Loving the newborn stage..with Taking Cara Babies infant sleep class
An honest review of Taking Cara Babies “Will I Ever Sleep Again?” Infant sleep course
Hi Friends! It’s been a year since I’ve written to you. In that time, I’ve become a momma and our son is about to turn 1 in just a few days. This has been the most incredible year of my life, of course against the backdrop of one of the hardest years for absolutely everyone in the world as we navigate this global pandemic.
Now that I’ve got 1 year of momma experience under my belt, I want to revisit some of the most important topics from both my son’s first year and our first year of being parents! So this will be my first blog in a series all about motherhood.
And the first and foremost...the question I get most often is SLEEP!!! Do you sleep, does your baby sleep? I heard so many comments from parents when I was pregnant basically saying, its horrible just prepare yourselves for a nightmare.
I’ll be honest I didn't love that response. Parenthood is truly very hard at times but I wanted to know how some people got good sleepers and vice versa? Is it truly all luck of the draw? Well of course I think some of it probably is. But Taking Cara Babies, the course I’ll review next, I think helped us stack the deck in our favor and provide our son with a great sleep foundation.
So in no particular order, the things we loved about Taking Cara babies newborn sleep class! Cara is a mom, a nurse, and now a sleep expert who provides evidence and science-based infant sleep knowledge along with the heart of a mom. It feels like taking a course with a good friend who wants you to ENJOY the newborn period instead of dreading it. We loved that the course is bottle or breastfeeding friendly, or combo feeding friendly which was our situation with Max. Any course of Cara’s is a “flexible routine, not a rigid schedule”. The newborn class is not traditional sleep training (she has a class for older babies that I’ll review later, spoiler alert…..we loved it!), this course is all about establishing good sleep habits right from the start for both babies and parents.
At $79 and offered virtually, we thought this price point was super accessible and honestly who wouldn’t pay just about anything to sleep better with a newborn baby. You don’t need a million products to successfully complete the course. I would absolutely recommend a sound machine that will stay on all night, I’ll link mine below and it is under $40. We used our own preferred swaddles/sleep sacks. During the pandemic, this is a great option for a safe course you can take during the last month of your pregnancy and again after baby is born (this is what we did!).
I particularly loved Cara’s flexible approach to the newborn stage. There are no rigid rules like “don’t ever put your baby in the bassinet to sleep” or “don’t ever let your baby nap on you or they’ll never nap alone”. Cara approaches newborn sleep with the idea that every day is a little different, and all we want is to lay a good sleep foundation and a flexible daily rhythm for your family.
Cara shows video of REAL babies from live courses she runs in Arizona (pre-covid of course). The live video showing some of the techniques really helped us because we could implement them right away, sometimes a video is worth 1000 words! The course is a mix of video and guidebook lessons, all in an easy to learn format...especially if you’re already sleep deprived!
Now as far as results go, this is what we loved the most is that it works for every baby no matter what your situation is. Max was born early and struggled with weight gain, severe jaundice, and also had to be evaluated for a serious metabolic condition (which thankfully we found out at 12 weeks he didn’t have). But until that time, we had to wake to feed him through the night (every 3-4 hours) to ensure he could eat enough calories to get healthy. Cara doesn’t push that your baby has to be sleeping this specific number of hours at a time to be “successful”. For us with our son, success meant for him to fall asleep quickly without much help, sleep for a full 3-4 hours, feed well, and then go back to sleep again with little intervention from us...so that WE could go back to sleep! And our hope was he would nap consistently throughout the day, sometimes on one of us or sometimes in his bassinet, so that we could get a mix of cuddles and then some free time to take a shower or eat something while he slept.
We were able to achieve all that and more with Cara’s newborn class. Once we got the all clear to feed him less, he then stretched out to 5-6 hour stretches which gradually became 6-7. At 8 months old, we decided to take Cara’s class for older babies called the A,B,C’s of sleep and this is more formal sleep training...but more on that later! Within a few nights of that course he was sleeping in 11-12 hour chunks with two naps during the day and he’s still at that schedule today.
I’m most grateful to Cara for helping us love the newborn stage. Sleep was what I was most stressed about when I thought about becoming a momma. There were of course days we both felt like zombies..it probably wouldn’t be parenthood without that. But we are so thankful we had the insight and guidance from this wonderful mama and sleep expert who helped us feel confident and capable as two brand new parents.
I highly recommend this course for anyone who is expecting and honestly it would make a great and very practical baby shower gift!
Sending you all love, safety, health...and most of all some good SLEEP!
Allison
Taking Cara Babies:
Sound Machine:
https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Machines-Sleeping-Non-Looping-Continuous/dp/B07MGWM3V3
