Last year, pre-baby, I reviewed The Happiest Baby on the Block and now I am back with an update! In short: I still think that book needed a more ruthless editor an you are better served watching his video than reading the book. But the 5-S advice is solid, and did, in fact, result in a happy baby. Yay!
So there we were, humming right along with our happiest baby. And then one day he turned into a not-infant and decided that sleep was for other people.
First, a very important note–before I ordered this book I spent houurrrs seriously hourrrrrrrs on the website of our very own alexis and I would just like to say THANK YOU ALEXIS YOU HAVE GIVEN US THE GIFT OF SWEET PREDICTABLE HAPPY BABY SLEEP.
Mr. Baby Luxury would like thank you too, but he can’t BECAUSE HE IS ASLEEP RIGHT NOW!
Alexis is the best.
So in addition to devouring Alexis’ site, I read this book. It is a good book. It has a simple and interesting introduction (What You Need to Know About Baby Sleep basically) that helps you understand why he makes his recommendations. Then it’s split up into infant (0-3 months), baby (3 – 12 months) and toddler (1-5 years) recommendations. We had already aced the infant stage so I skimmed it; some of that was a repeat of Happiest Baby on the Block, but it’s not too much if you’ve already read that one, and has additional tips about things like dream feeds.
The baby stage was obviously the most pertinent to my situation. Karp’s approach is sensible and gentle. Things like: encourage the use of a lovey; find and establish sleep cues; use white noise; (how to) pick the right bedtime. He has some pointers for how to do “cry it out” in a gentler way, too–luckily we haven’t had to do that, since everything else seems to be working…!
This is an easy book to read and implement. There were some suggestions that didn’t jive with me, but hey, the more ideas the better. He gives you a lot of ideas to work with so you can find your own way to baby sleep heaven. I read a lot of sleep advice online and in other books and this was definitely one of the easiest to read, implement, and understand–gives you enough information to go forth and do something but not so much that you’re overwhelmed. Karp gives you information to trust your gut, in other words.
There’s not very much extra information, though–not much at all on the when/what/why of sleep regressions, for instance, which is what started us on this journey in the first place. That would have been nice. But maybe too much to ask since that might have made it more dense and less easy to implement?
4/5: A variety of good suggestions, non-judgey tone, easy to implement, parent-empowering, and, very importantly, the strategies seems to work with our little dude. It is repetitive–although not as much as Happiest Baby–and that gets annoying after a while. But I found this book easier to skim than Happiest Baby because it’s broken down in a more helpful and straightforward way with less padding in each chapter.
I’m glad I read this along with Alexi’s site because the two compliment each other really well. And now I’m a mama who can, thank goodness, finally get some sleep.