Before I had my son in January 2020, I absolutely nerded out on all the awesome baby technology out there. For those that don’t know what The Snoo is, it’s a “smart bassinet” developed by a pediatrician to help sooth babies back to sleep. The Snoo is an FDA approved safe sleep device that incorporates soothing measures during the “fourth trimester” while babies are adjusting from being within the womb to the real world. I used The Snoo for my two babies and have had fairly different experiences. This Snoo review post is to share the background information on how/why I decided to invest in The Snoo, the experiences I had with each of my two kids, and help you decide if The Snoo is right for you. This post is not sponsored and is solely a reflection of my experiences. If you do have any questions, drop them in the comment box at the end of the post – I’d love to help anyone trying to learn more and decide what is best for their family.
Why I Chose the Snoo
Back in 2019 when I was pregnant, I heard many stories about how I’d never sleep again/babies are hard/etc. Genuinely I had trouble imagining how I could possibly function on very little sleep. Sometimes, I genuinely felt like a zombie when I was only able to get six hours of sleep. How was I supposed to feed a baby every couple of hours and be the mom I wanted to be? This combo of thoughts combined with some anxiety surrounding SIDS lead me to The Snoo. The price point was very intimidating. I decided I would eye the price and look to getting it close to my January due date. I wasn’t quite sure if I would rent or buy, but my husband and I decided we did want to give it a try.
Purchasing vs Renting
While the price point was intimidating, I did know I wanted to have more than one child and I knew the resell value of it is pretty good. I considered the buying used and renting, but ultimately a 40% off sale on Black Friday is what got me. When I saw the sale, I decided to commit to The Snoo and if it didn’t work out, I knew I’d be able to sell it for close to what I bought it for. A 40% off sale seemed extremely rare. Thinking back now, I believe I’ve only seen a 40% off sale once since I bought The Snoo in 2019! I clicked purchase and scheduled delivery to my house sometime in January!
Babies’ Introduction to Snoo (Month One)
Baby number 1
My first baby was incredibly chill and easygoing. We spent three nights in the hospital after some issues with jaundice and an unplanned C section, but ultimately came home and immediately started using The Snoo at night only. During the day he usually slept on one of our chests as we watched tv or just slept on the couch. I only put him down in The Snoo when I decided I needed a nap myself and I wanted a safe place for him to sleep.
Little guy took maybe about a week and a half to learn his days and nights (with lots of help from us). We played music during the day, I tried to feed him about every two hours during the day, and I tried to get a little bit of sun on him during the day. At night I let him sleep longer between feeds and tried to keep the lights dim and keep things calm. I did always pick him up and take him across the hall to his room for feeds – I personally could not take the sound of my husband snoring while I was awake and exhausted feeding our baby! Hah! Baby number one usually slept about 3hours at a time till one month old then four hours at a time after the first month… then it very gradually increased. The first sleep stretch was always the longest. He’d usually cry between sleep cycles, but when The Snoo’s motion picked up, he’d usually fall back asleep.
In the early-ish days (maybe 2 weeks old and up), I did feel concerned that my son may not be able to sleep on his own so I did attempt crib naps occasionally and almost all of the naps were unsuccessful. The ones that were successful were very short (maybe 20 mins or so). This little guy just LOVED motion and he loved being next to mom. As a tired new mom, I decided if this was really going to be a problem, I’d deal with it later. Everyone seemed to have an opinion on what I was doing with my baby, but at the end of the day I realized I was going to be the one that knew what was best for my family.
Baby number 2
As a second time mom, I felt a little more confident in what I was doing and started my baby girl in The Snoo as soon as we got home as well! I probably used it more for naps as a second time mom than I did with my first. When I could, I spent one on one time with my son while I relied on The Snoo to provide a safe sleeping/soothing device to get my daughter to sleep.
Baby number two took about two weeks to sort out her days and nights. I clearly remember night by night her longest stretch of sleep creeping up nightly – with the first night home getting almost no sleep at all till around 5am. Each night got better as I went along till maybe two weeks later when she was clearly ready for “bed” at 10pm. The log below show’s baby number 2’s first night at home. 5am felt glorious that night.
After those first two weeks, baby girl would usually cluster feed during the “witching hours” from 7pm-10pm. In the middle of the night, I tried my best to follow my pediatrician’s advice not going more than three hours between feeds. I tried waking her, but most of the time in this first month I had trouble waking her up for a good feed. She would take in very little milk when I’d wake her up and she’d fall asleep on me. Our pediatrician previously gave me the go ahead with our first to let him sleep as long as he wants at our one month appointment. Knowing this, I decided to turn off my alarm the day before baby number 2’s one month appointment. I was beyond shocked when she slept eight hours straight. The nurses at our pediatrician office looked at me like I was absolutely crazy when I responded to how many hours her longest sleep stretch at night was. To this day, I’m not totally sure if it was The Snoo that helped her sleep this well early on, though my husband was convinced she just really liked the baseline motion The Snoo provided. She rarely cried out, so The Snoo typically didn’t pick up the rocking motion for her.
When Did They “Sleep Through The Night”?
Baby Number 1
So much of baby number 1’s sleep journey was by the books. I put him down “drowsy but awake” in The Snoo. He followed normal (maybe a little on the shorter end) wake windows. His first sleep stretch was consistently his longest sleep stretch and it slowly increased until he reached 12 hour sleep stretches. When I went back to work, he was about three months old and he was sleeping from 8pm – 5am. I started my work from home day during the Covid pandemic after that 5am feed. He usually went immediately back down after that 5am feed and would sleep until 10am. I believe he started sleeping 12 hour stretches around 4 months old.
Baby Number 2
Like I mentioned earlier, my second started sleeping fairly long stretches at 1 month old. She was sleeping 12 hour stretches before she reached 2 months old (though she definitely worked hard to fill up her belly before sleeping for the night, during her witching hour). Now that she is a toddler, I do realize she just had a smaller appetite than my first born. I somewhat wonder if she was just SO FULL and that helped her sleep well so early on.
I think I took this screenshot below when I had accidentally slept through my alarm. Genuinely this log is so ridiculous for anybody’s baby sleep expectations and not normal for a two week old.
Sleep Regressions
Both of my babies went through sleep regressions at the normal time frames. With my oldest, this merely meant he’d cry out and be soothed in the middle of the night by motion increases for The Snoo and then maybe he was a little bit hungrier than normal and would wake up earlier for the day ready to feed. My youngest also would wake up maybe once at night hungry (which was abnormal for her). The sleep regressions would subside on their own in a weeks time or so. With my two Snoo journeys, there were two sleep regressions (one for each babe) that stuck out in my mind.
Two Month Sleep Regression – Baby Number 1
This sleep regression really through me for a loop as a first time mom. I could no longer get my baby to sleep in the living room while I watched tv or set him on the couch next to me after a feed. He seemed SO tired but would not sleep unless he was being held or nursing and I could not understand what happened to my chill baby that slept everywhere. A couple of times, I tried using The Snoo to get him to nap during the day and it just would not work. After texting a couple of mom friends, I realized I did not know anything about baby sleep. HA! Contrary to my belief, I realized babies would not just sleep when they got tired enough… In fact, they are LESS likely to sleep when they’re overtired. Shout out to my dear friend Kim who recommended the book “Precious Little Sleep” to me.
Despite how tired I was, I breezed through the book and adopted appropriate wake windows for my son. The book specifically talks about adopting many of the sleep aids that The Snoo provides (such as swaddling, motion, and sound) to help your baby sleep. Adopting appropriate wake windows for my son’s age, putting him down in The Snoo for each nap (or as many as I could), and getting back on track with a stroller walk when he got overtired helped me conquer this “sleep regression.” As much as I thought The Snoo was a blanket problem solver, it did not replace proper sleep habits/knowledge on my part. I kept a timer on my phone to keep track of his wake windows and went ahead and fed him every time he woke up from a nap. If he napped less than 45 minutes, I tried to let the Snoo soothe him back to sleep. Sometimes it would extend his naps, but sometimes it wouldn’t. Regardless, this helped me a ton as I was working from home during a pandemic as a first time mom.
The Four Month Sleep Regression – Baby Number 2
When I went to my daughter’s four month checkup, my pediatrician told me to take her out of The Snoo and she was ready to move around in the crib. I absolutely ignored this advice because she was sleeping wonderfully as it was, she only had a little bit more time in the Snoo, and I was committed to taking the same path I took with my son. Shortly after that, we ran into the four month sleep regression. She really did fine sleeping once she fell asleep, but it felt impossible trying to get her down in The Snoo. We tried putting her in her Snoo Sack, rocking her to sleep, then putting her down and sliding the wings into the clips without waking her, then turning it on. If she did wake up when we put her down, sometimes she could be soothed by the motion, but sometimes it didn’t work. Looking back on it now, I think this was her way of telling me that she was ready to move out of The Snoo earlier than her big brother and it was a sign that she entered a separation anxiety stage earlier than I expected. We struggled for longer than we should have – naps, nighttime sleep, all of it.
Weaning From the Snoo
Baby Number 1
As mentioned previously, my son was very textbook when it came to sleep. I tried taking his arms out of the Snoo Sack around 4 months and that was a mistake. I quickly tucked them back in and tried again around 5.5 months. I pulled one arm out and once he was doing that well for a week, I pulled the other arm out. At this point, he was sleeping absolutely fine. In fact, one time I forgot to turn on The Snoo when I put him down and he slept absolutely fine throughout the night. Despite this, I still turned on the “weaning” feature on the Snoo for a week and let him sleep in our room in the Snoo with it completely off for a couple of nights before I put him in his crib for the first time. The weaning feature simply turns off the baseline motion from The Snoo and only provides motion if your baby cries out. To this day, my son is a great sleeper.
Baby Number 2
By four months old, we were really struggling with The Snoo with this little girl. Sometime between four and five months old, I decided it was time to put this girl in her crib. I did not do any weaning or slow transition, we just stopped cold turkey. She had a hard time for about ten minutes and eventually was able to fall asleep and stay asleep in her crib for the night. Things were much better after switching and really the best once she learned how to roll to her stomach. Baby number 2 is a stomach sleeper to this day and I wonder if she was ALSO trying to tell me she was a big enough girl to move around and roll to her stomach (like my pediatrician told me). This little one has slept great since I let her sleep on her stomach. Before she learned to roll to her stomach, she found her thumb and that certainly helped ALL of us.
The Final Verdict
Based on personal experience, I would say The Snoo is not a “must have” item but a very nice item to have if is it within your budget. I absolutely would recommend this to any friends/family and I’d use it again. Knowing what I know now, I would try to follow my baby’s cues a little more than I did – especially with my second. I think my first born did better than my second because he is a back sleeper, but both were benefitted by the device. Best of all, I benefitted from the peace of mind knowing my babies were in a safe sleep device while I learned to be a mom. The Snoo is not a sleep crutch and will not give your babies bad habits. Babies will not “need” the motion forever. The Snoo is an extra set of hands that helps slowly transition your baby from the womb to the real world during the fourth trimester. Plenty of people who have not tried The Snoo seem to have criticism of it, however after using it with two babies, I have found that it is a great sleep tool/resource. It does not replace feeds, your baby will wake up when he or she needs food. It does not replace good sleep habits, you still need to learn when to put your baby down and understand your baby’s needs. What does The Snoo do? It does its best at providing the comfort a baby is used to from the womb when it can. It helps parents get a little break in the same way a swing or a swaddle has been used, but in a certified safe sleep way.