Sounds for Silence Nursery Sound Machine

July 15, 2011

Tenille

Not all sound machines are created equal. I learned this after using the Sounds for Silence Nursery Sound Machine from The First Years for the past few weeks in our household with our 3 month old. We already had a sound machine – one that we used for my middle child Nevaeh and still use in our bedroom when my husband is sleeping off a night shift. I thought we would just use that for this baby, so when I was offered the opportunity to try out the Sounds for Silence Nursery Sound Machine I wondered if it would be wasteful to have 2. The short answer is no, my husband can keep the old sound machine and we will cling to this one!

The Sounds for Silence Nursery Sound Machine features custom sounds developed by Pediatrician Dr. Harry Zehnwirth. Tested with crying babies, the sound machine continuously achieves a 90% success rate in soothing babies. I wondered who this doctor was, and looked him up online before using the product. You know how it is, companies attach a doctor’s name to a product to make it sound special, but does the doctor hold any relevance? In this case, he sure does!

The book Sounds for Silence Baby Settling and health Guide by Dr. Harry Zehnwirth is now in it’s 2nd edition and features over 100 pages of helpful advice for settling babies and managing irritability. Dr. Zehnwirth suggests doing away with lullabies for soothing babies but rather using everyday sounds from our lives that are rhythmic and in baby’s case, soothing. Now, he’s taken the practical advice from his book and developed these custom sounds for the Sounds for Silence Nursery Sound Machine. Brilliant!

Admittedly, some of the sounds on the machine were irritating to me – they seem more harsh than calming (the white noise for example isn’t an ocean sound like our old sound machine but more like a staticky radio) and when I go to sleep at night with the machine on, it bugs me before I fall asleep (Everleigh’s crib is in our room). However, she happens to sleep well with it and that’s the important thing!

If you have an infant, take a minute and watch this video clip here – you can see the Sounds for Silence in action with Dr. Zehnwirth and see how it calms a crying baby instantly (it’s really quite amazing!)

We started using this machine a few weeks who when we transitioned Everleigh from napping in the swing, bouncy chair, or car seat into her crib. I posted here on my blog about my baby only napping 20 minutes at a time, and how frustrating it was. I knew that the 20 minute point was when babies transition from one sleep stage to the next and Everleigh was easily being roused out of sleep at that point. We are getting much better at increasing her nap length time – in fact some days we have seen 1-2 hour naps! I know it is related to the sound machine because when we are out at a friends house, like we were this past weekend, and she napped without the Sounds for Silence Nursery Sound Machine, the nap was again her usual 20 minutes.

The Sounds for Silence Nursery Sound Machine comes with an MP3 hookup for custom music, an auto-off timer and Dr. Zehnwirth’s Baby Settling & Health Guide as well (though note that the guide is just a brochure summarizing his info, not the actual book itself)! Use the Where to Buy link on the Learning Curve website linked above to see where to find this in the US, or wherever products by The First Years are available (I Googled locations in Canada and you can check at Babies R Us and Walmart for products by The First Years, in the US look at Target and Babies R US!)

1 of my lucky readers is going to win the Sounds for Silence Nursery Sound Machine by The First Years. To enter, just leave me a comment here telling me why you’d like to win.

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This giveaway will end on August 4th at 9PM CT . Giveaway is open to Canadian and US addresses.