan is and how important it is to make sure that they get the sleep that they need.

Alyssa:  They thrive on it, and we think that we’re doing them a favor by letting them stay up late to play with their friends.  Or the 4th of July; it’s not even dark for fireworks until 10:00; what am I going to do?  We’re not doing them or ourselves any favors by letting them stay up because usually they’re a wreck for two days after that.  They’re not going to sleep in the next day.  More than likely. They’re going to be up early the next morning.  It affects them so opposite of the logical thinking.  But yeah, that’s the key.  You’ve hit the nail on the head; you have to readjust and understand that you have less time together, but it’s more quality time, and her entire world has changed.  She’s happier, healthier, developing at a better rate because we all need sleep for that to happen.

Megan:  It’s funny that you brought up the whole fact that readjusting and going to parties and not keeping them up late and whatnot — it’s funny because it’s easy for my husband and I to say sorry, we’re leaving at 7:30 or 7:00 or 6:30, whatever we have to do, to get home and start the bedtime routine.  The hardest part about all of that is not leaving early; it’s convincing your family members and your friends that this is what you’re going to do and that this is important to you and your family, because it’s almost like they’re the ones pressuring you to alter your child’s sleep schedule.  So that’s come up a few times, especially around the holidays when your family members do holiday parties or gift openings starting at 6:00, and bedtime routine starts at 6:30.  You’re like, sorry, guys, we can’t come.

Alyssa:  Right, unless you want to bring a pack and play and put her to bed there.

Megan:  Which we’ve done.  When she was young enough, we did that, and that was fine.  We do that sometimes with friends where we go over and put her to sleep in the pack and play.  We try to avoid that as much as possible, and now that our friends have kids or are having kids, we schedule things at 2:00 in the afternoon instead.  Dinner parties go from 3:00 to 7:00; they don’t go from 7:00 to 11:00.

Alyssa:  Yeah, that is the hardest part, because you have to be so consistent, and when you get those dirty looks or the weird looks from your friends, like why do they always have to leave so early, it makes you kind of feel bad, but you know it’s worth it.  You’re doing this because it’s worth it.

Megan:  Yep, it is.

Alyssa:  So then you called me again recently…

Megan:  I did!

Alyssa:  She was sleeping great, and then you made a pretty big transition.  Tell me about that.

Megan:  Yeah.  She was always a little bit ahead of the other kids as far as walking and crawling and climbing and running, so she eventually started climbing out of her crib, and we started getting very nervous about possible injuries.  Quite a few times, on the video in her room, we’d see her sitting on the edge of the crib, just teetering there.  My husband really pushed for a change because we can’t be doing this.  So we actually ended up moving her into a big kid bed at the age of 19 months.  And I’m trying to take what I learned with you from when she was nine months and trying to apply it to a child that’s now a toddler.  And it wasn’t working.  And that’s when we contacted you and learned about how kids don’t learn about delay of gratification until they’re three years old.  So she doesn’t understand what it means when we tell that if you stay in bed all night, we get special time together in the morning.

Alyssa:  It makes no sense.  She doesn’t understand that concept whatsoever.

Megan:  No.  And she can get in and out of the toddler bed.  Yeah, she may not be falling out of it now, but my husband and I went back to doing whatever we’ve got to do to get this child to sleep.  So her nighttimes got shorter because we ended up staying in bed and laying with her until she fell asleep.  Our bedtime routine went to two hours; from twenty minutes to two hours.  And then she wouldn’t sleep a full eleven hours at night, and then her nap became elongated to three hours.  We were on a waitlist for a daycare at the time, so we had to hire a nanny for a couple months.  And it was funny because we were paying her for an eight-hour day when our daughter is sleeping for three of them!  Just kind of a funny fact.  But we went right back to, oh my gosh, what do we do?  A year later, I’m finding your email address and saying help!  Is there anything that you can help us with?  And then when you sent us our new sleep plan and we saw that there are clear ways to help a child stay in the bed and to go right back into a routine for this next stage of a child’s life, and that babies aren’t the same as toddlers.  It was eye-opening again when we saw the second plan, and you had so much good information in there!

Alyssa:  I always wonder if it’s too much.

Megan:  No!

Alyssa:  I geek out on sleep information, so I give my clients so much information.  I think it’s imperative!

Megan:  My husband even brought up later on about something else in the sleep plan that wasn’t related to sleep.  Oh, it was snacking!  You had said — and it’s so true.  A lot of times, we were just allowing her to snack a lot, and we didn’t have set meals, necessarily.  Yeah, she ate meals with us, but we allowed her to snack more than we snacked, not even thinking about how that might be tied into sleep or protein intake at certain times of the day and how that aids in sleep patterns.  We had no idea.  I was giving her a snack, and my husband actually said to me, don’t you remember reading that on Alyssa’s sleep plan?

Alyssa:  That’s great!  That’s what it’s there for!

Megan:  Yeah, it was a lot of great information.  And there’s just something special about receiving this information from a local person, from you, a person, and not a book I just pulled off the shelf at the library that might be outdated.  You really cater our sleep plans to us, to the client and to the child, and having come in to our home, you knew us.  You looked for things that might be distractions for quality sleep and taught us how to do a proper nighttime routine.  Although it was a lot of information at one time, it was well-received, and we felt very — I don’t know if qualified is the right word, but we got the information we needed to then make good, informed decisions.

Alyssa:  And be confident.

Megan:  Yes, we got the confidence.

Alyssa:  Even though I’m with you — you’re texting me all the time; I’m responding back; I’m there for guidance — but I’m not there forever.  So that’s why I want you to have enough information that you can say, oh, okay, she’s twelve months now.  Oh, yeah, she told me that this would probably happen around 12 months.  Because I learned this when she was nine months, that’s what this means at 12 months.  You have to be able to troubleshoot yourself or you’re just going to keep calling me every three months at every developmental milestone, saying what do I do?  Help!

Megan:  And it’s funny because we went back to your sleep plan multiple times between 9 months and 15 months to just look and what did she say when she reaches this age group; how much sleep will she need; what are her naps supposed to look like?  So we definitely referenced it.  But being in a new bed, when all that came up… And the plans themselves were very different.

Alyssa:  Yeah, sleep is very different for a two-year-old versus a nine-month-old.

Megan:  Yeah.  But now, after day one of the new sleep plan, we got her back in the crib.  It was like she never forgot it.  She was in the big girl bed for probably four weeks.

Alyssa:  So you’re thinking, oh, great, even if we try this plan, she’s ruined.  We’re going to have to start all over.

Megan:  Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought, but no, her sleep habits came right back.  We were able to get her nap back down to a normal, respectable time, and she’s back to sleeping eleven, twelve hours at night with no interruptions.  We can go back to watching movies and having quality time together with my husband.

Alyssa:  And for date nights, babysitters are easy?

Megan:  Oh, babysitters can put her sleep again.  I’m not asking a babysitter to sleep with her for two hours.

Alyssa:  “You’re going to have to lay in this bed with her, sorry!”

Megan:  And then ever so slightly, quietly creep out as quiet as possible!

Alyssa:  It’s like the ninja role.  Like, you kind of slowly roll of the bed, and you keep a hand there for pressure and you slowly lift your hand up.

Megan:  Make sure the dog is quiet when you’re moving around so its nail don’t click-clack on the hardwood floors and wake her up!  Oh, I better put some WD40 on that door!  Yeah, those were all things that were happening and going through our head.  I’m laughing and I’m making a joke about it, but those were legitimate concerns of mine when we had her in the big girl bed and all of this was going on.  Call me crazy, but that’s how you feel when you and your child aren’t getting sleep.

Alyssa:  Well, you are a bit crazy.  I mean, sleep deprivation does not make for a sound mental state!

Megan:  And now I just can’t believe how much you guys have been able to help us.  Maybe my experience can help other people.  I’ve referred quite a few people over your way.

Alyssa:  Thank you!

Megan:  I just can’t reiterate enough how much you guys helped us and how worth it it is.

Alyssa:  it’s definitely a service that I could literally call life changing.

Megan:  Yes!  I would call it that, as well!  In fact, I think I’ve left reviews stating that!

Alyssa:  Well, if you had one thing that anyone who has pushed off sleep training would need to hear, what do you think it would be?

Megan:  It’s worth it.  It is what’s best for baby.  It’s what best for you and your family unit.

Alyssa:  And what if they’re scared?  Sleep training just causes anxiety.  Those two words; people just think oh, this just sounds like it’s going to be a miserable experience.  My child is going to be left alone; they’re going to have anxiety.

Megan:  But she wasn’t left alone.  The plan you gave us; that wasn’t the case, and you told me right from the beginning, before I even paid for anything, that we will do a plan according to what is comfortable for you.  And I was totally okay with the plan.  And what’s the worst that could happen?  She wakes up 12 times at night versus 11?  No, that’s not even going to be a possibility.  We were so far down the rabbit hole that there was no getting deeper.  We were hitting bedrock.  So it could only get better at this point, and it did.  It was a complete 180.

Alyssa:  Well, I loved working with your family both times.  You probably won’t need me again because she’s great.  Don’t put her in that toddler bed until she’s three.

Megan:  We won’t!

Alyssa:  You’ll know when she’s ready!

Megan:  We will definitely wait.  Now we have just over a year before we have to make any new changes to sleep, but now I have the tools, too, to be able to transfer her to a big girl bed

Alyssa:  Yeah, did I give some info to plan for?

Megan:  You did, yeah!

Alyssa:  Oh, good.  I figured I did, but…

Megan:  But this isn’t the end, Alyssa!  I’m sure that we will see each other again and talk to each other again!

Alyssa:  Well, on that note — because you might be adopting?

Megan:  Yeah.

Alyssa:  So I’m going to talk to you again at a later time about what an adoption process looks like because I don’t know, and a lot of our listeners and parents probably don’t know and maybe are even thinking about it but might be scared.  SO we’ll talk about that next time.

Megan:  I’d love to help you with some insight on there.

Alyssa:  Thanks for joining us!

Megan:  Yeah, thank you for having me!

Alyssa:  If you have any questions for us, you can email as at info@goldcoastdoulas.com.  You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram.  Thanks, and remember, these moments are golden.

 

Megan’s Sleep Story: Podcast Episode #80 Read More »

Postpartum Depression

Supporting a Postpartum Mother: Podcast Episode #79

Elsa Lockman, LMSW of Mindful Counseling talks to us today about how partners, family members, and other caregivers can support a mother during those critical postpartum weeks to ensure she seeks help if needed.  How do you approach a new mother and what are her best options for care?  You can listen to this complete podcast episode on iTunes or SoundCloud.

Kristin:  Welcome to Ask the Doulas with Gold Coast Doulas.  I’m Kristin, and I’m here today with Elsa Lockman.  She’s with Mindful Counseling, and we are talking about how partners and other caregivers and family members can support a woman who has potential signs of postpartum depression or mood disorders.

Elsa:  Yes.  So postpartum is going to be an emotional time, so tears, some anger, sadness, are all part of the experience.  After about two to three weeks out, if spouse or a friend or a mother is noticing maybe a mom is crying more than usual, isn’t really looking forward to things, has these unusual fears that they can’t seem to let go of.  Another sign would be not seeming to eat very much or either sleeping a lot or not being able to sleep when the baby is sleeping.  If they’re noticing those signs, it would maybe be a sign that they could go talk to somebody as far as a therapist or go see their doctor.  Approaching Mom would be in a way to not criticize mom as if she’s doing anything wrong.  She’s not doing anything wrong, so start off with validating, actually.  She’s doing a great job with how hard it is; validate how hard she’s working, and try to tell her that it doesn’t have to be this way.  She doesn’t have to do it alone.

Kristin:  How does the caregiver know if it is baby blues or if it’s something that she needs help for?  Because, of course, there can be that hormonal fluctuation.  They may be teary.

Elsa:  Baby blues usually stops after three weeks postpartum.  So after that would be maybe a sign that there’s more going on.  But I would say, is it getting it the way of functioning?  Is it getting in the way of relationships?  Is it getting in the way of their working in the home or outside of the home, getting those things done?  To a degree, that is expected postpartum; not everything running smoothly, but are relationships being affected?  Those would be signs that it’s more than just baby blues.

Kristin:  How can a spouse, partner, or caregiver be supportive in order to empower her to get help?  Is it best for them to directly reach out for help for her if they’re seeing signs, or what do you recommend?

Elsa:  I recommend the mom reaching out, so that would be encouraging Mom to reach out herself.  And maybe she needs to talk to a friend and have more time with friends or more time to herself; maybe that would help.  See how that works.  If that seems to help and is enough to alleviate whatever stress is going on, then that works, but maybe if it’s not working, then take it to another level, which would be contacting a therapist or your doctor.

Kristin:  And since, obviously, women have multiple doctors — they’re seeing their OB or midwife and family doctor and their pediatrician — does it matter who they’re speaking with about getting help?

Elsa:  No, it wouldn’t matter who you see.  Usually the OB would be the person that they’ve seen most recently, but they can even bring it up to the pediatrician, since moms see the pediatrician very often.

Kristin:  And as far as getting help for our local listeners and clients, they can reach out to you directly?  How do they access you at Mindful Counseling, Elsa?

Elsa:  They can go to the website, and they can contact me through there.  Another resource would be Pine Rest, and through your OB’s office, there also is a list of therapists who specialize in perinatal mood disorders, which includes postpartum depression and anxiety.

Kristin:  That’s so helpful.  And in past conversations, you had mentioned that women can bring their babies to therapy; that you allow that with clients you’re working with, and I know Pine Rest encourages that with their mother-baby program?

Elsa:  Yes, for sure.  Bring your baby to the session; you can feed the baby, breastfeed, anything.  Coming with your baby is welcomed and encouraged, for sure.

Kristin:  Do you have any final thoughts or tips to share?

Elsa:  Just that it doesn’t have to be going through this alone.  It’s very normalized for women to feel that anxiety is just part of the postpartum experience or feeling depressed and stressed is part of it, and while it might be a new phase and there’s a lot going on, it doesn’t have to be that women are just suffering through it.

Kristin:  Great point.  Thanks so much, Elsa, for being on!

 

Supporting a Postpartum Mother: Podcast Episode #79 Read More »