We live on a very busy road in the middle of town in a building that is over a century old. This means that 1. there is a lot of noise from the road below (yelling college students/drunks, very loud semi-trucks, and lots of sirens) and 2. the walls and our solid wooden doors are very thick. As in my children have to be screaming for me to hear them sometimes if my door is shut all the way. So we like to employ white noise while we sleep, but I still need to be able to hear my children if they need something in the middle of the night. Here are some tips for just how to do that.

I am sure this woman looks way better when she is sleeping than I do. That could be because she is sleeping in her make-up.

My husband and I have always slept with some white noise. Before we had children, we would have a fan running in the corner. After we had our first child, she slept in the room with us for the first few months, so we didn’t want to run a fan. (First time parents. We didn’t want a draft on our new baby!) After she finally moved out we could turn the fan back on, but then we worried we couldn’t hear her. Cue my first tip for you: use a baby monitor and either have the white noise in your child’s room  piped in over the monitor to be the white noise you use or have your own white noise machine in your room with the monitor turned up loud enough for you to hear your precious child if they cry. We used to just use our kids white noise until my daughter started yelling “I’m AWAAAAAKE!” at the top of her lungs every morning. (Now THAT will wake you up.) So, we turned her monitor to a much more reasonable level since we weren’t using her white noise for us and bought ourselves a white noise machine to put in our room.

Now, we also have the opposite problem at times. I can hear my child in the middle of the night and I don’t want to. Now, I am not talking about screaming and crying where he obviously needs something. I am talking about the situation where I have already been in to check on my one year old son and for some reason, he just decides it would be great if he woke up and started talking happily to himself at 4am. I want to be able to monitor the situation, but I also don’t want to lay in bed just listening to him and stewing because I can’t go back to sleep. Cue my second tip for you: use a timer for your white noise machine. Ours has a 10 minute, 30 minute, and 1 hour timer that I will use if I hear one the children awake in the middle of the night. When I come back into my room after checking on the awake child, I just press the timer button on my way back to bed.  Once the white noise turns off, I usually don’t even wake up unless I still hear my child and now I can reassess the situation and perhaps go back in and check on them. Or press the timer button again if they still sound okay.  Mama still gets her sleep and also doesn’t get mad. Beautiful! (Daddy wears ear plugs so he misses all of this stuff. Its okay. I still love him. He would get up if I really needed him to.)

Here are some other helpful things we have written in the past about white noise to help with sleeping.