Everything That's Actually Helping Us Sleep
- Kate Waldo Jones
- Jul 21
- 7 min read
My phone charges in the bathroom.
Not on my nightstand. Not face down on the dresser. In a completely different room, behind a door.
It sounds a little extreme, and honestly it was the single best thing I've done for my sleep.
Because when your baby stirs at 3:45am and you reach for something to check the time, the thing you reach for should not be a glowing rectangle that also contains your inbox, the news, and everyone's opinions.
So today I'm sharing everything that's actually working for sleep right now. Mine first, because that's the part nobody talks about, and then hers. It's a mix of things I've used for years and a few new finds, and every single one is linked below.
Let's get into it!
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The phone lives in the bathroom now
Here's the setup that replaced it.
I got an Amazon Echo Dot specifically so I wouldn't need my phone by the bed. It's my clock and my alarm. (Not that I need an alarm. I have a baby who has decided 5:00am is a reasonable hour to get up... We're working on it.)
The real magic is the clock. When she makes a noise at night, I have a pretty small house, so I can hear her, I just pull up my eye mask and take a peek. Is this a normal wake-up time? Or is it 3:45am and she's just moving between sleep cycles and will put herself back down? I get my answer in one second, and I never touch my phone. These go on sale on Prime Day, and it is so worth it.
Speaking of the eye mask: this one. I don't like the thick ones with the molded eye holes. This one is simple, it packs flat, and you can throw it in the laundry. My Labrador loves to steal it, so I do have to hide it, which feels like a design flaw on his end and not mine.
For sound, I found this rain playlist on Spotify and I'm never going back. Ten hours of continuous rain. I kind of hate white noise, and brown noise is fine, but rain is just RIGHT. It's the perfect amount of sound without feeling like a machine is running in your room.
And always, always a water bottle by the bed. I have this Owala in all white. It's what all the kids are using, and they're right.
The $10 thing I tell everyone about
A friend put me onto these and they have saved me more times than I can count. They're thin little pain-relieving patches from a Japanese company, they're mentholy, and you can stick them anywhere. I put them across the tops of my shoulders and on my back. They're incredible for period cramps.
Here's why they belong in a sleep post: if I'm tense, I cannot fall asleep. And when you're only getting a small window of sleep to begin with, you really cannot afford to lie there for forty minutes waiting for your shoulders to unclench. These fix that fast.
Twenty patches per pouch, three pouches in a box, about ten dollars. Go.
I also love these flat earplugs. They come in a tiny little container and they sit completely flush in your ear, so nothing is sticking out and poking you when you turn over. You can really tune everything out.
Winding down without scrolling
This is the part I'm still working on, honestly. But when I do it right, it looks like this.
Phone goes in the bathroom. I pick up my Kindle instead.
I have the most basic one you can buy, completely on purpose. I wanted the gray screen. No color, no apps, no temptation. I put a PopSocket on the back so it's easy to hold with one hand.
Fun hack: you can borrow books from your library through Libby and send them to your Kindle. Then put the Kindle on airplane mode. You can't download anything new, but they also can't take your books back. Nobody tell them.
And in the morning, before I look at anything else, I read a passage from Journey to the Heart. It's daily meditations, one short passage for every day of the year, and I have been talking about this book for YEARS. My copy has been through a lot. It's such a better way to start the day than a screen. If I have extra time, which is a genuine luxury right now, I'll journal for a few minutes after. It sets me up so well.
Bedding, for both of us
A few things that made a real difference.
Bamboo sheets. I've had mine for a few years and they've held up beautifully. So soft. I pair them with this organic waffle duvet.
Get two sets. I cannot stress this enough. Two sets of sheets for your bed, two for the crib. The unmake, wash, remake cycle becomes so much less painful when there's a clean set ready to go.
This wedge pillow is long and skinny and it wedges into that gap between your headboard and the top of the mattress, so nothing falls down into the void anymore. Highly recommend.
And my mattress, which I think is a really good in-between: not a high-end investment piece, not a foam thing that arrives in a box.
On my wishlist: a box spring to lift the bed higher. I really wish I'd had a higher bed postpartum, especially after a C-section. Getting in and out of a low bed when your core is recovering is no joke. More on this in an upcoming Dream Bedroom post, because I have opinions.
Now, her sleep
The monitor
I intentionally got a monitor that isn't WiFi. Not because I'm crunchy about it. Because I did not want to be the person compulsively checking an app on her phone every time she left the house.
It's radio-based, and it's so simple I didn't even have to set it up. Plug the camera in her room, turn on the screen, done. Great picture, adjustable brightness and sound. I usually keep it off at night since I can hear her anyway, and just flip it on if I want to check.
The book
Okay. Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems by Dr. Richard Ferber.
You've probably heard of the Ferber method. I didn't know what to think about it until a friend with a baby two months older told me it was painful but so worth it. She was right.
The book looks intimidatingly thick. You genuinely only need to read about 25% of it to get what you need. It gives you all the science and all the reasoning, and it works for children of any age, not just babies.
It took 24 hours. She has slept through the night since she was three and a half months old, and she's six and a half months now. I don't think we've had a single wake-up. What it really did was teach her that she's okay when she surfaces between sleep cycles, and that she can put herself back down.
It worked for us, and you can always run the process again if she gets sick, or you travel, or you decide it's finally time for the pacifier to go.
Sleep sacks
Two brands, and I love them both!
Kyte Baby is my number one. She's in the 1.0 TOG, which is just a measure of how heavy it is. We're in Florida with the air conditioning always running, so a medium weight is perfect. It's so soft that if she's warm and just in a diaper or a onesie, I have zero hesitation putting her in it exactly like that. At night she wears full long-sleeve pajamas underneath.
Quincy Mae is the other one. I needed a second sleep sack on vacation because the first kept getting hit with blowouts and spit-up, and it wasn't drying fast enough. The prints are adorable in a way that doesn't quite come through online. See them in person in a boutique and you'll get it.
A washing note: they tell you to keep them zipped when you wash them. I find that doesn't get the inside clean and they take FOREVER to dry, even in the dryer. So I unzip them completely. Maybe it costs them a little life. Worth it.
Same rule as before: have two on hand.
Crib bedding
A waterproof mattress protector is everything. This is a leftover instinct from when I ran an Airbnb and it has never steered me wrong. It's the same size as the crib sheet and it goes right underneath.
Then these bamboo crib sheets on top. So soft, so easy to clean.
Keep Reading
That's the whole setup. Some of it took me years to land on, some of it I found last month, and the phone-in-the-bathroom thing genuinely changed my life for about four dollars of effort.
If you have a sleep thing that works for you, tell me. I want to know. I'm always trying to make this better.
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xo, Kate
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