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October Book Reviews

November 4, 2020 / 19 Comments

“Babies don’t come with a manual.”

We’ve all heard this phrase so many times, but I never understood the truth until I had my own baby! There are so many areas of caring for your baby that you just wish you had a manual- and there is none! But when it comes to sleeping, I found a few books to be very helpful guides to teaching my baby how to sleep at night. This month I have been focusing on learning how to sleep train my newborn, so the audiobooks I listened to this month were geared toward this training.

The Happiest Baby on the Block
By Harvey Karp, M.D.

This is a must read for any new parent. Dr. Karp teaches the 5 S’s (swaddling, shushing, sucking, swaying, side/stomach). These are excellent tools for comforting your newborn. Dr. Karp talks a lot about the 4th trimester, and gives great advice to help ease your baby through this transition from womb to world. I think this book is a great read to learn comforting tools to help you and your baby through the sleep training journey.

Twelve Hours’ Sleep by Twelve Weeks Old
By Suzy Giordano with Lisa Abidin

Remember that common phrase “Babies don’t come with a manual”? Well, reading this book was the first time I felt like a had a manual to help my baby sleep through the night. This book made a lot of sense to me, and seemed like a great way to help train my baby to sleep through the night. It taught me about how babies need to learn to comfort themselves and put themselves back to sleep in order to sleep through the night. Learning how to soothe my baby when he woke up helped us both sleep better at night. He is learning that I won’t pick him up every time he wakes up at night and help put him back to sleep. Instead he is learning to fall back asleep on his own and has sleep through the night a few times and he is just 9 weeks old.

The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Newborns
By Elizabeth Pantley

The author has a “No Cry” approach to helping your baby sleep at night. When I first read the title I thought it seemed like a great option and I wanted to learn more about this approach. After all, no one wants to hear their baby cry! But once I listened to the audiobook I quickly realized this approach was not best for our family. I felt the other books were more suitable for us to help our baby sleep better. It seemed to be her personal beliefs on many topics such as sleep training, breast feeding, bed sharing, and vaccines. I used the book mostly as an informative piece to our puzzle rather than a strict guide to caring for my baby. I thought I would still provide some info on the book here for you to decide if this is one you want to read.

The author’s advice is to expect to be up throughout the night because babies wake up often. She recommends nursing whenever baby wakes up and wants to nurse, and allowing your baby to sleep in the “family bed” if you desire to do so. When it comes to “crying it out”, this book says the answer to when your baby cries is to always pick up your baby if you want to because it shows your baby that you care.

The part of the book I felt most helpful for us are the keys to help learn your baby’s signs and cues. The better you get to know your baby, the easier it will be to figure out why he is crying.

My Little Pumpkin Pie
By Natalie Marshal

I wanted to include this baby book here for you because I thought it was so cute and a fun little addition! My mom gave this to Noah for Halloween, and we read it the next day. Before this book, when I read to him we would only make it a few pages before he lost interest. But this cute book is so special to me because it was the first time he stayed engaged for the whole book! This book is so fun to read with your baby, and the bright colors of the pages seemed to help keep him engaged and looking at each page to the end!

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