Has anyone else been living the #shortnaplife? It’s not my favourite place to be.

Short naps are naps that last 20-30 minutes. They are especially rough on the mental health of everyone involved … for a few reasons.

As parents, we often feel a sense of relief after we lay baby down for their nap - especially once we see them drift off to sleep on the monitor. Whew. Time for a break. We go over our mental list of goals: shower, cup of tea, favourite page-turner. We turn the water on in anticipation, and set the kettle to boil. But just as we’re stepping out of the shower, we hear that telltale waaaaaaaaaaa! So much for the tea.

Turns out, there was a lot I didn’t know about sleep, temperature, and my baby that would have helped me to sleep more soundly at night. So allow me to give you the 411 on navigating sleep through warm weather:

When it comes to temperature, heat is the one we need to be especially aware of. Coolness actually helps to induce melatonin, which helps sleep. Whereas when your little one is too hot they can struggle more in sleep, become lethargic and waking more. In toddlers, overheating can cause nightmares or disorientation.

When I find a parent hack or product that is a game-changer in the parenthood, I have to share the love.

I had to laugh at how much I became obsessed with this particular product. It felt similar to picking up a new hobby, like bird-watching. Though instead of bird-watching, I was baby-watching. Instead of talking my hubby’s ear off about different kinds of birds, I was talking about the monitor’s different functions. Instead of interpreting different bird calls, I was learning to interpret different types of my baby’s cries. The monitor was my nerd-out set of binoculars. And I thoroughly enjoyed using it.

Ahhh, summer. It’s the season of late night barbeques, weddings, and days spent at the beach - it’s the season I live for. Single me loved those days. When I became a mom, however, I had a complicated relationship with special events for a while. It made me ask questions I didn’t see coming.

Thoughts like,

How do I breastfeed on the beach when the wind is blowing my cover off every 5 seconds?

How in the world am I going to stay awake this late when I know I’m going to be up half the night?

I spent many hours awake at night with my first, feeding her and then trying everything, including begging, to get her to go back to sleep. And if she slept longer in the morning, there was no way I was going to wake her even a second earlier. I needed to sleep.

But back to the questions: Does waking up your baby at the same time each day really make a difference?

Once you’ve been around the parenting block a couple of times, then you have a fairly good idea of what to expect - even then, however, there are surprises and “I wish I had known that with my last baby” moments.

Here’s one that might surprise you: Newborns sleep A LOT (wait for it …). However, if you just let baby sleep on their own timeline, you might be making things tougher for yourself.

Sometimes I take potential client calls while working in the same room as my husband. I try to avoid it, as I like to keep work calls separate from my family life. A few times in the past I know he’s wondered why I don’t push the benefits of teaching your baby to sleep in order to try to “land a client.”

Toddlers are the CUTEST forces of nature. And they love to push boundaries and use ALLLLL of their cuteness powers to post-pone bedtime.

Your little one’s sleep needs change as they develop and age. While toddlers need much less sleep than they did as infants, ensuring they get that sleep consistently is important.

What a wonderful question! More sleep. Yes girl. As you can tell from my line of work, I am super passionate about helping families get their sleep back. And it’s not just because I love sleep, it’s truly because we need sleep to function.

During sleep, our brain gets to work sorting memories…

I know it can be a bit of an emotional thing. The memory of bringing baby home from the hospital still feels new, and all of the sudden we are faced with the decision of whether baby is ready to be moved from the bassinet to the crib.

There are three main types of stimulation: overstimulation, understimulation, and healthy stimulation. Today we’ll tackle understimulation.

Has anyone else been here before?

Sleep has been better for a while. Baby has slowly started to wake less and less. You begin to feel more like yourself. You can carry a coherent conversation without losing your train of thought. You’re feeling hopeful that you’ve passed through the valley of exhaustion from multiple night wakings. The brain fog is clearing and life is gooooooood.

And then sleep changes.

When I find a parent hack or product that is a game-changer in the mamahood, I have to share the love.

This product is a MUST. As parents, we shudder at the thought of anything terrible happening to our children … so much so that we often push the thought out of our minds. But the reality is that children get hurt and we need to be prepared.

There are a number of factors that influence sleep, but these 3 are the most common challenges when it comes to short naps:

We’ve all been there before. It’s near the end of our baby’s wake window, and we’ve given them a little feed or snuggle to help them fall asleep. Yep, they are OUT. Time for us to take a little reprieve. Whew.

Anna McMillan from Little Winks Sleep shares helpful tips for hosting families in your home with little ones.

What can you do to make their extended stay with you more comfortable?

What can you ask for ahead of time to help overwhelmed parents?

You know what they say, the days are long but the years are short. One moment you’re trying to figure out why baby cries whenever you lay them in the crib, and the next moment you’re wondering if your “big kid” is ready to transition into a big kid bed.

In the current housing climate, square footage can be difficult to come by. As lovely as it is in theory for siblings to have their own rooms, it’s not always practical for us as parents. We live in fear of getting even less sleep than we currently do, because one sibling might wake the other and we might end up lying in bed at night with our partner playing “name that cry.”

This is a common question: Is my child experiencing a Nightmare or a Night terror?

As parents, we completely understand your anxiety about your child’s experience at night. We want them dreaming of raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, not the Gorgon monster from Stranger Things.

Nightmares and Night Terrors are very different experiences, but actually have similar causes. Needing to pee, overheating, and unprocessed anxiety are among them.