You expect the breathing to pick back up right away, but it doesn’t. In fact, it can take as much as 15 seconds before your baby starts breathing again. In parent years, that seems like an eternity. Those can be the 15 scariest seconds of your parenthood.

The good news is that your baby’s little pause is fairly common. In fact, doctors have even come up with a name for this phenomenon: “Periodic Breathing.” Periodic breathing is just something that happens up until about 6 months of age. (After 6 months of age, it’s not especially common and you should talk to your baby’s doctor if she’s still doing it.)

According to experts, a baby’s breathing can follow this kind of a patter as much as five percent of the time during sleep. These kinds of breathing pauses are more common in babies that were born prematurely, and they may experience it as much as ten percent of the time during sleep.

If you’re worried that your baby has stopped breathing, you can touch her to see whether or not she responds. If she doesn’t respond, she may be experiencing apnea, and you should immediately respond.

If your baby isn’t breathing and you have someone else nearby, perform infant CPR immediately while the other personal calls 911. If no one else is around, perform infant CPR for two minutes and then call for help. Pick back up with CPR until help arrives.

Most of the time, irregular breathing isn’t a life-threatening event. Still, you need to make sure you’re paying attention to whether your baby is experiencing periodic breathing or whether he’s in distress. If you’re concerned about his breathing patterns, talk to your doctor.

Related posts:

1. Are Breathing Pauses Normal in an Infant?
2. How Often Should You Check Your Baby’s Breathing?
3. Is it Normal for Infants to Snort and Snore?

In most cases, the best thing parents can do for their baby’s sleep (and their own, by extension) is to establish familiar routines before bed time. What you do, exactly, is not nearly as important as the doing the same thing night after night.

Here are some examples of routines that will help ease your baby to sleep:

• Read a story. There are countless baby books, and many of them, curiously enough, are bedtime themed. We wonder if they may have been written by sleepy parents. Good Night, Moon and The Going to Bed Book are excellent examples of good bed time reading for baby.
• Give baby a bath. A nice, warm bath is often the best thing for fussy babies, and babies, like anyone else, are better able to relax when they feel nice and clean. Of course, some babies are stimulated by baths, so judge for yourself whether baths are part of a good bed time routine for you, or whether they’re better earlier in the day.
• Massage. There are several good books and web sites dedicated to baby massage techniques. The long and short of it, though, is that even if you don’t have the technique down, a gentle rub down is relaxing for anyone, and babies in particular.
• Rock your baby. A good glider or rocking chair quickly becomes indispensable for baby parents. Rocking babies to sleep has worked for farther back than anyone can remember.
• Sing a song to baby. Of course, the songs you sing at bedtime should be soothing, and it helps if you keep the bedtime tune selection down to 1-3 songs. This helps baby associate those songs with going to sleep.

Remember, when it comes to bed time routines, it’s not as important what you do as that you do the same things consistently. It’s best to choose two or three things, which you will do every night before bed time. While this won’t guarantee that baby will sleep through the night yet, it will lay a foundation for baby, and help her to associate bed time with relaxing and sleeping.

Related posts:

1. Putting a Fussy Baby to Sleep
2. Using Routines to Help Baby Sleep
3. Setting Sleep Routines for Baby

Of course, naps are very important for babies, largely because they aren’t yet able to sleep for eight hour stretches like adults can. They need to eat every 2-3 hours, to be changed as needed, and can easily get too cold or too hot. You baby is dependent on you to meet all of her needs for the first few months of her life, and most of them for years to come.

Recent studies have shown that babies actually learn while they are sleeping. It is likely that baby’s brain development is dependent on sleeping most of the day, making naps that much more important.

So, what are the best ways to go about helping your baby to nap? There’s no shortage on good advice on this subject, but here are some of the best tips we’ve found:

1. Help you baby to nap by laying her down when she first shows signs of being tired. Sometimes when we wait, baby catches a second wind and could miss a nap.
2. Different babies will nap differently. But, whether your baby naps two or three times per day, try to be consistent about nap times and procedures. Whether you lay him down and allow him to self soothe, nurse him to sleep, rock him to sleep, or whatever, it’s best if you can do it the same way every day. This helps establish routine.
3. For younger babies, let them wake up from the naps when they are ready. As baby gets older, you can put naps on a schedule, but in general, younger babies should be allowed to nap as long as they will sleep.
4. Place baby in a dark place during nap times. Not only will this help her get to sleep, but it may also help her to differentiate between day and night, moving her towards sleeping better at night.
5. Swaddle your baby for nap time. Newborns and infants love the feeling of being swaddled snuggly in a blanket, as this replicates the secure feeling of the womb.

Related posts:

1. Nap Tips for Babies
2. Tips to Help Your Newborn Sleep
3. Enjoying Your Night Time Parenting

Here are a couple of basic, virtually unchangeable facts:

1. Your baby can’t sleep through the night, and won’t be able to until she is at least 4 months old, usually longer. That’s because she needs to eat every two to four hours.
2. You are going to need to adjust to your baby’s patterns over the first few months. In time, you will be able to train him to adjust to yours, but he won’t be capable of that for several months.

So, given the facts that baby is simply not going to sleep through the night right away (in fact, call a doctor immediately if she does), you are faced with the fact that you still need to function. Whether you are a working mom or a stay at home mother, you will need to be alert enough to handle the tasks that life throws at you. And that requires getting some rest.

Here’s what you do. As one wise old saying goes, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” That’s right, when your baby nods off to sleep, lay her in the crib, and go catch a few winks yourself. This might be difficult for some to do during the daytime, but you are going to need the rest. For the better part of the first year of baby’s life, an eight hour night of sleep is just not in the cards for you.

Basically, it comes down to this. Since you won’t be able to sleep like an adult for a while, you’re going to have to learn how to sleep like a baby. That means taking one to four hour naps here and there, when the baby sleeps. Here are some tips for sleeping like a baby:

• Give yourself some grace on the housework. It’s not going to kill anyone if the laundry waits a day.
• Buy a sleeping mask if you have trouble sleeping during the daytime. They look a little silly, but they keep the sunlight out, and can really help you catch a much needed nap.
• Turn the phone off. When you need a nap you need a nap, and you don’t need anyone’s text messages or phone calls depriving you of sleep. If it’s important, they’ll leave a message.

Related posts:

1. What Parents Need to Know about Baby Sleep
2. Daylight Savings Time and Baby Sleep
3. Sleep: Who Needs It?

The idea of using a reproduction or simulation of the sounds from inside a mother’s womb is nothing new, of course. That idea caught fire in the 1970s, and has been used ever since. Even before the 1970s, moms all over the world had figured out that white noise helps babies relax and nod off to sleep.

We’ve come a long way from simply making shushing sounds ourselves to placing baby near the washer and dryer or vacuum. The past two decades have seen the market flooded with products designed to offer womb sounds or other soothing noises to help comfort babies. Womb sounds have been recorded on phonographs, cassette tapes, CDs, and more recently, downloaded in mp3 format.

But the latest development is likely to excite a lot of young parents (and maybe a few older ones who had a baby later in life). Best of all, it costs less than three bucks.

For $2.99, you can download the Baby Sleep Shop application to your iPod, iPad, or iPhone. The application allows you to choose from a wide variety of soothing sounds to help your little prince or princess relax. In that sense, it isn’t much different from other products on the market.

What sets it apart, as we see it, is that the Baby Sleep Shop can be uploaded to a device that you are carrying with you anyway. Not only is this a whole lot more cost effective, but it means that you’ll never be without this invaluable sleep aid. Whether you are at home, in the car, or virtually anywhere, if you are an iPhone or iPad user, you probably have the device with you.

One thing that we’ve found is that having the Baby Sleep Shop means we don’t have to decide whether to try putting baby to sleep in the crib with womb sounds playing on the CD player or taking her for a ride in the car to put her to sleep. We can do both (and trust us, it really works).

We look forward to other applications like this coming out for other electronics devices and phones as the competition latches onto the idea. Hopefully smart phone users of every stripe will soon have this kind of an application available to them.

Related posts:

1. Beware of Magical Sleep Aids
2. Creating a Great Baby Sleep Environment
3. What is White Noise and How Can it Help Baby Sleep?