The best time to figure to figure out how and when you are going to get some sleep with a newborn baby is before the baby is actually born. Hopefully you’re reading this while baby is still on the way. But, even if your baby has already come and is already treating you to sleepless nights, you still have time to adjust your habits to prevent yourself from becoming exhausted.

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.

We’ve found a baby sleep aid that has us shaking our heads in wonder and asking, “What will they think of next?”

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.

Have you ever wondered where the phrase “sleeping like a baby” comes from? We’re not sure either, but let’s venture a guess and say it came from someone who has never tried to help a fussy baby fall asleep.

Of course, babies sleep a lot. Newborn infants average anywhere from fourteen to eighteen hours of sleep per day. Still, that sleep comes in brief two to four hour spurts, so it can feel like a lot less to parents who have spent the majority of their lives sleeping for eight hours at a time.

Of course, newborns have a very good reason for waking up so often. Their little tummies just can’t hold very much. Combine that with an ultra fast digesting liquid diet, and you have a formula (no pun intended) for a hungry infant who needs attention on a regular basis. Breast fed babies especially need to wake up often, as breast milk digests even faster than commercially produced formula.

As your newborn grows, so will her stomach, and she will gradually be able to eat enough at one setting to stay satisfied for longer periods of time, allowing her (and you) longer rest and sleep periods. Babies differ as far as their sleep patterns go, but generally speaking, your baby should be able to start sleeping through the night somewhere between six months and one year of age.

Of course, five hours of uninterrupted sleep is considered “sleeping through the night” for babies. We’re still trying to figure out who came up with that number. To be sure, though, by the time your baby is sleeping five hours or so at a time, it will feel like a full night’s sleep comparatively.

Until your baby is three or four months old, there really isn’t much you can do to help her sleep for longer periods of time. The most important thing is to take care of her needs. Change her, feed her, burp her, and take care of any other needs she may have, and then rock her back to sleep. The best thing you can do for yourself during this time period is to take as many naps as you can while the baby is sleeping.

Your baby’s crib is perhaps the most important piece of safety equipment you will have in your house. You need to make sure that crib is safe and secure, and that it’s a comfortable place for your baby to rest her head at night.

You need to recognize just how important that crib is. Here are some facts about your baby’s sleep habits and his time in the crib you might not know:

• Your baby is going to sleep an average of 16 hours a day for the first two months. That adds up to 960 hours, and the vast majority of the time is going to be in the crib.
• The following four months – from age three months to age six months – that sleep amount drops slightly to about 14.5 hours a day. That gives you another 1,300+ hours, much of which is crib time.
• The remainder of the first year gives you an average of another 2,500 hours of sleep time.

All told, you’re looking at nearly 5,000 hours of sleep in the first year. Assuming ¾ of that is in the crib, you’re talking about 3,250 crib hours. Now, you can begin to see why the crib needs to be safe, secure, and comfortable.

Here are some things you can do when buying a crib to help baby be safe:

• If you’re buying a used crib, check out the Consumer Products Safety Commission to make sure there hasn’t been a recall on that particular model. Crib recalls are common, so do the homework before you buy used.
• On any crib, the slats should not be any greater than about 2.5 inches apart. If you can put a can of pop through the slats, your baby can probably get his head stuck in there.
• Corner posts should not have the potential for snags that can catch your baby’s clothing or blanket.
• Headboards and footboards should not have cut-out designs.
• Make sure the crib’s dropping side has a minimum of two locks so that your baby – as she gets older – isn’t able to accidentally release the crib side.
• When your baby begins climbing, consider switching to a toddler bed as soon as possible.