Continuing the tradition of my blog on I spent $10k on a mattress, and I sleep better for it, here it is: infant edition. You may see a theme develop here: I invest in sleep and I put my money where my pillow is.

Why I didn’t get the Snoo for my first two babies

With my first baby the Snoo Smart Bassinet, did not exist with my second; it did, but I didn’t have the sense to give it a try. For some context, the Snoo is a bassinet that goes for a whopping $1,700 new so you can see why I might be reticent to give it a try, especially when I already owned a bassinet from my baby registry that worked perfectly adequately for my first baby the first time, or so I thought. For more context you typically use a bassinet in the first 5-6 months only. For a single baby that would work out to $283/month!

So when my second baby didn’t sleep on her back for the first two months, I felt I had no other choice than to into into a cycle of holding her to sleep day and night and frequently falling asleep myself with her in my arms. I called my birth support team (birth doula, midwife) to ask advice, to which the conclusion was seemingly this would be a short phase to power through. Exhausted and stressed, at about two months, I gave up and placed her on her stomach to sleep, and she was happy there. Falling asleep with her in my arms seemed more dangerous than the hyperbolic sleep recommendations of “sleep the baby on their back at all costs to avoid SIDS”; so despite it going against recommendations, sleeping on her stomach seemed safer to me. It certain was to my health as well.

At first, I kept a close eye while she slept, but this was unsustainable and eventually I settled into the routine of her sleeping nearby peacefully on her stomach. Thankfully, she did just as well most of us who grew up in the generation where this was the norm. SIDS is so rare and we’re low risk of SIDS anyway (as I breastfeed, don’t smoke or drink or co-sleep), she ended up fine. That didn’t mean this wasn’t an agonizing decision for me.

Why I decided to give the Snoo a try for my third baby

For the third baby, I was determined not to go through that process that pushed me almost to the breaking point. But $1,700 for a bassinet, even for some solidly in the upper middle class, still seemed rich. And what if it didn’t work, the baby didn’t like it, or it was just a lot of expense for nothing? Luckily they offer a rental program, where you can pay month to month and send it back if it’s not for you. I also have heard frequently these a great used, and have great resale value. Not knowing if they were for me, I wanted to have an easy “get it out of my house” button. So tentatively, I gave it a try and setup the rental to be ready when baby #3 arrived.

How the Snoo works

Going into it I though perhaps the Snoo was more robotic or artificial and I worried about it being unnatural or subjecting the baby to robotic vs human comfort excessively. After using it myself, I no longer think so. If the baby stirs for more than a minute or two, it then stops operations and calls the caregiver in. This is less a replacement for a caregiver and more an implementation of the “give a baby a second to see if the settle” routine on easy mode.

The Snoo does this with a “smart rock” feature where it gently goes back and forth while the baby is nodding off and sleeping, this is accompanied by white noise, which fades some time after the baby falls asleep. The rocking increases in frequency when the baby begins stirring for a short period, and the white noise returns slightly loader. When increasing the frequency it sends a push notification to the caregiver’s phone, which allows the caregiver to check and observe as they choose.

This is all enabled by the Snoo swaddle, where the baby is tucked inside. The wings are attached to the bassinet and the bassinet stops when they are unclipped.

The results on baby #3 – a big win after an unclear start

When baby #3 was very fresh, for the first week or two, it seemed unclear where we stood with how well the bassinet was working. The rocking feature seemed to distract a very fresh infant, who was prone to sleeping at all times of the day, and if the stirring escalation activated it seemed not to function as intended. I resorted to sleeping the infant in the bassinet, without turning on the rocking feature. Still, the swaddle and the routine was a big win. It was easy to use, consistent, and kept the baby cosy and in the right place. It was one less thing to think about.

A few weeks in I decided to use the rocking feature again, and by this point the baby was old enough to enjoy it. The escalation in frequency rarely worked in the early days to soothe them back to sleep, but I was always right there to extract them after giving it a brief chance, thanks to the quick notification. Since it seemed to operate on stirring vs noise, I’d have an earlier heads up about this wherever I was in the house. Importantly the baby enjoyed sleeping on their back. Whether this was genetics or the swaddle and Snoo I’ll never know but I’ll take the results.

As the baby grew, the benefits of the Snoo grew. We had a routine at 2 months where we could switch from nursing to sleep to nursing on wake and setting the baby down after an average wake window, even if they seemed wide awake still. The Huckleberry app is great for keeping track of this, with their SweetSpot letting you know exactly when. The swaddle and the gentle rock was just the trick for this helping with both naps and bedtime. The baby knew just what to expect, and it worked!

Around this time we started seeing huge stretches of sleep. My baby was a natural sleeper – I think this was genetic, but there was also a Snoo component which helped us give them space to do so. She started taking just two large naps a day (vs 4-5 expected at this age), and having a long stretch of sleep at night, with a brief wake to feed, and then another long stretch. At six months, they dropped the night feed spontaneously and began sleeping through the night.

Why I am a Snoo convert – and even bought one to own for baby #4

So the secret sauce of the Snoo I think is actually in giving you the technology and framework to let your baby have a brief bit to sort things for themselves before you intervene. In some baby book I read that this is done in France and is referred to as “Le Pause”. On top of that, the swaddle game is top notch, which helps babies feel cosy in a consistent manner. Finally, it’s about having a super consistent sleep environment so that everyone knows what to expect every time, which is a great thing to have when transitioning from drinking or being rocked or held to sleep. It’s less about the fancy tech, and more about the fancy tech giving you the confidence to let the baby do their thing. So you could probably reproduce this without the $1700 monstrosity (spring for the swaddle, be consistent, set up a baby monitor with the right alerts), but it sure does make it more inevitable.

Rather than rent for baby #4, after looking up and verifying the great resale value, I decided to purchase the bassinet (used, on sale for a “bargain” $800), for baby #4. That would give me options including gifting it to another family instead of the rental cost down the drain.

So far we are seeing the same great results. Now just over two months, baby #4 is consistently sleeping on back without trouble. During the first few months I did a lot of contact napping with them during the day which was delightful. I never worried that I was getting them used to this permanently as we always practiced with the Snoo at night. And when we transitioned from the wake-feed-play-feed-sleep cycle to the wake-feed-play-sleep cycle, the bassinet started to be the default for most day naps and gave everyone in the house a more predictable schedule. For example, after the baby drinks I can be pretty sure I won’t be needed to breastfeed for a few hours again!

What to do when traveling without the Snoo

Some people are concerned about dependency on the Snoo, this may be valid. We certainly travelled without the Snoo, but we did try to recreate it on the go as much as we could. When we travel (we did a roadtrip with baby #3 to Texas and with baby #4 to San Francisco during this period) we brought our bassinet attachment to the stroller and the Snoo Swaddle as well as some white noise that sounded like the Snoo. This kept the sleeping situation pretty consistent. Snoo even offers a white noise bear with the exact same sound, which we purchased. This setup would be feasible on a plane as well, as it’s a standard stroller attachment. This worked really well on the go in all sorts of strange environments! It’s another piece of evidence that the consistency of the swaddle, routine, noise, and bassinet was enough to sustain the sleep success longer term, with the rocking being relatively easy to wean off of once the pattern was established.

Moving on from the Swaddle and the Snoo

Some folks are concerned that moving on from the Snoo would be a challenge. It offers a weaning mode where it ceases rocking, which we used starting at about 5 months. We choose to use floor beds as the next step for our children. Sometime in the 5-6 month range, we made the transition. This happened to go smoothly for us, but your mileage may vary. I think this is in part due to us already having firmly established thanks to Huckleberry good foundations for falling asleep independently as well as having some experience with sleeping outside the Snoo on trips.

If I could go back in time – I’d deliver a Snoo to baby me with baby #1 and #2

If I could go back in time, I’d definitely have a Snoo for baby #1 and baby #2. Part of a baby learning how to sleep is a parent learning how to let a baby sleep, and I think this would have helped both me and baby through that process. Since I can’t go back in time, I’ll give the advice to others. Give it a try. You could always rent and send it back. If you decide to spring for one, feel free to use my referral code but I swear I’m not otherwise Snoo-sponsored (although certainly and clearly I’m Snoo-pilled). And if it’s too much money (which is definitely understandable in this economy!) you could take what I’ve identified as the best qualities in the Snoo and probably reproduce super cheaply as long as you have it in you to be consistent. For all those parents (and babies) out there, I wish you great sleep. <3