I think we all know that I HEART white noise and white noise generators.  They have really saved me in many a pinch and I love how natural and portable they are!    In addition to compact size and portability, many white noise generators have added features, such as clock radio features and sound therapy.

5 Ways to Use White Noise

1. 

   Sound Oasis Deluxe

   For work.  Many an unprepared worker gets distracted at work.  Actually, the average worker is distracted more than 2 hours every day.  Yikes.  A little white noise can help your brain tune out the unnecessary noise while still focusing on important tasks.  I like the Sonet for wok for its effectiveness.

2. For sleep.  Maybe you’re like me in you live in a flat or apartment.  Or maybe on a  busy street.  Or maybe you just have a hard time tuning out the worries of the world as you try to fall asleep.  I like Sound Oasis or Night Wave for sleep.
3. For kids.  Whether you’re sleep training, rooming your kids together, or just trying to get a nap in, white noise can ensure good, uninterrupted sleep {especially if the rest of the house isn’t quiet yet}.  I love the Sound Oasis Travel generator because it’s portable…because when your little ones sleep, so can you!
4. For relaxation.  There’s no need to listen to cars honking and dogs barking when you are home.  Why not try the Sound Oasis Deluxe and enjoy nature sounds as you kick up your feet?
5. For tinnitus.  If you’ve ever experienced “ringing in your ears,” then you know how distracting and uncomfortable tinnitus can be.  The sound therapy found in Sound Oasis is clinically proven to lessen the discomfort of tinnitus.

Because a little white noise goes a long way….toward peace and relaxation and sleep!

We have written before about ways to improve your sleep. Recently, National Geographic published a handy little quiz that will tell you if you are getting enough sleep at night and offer tips to help increase the amount of sleep you get if you aren’t getting enough.  (And according to surveys, you probably aren’t.)

After you take the quiz, feel free to peruse back through other helpful articles we’ve written in the past to remind yourself about techniques to improve your sleep.

• Decluttering Your Bedroom for Better Sleep
• Getting Your Baby to Sleep
• White Noise for Infants
• White Noise Machines for Home Use

The things parents do for sleep…

Your baby (and his sleep) are precious things.

As I am babysitting my friend’s 10-month-old, and he won’t stop crying (surely it’s not me…right?), I am fondly (and not so fondly) remembering those days with my own 2 children.  It’s crazy the lengths we sleep-deprived parents will go to to get our kids to sleep.  Whether it’s a specific pacifier, a soft blanket with just the right texture, or even a special stuffed duck-billed platypus, our hearts (and therefore our wallets) know no bounds.  For you parents just starting out on this crazy journey, I’d love to pass on what I learned about babies and their sleep.

Tips for getting baby to sleep

• It’s great to read books on sleep, but no one has your child.  It’s your job as the parent to study your child and know their sleepy signs, such as yawning, rubbing eyes, pulling ears/hair, etc.
• Put your baby down for a nap or for the night before he or she starts crying/fussing.  This is tricky, but if you can catch your child as they’re staring off into space and not yet irritable enough to fuss, you’ll have a much better put-down.
• If you are comfortable/successful in nursing/feeding/rocking your baby to sleep, then by all means do it.  On the other hand, if that doesn’t work for you for whatever reason, don’t worry about a few minutes of crying.
• Reconcile yourself to the fact that your kid may not be a marathon napper.  I worked for longer naps for my daughter for over a year and finally took what I got.  We were both much happier.  My son, on the other hand, snoozes for hours.  Again- each child is different
• We love white noise- specifically, portable sound machines that can travel with us.  It may be that our kids don’t really need the extra sound to block potentially intrusive noises, but the peace of mind white noise brings is worth it.  I am not the mom who is afraid of the phone ringing or the door bell chiming.  I am confident my kids’ sleep will not be disturbed.

Regardless of what anyone says, you do know best.  You may not be able to give your child a check-up, but you do know how they work.  I think the hardest thing is surviving the first few months and learning how each child works.  Once you do notice the patterns, though, you can roughly predict what they need and when- you can even schedule in a nap for yourself!

According to a recent survey, “seven out of 10 Americans are getting less than seven hours of sleep on weeknights accumulating a deficit of more than one hour per night based on experts’ recommendations that a full night’s sleep is about eight hours.” This probably comes as no surprise to you. However, the far reaching effects of too little sleep were surprising.

Could lack of sleep be effecting your productivity?

The survey results also showed that

One in five Americans has missed work because of feeling tired. And many of those that do drag themselves in to work after a bad night’s sleep are not very productive – a sleepless night has caused a lack of concentration during an important meeting or conversation for almost half of Americans (47 percent).

The consequences of not being able to concentrate during an important meeting could be potentially devastating. You don’t want to come across as disengaged or uninterested.

Effects on Your Skin

Here are some more surprising results.

• After a bad night’s sleep, most Americans’ (85 percent) skin suffers – the most common results are dark circles under the eyes (59 percent) and dull (31 percent) or splotchy skin (16 percent).

“Sleep allows your skin time to repair itself from the daily damage done by stress and the environment,” says Dr. Jeanine Downie, certified dermatologist. “When skin does not have adequate time to repair itself, the long term effects can be similar to those of sun exposure.”

I’ve been using sunscreen every day for years now trying to save myself skin cancer (and, I’ll be honest, I’d like to continue to look young and unwrinkled as long as I can.) Perhaps I should start focusing more attention on getting to bed on time.

Are you a Danger on the Road?

Finally, this startling statistic should convince you of your need for a peaceful nights sleep if nothing else does.

One in five Americans has ever fallen asleep while driving and almost half of Americans (48 percent) “drove while drowsy” in the last month.

That doesn’t only affect you. It effects all the drivers around you.

Tips to Get Enough Sleep

Now that you are convinced that sleep is important and that you aren’t getting enough, what can you do to change this? How can you help yourself to get enough sleep?

The Mayo Clinic offers these 10 tips.

10 Tips for Better Sleep

• Go to bed and get up at about the same time every day, even on the weekends. This helps your body’s natural sleep and awake patterns to stay on track.
• Don’t eat or drink large amounts before bedtime. If you do need a snack, eat something light.
• Avoid nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol in the evening. All three can effect the quality of your sleep.
• Exercise regularly. Its hard to be sleepy if you never do anything.
• Make your bedroom cool, dark, quiet, and comfortable. Make sure the temperature is comfortable and the room is dark. If you live in Scotland like I do, black out blinds are a must for the summer.  A white noise generator may be of use to you so you don’t hear any ambient noise that will wake you up. (I live on a busy street. I am awakened nightly if I don’t use white noise.)
• Sleep primarily at night. If you take long naps during the day, then you won’t be tired at night when it is time for bed.
• Choose a comfortable mattress and pillow. Can’t sleep if you aren’t comfortable. Also, memory foam is wonderful.
• Start a relaxing bedtime routine. Works with kids and it works with adults. Perhaps you could take a bath or read for a bit before falling asleep.
• Go to bed when you’re tired and turn out the lights. Stressing about not sleeping doesn’t help a person fall asleep.
• Use sleeping pills only as a last resort. You don’t want to train your body to need sleeping pills to be able to fall asleep.

Recently I have been thinking about how I use my time. I am HORRIBLE about wasting time. Like just now, when I was supposed to be writing this blog post, I might have wasted an inordinate amount of time on Facebook and reading blogs. When I was working in an office it wasn’t the internet that kept me distracted, but it was conversations with my co-workers. If there was a conversation, I wanted to be in on it! (Can you tell I am an extrovert?) I am not a task oriented person if other people are around that I can interact with. Consequently, I ended up taking longer on a project than I needed to or causing myself undue stress trying to meet a deadline. Now, since I work from home, I end up working at undesirable hours because I might have squandered away the desirable hours wasting time. I know I am not the only person who struggles with this.

Obviously I need to be more purposeful with my time. I know this is a cliché, but it works and it is true. I need to:

Work hard: This is simple, but it is really difficult for me to do sometimes (especially when I am supposed to be doing

Git-R-Done

it). Work hard when you are supposed to be working hard so that you can stop when it is time to stop and not feel guilty about it. For myself, that means getting away by myself so that there is no one else to interact with and buckling down. That may not be possible for others, so you could use headphones to listen to music or white noise to drown out the distractions in the background so that you can concentrate on the task at hand. As my father in law likes to say (and incidentally Mater too): Git R done!

Play hard: Since you have finished you work, you can now play hard. Whether this means spending time with your significant other, your kids, or just watching TV, you can do it with a clean conscience. This is what this time has been allotted for, so enjoy it!

Sleep hard: You have to have enough rest to be able to accomplish the above tasks. Do whatever you have to do, but getting enough sleep is important.

Now if only I didn’t need the internet to do my work so that way Facebook wasn’t always calling out to me…..

Cold & Flu Season

I always dread this time of year. Christmas is over, and it feels like forever ago. It seems like it should be spring by now, but alas it isn’t.  A lot of us even still have snow on the ground- it’s pretty unless you can’t get to work or to the store.  To top it off, this is always the worst time of year for illness for my family, which is not surprising because February is the peak of cold and flu season.  In fact, we are still recovering from having the flu last week.

Tips to prevent illness

In light of all the illness going around right now, I thought I’d post some reminders about how to prevent  it so that way you can use your sick days for ‘mental health days’ instead of actual sick days. There aren’t earth shattering revelations—just some helpful reminders.

1. Wash your hands! My entire family washes their hands as soon as we get home from going anywhere. If you don’t have soap and water handy, then hand sanitizer is also very effective. This is your first defense against getting sick.
2. Wipe down your work area periodically. According to a study done at the University of Arizona, work stations can contain nearly 400 times as many microbes than bathrooms. (Go ahead and go grab that antibacterial wipe and wipe everything down. We’ll wait for you until you get back.)
3. Avoid touching your face. This one is obvious. If the germs are on your hands, you don’t want to give them a chance to get into your body through your eyes, mouth or nose.  Plus, nobody likes watching you pick at your face.)
4. Get enough sleep. I don’t know about you, but when I am tired, not only do I get sick more often, but it is a lot harder to cope with being sick. (Can anyone say, “Whiny?”)    Try to get better sleep- and because I think you’ll like it, a free white noise generator to help you tune out your annoying neighbors or snoring bedmate.
5. Take your vitamins. A lot of people are running low in the Vitamin D department this time of year. (Fewer hours of sunlight + lots of layers of clothing=vitamin D deficiency.)  Vitamin D deficiencies have been linked to higher rates of cold and flu, so now is the time to supplement since you most likely are not getting enough.
6. Think Spring! Okay, I don’t actually know if this will help you not get sick, but it will help your mindset. Perhaps put up a nice wallpaper on your computer background to remind you that spring will be here soon.

If you want to help your coworkers remember to also keep the germ spreading behaviors to a minimum, the CDC put out a helpful little poster for that very purpose.

(Please note. We aren’t doctors. Just people with common sense. Always ask your doctor before starting a vitamin supplement.)

Nothing like answering the same littany of boring questions 20 times.

I’ve never been that into retreats.  I’ll go, but I never look forward to it because it never ends up being very relaxing.  Whether you’re a college student or a career-driven adult, the weekend is something sacred, a time when you should be watching sports and sleeping in.   Instead, you sacrifice a weekend to go to a retreat because it’s going to be “so fun.”  Mm-hmm.  All the fun begins as you stick a name tag on and invite all eyes to stare at your chest (yes, I’m of the female variety).  Then, you get sub-par food at predetermined times, including a senior citizen’s early bird special at 5pm, leaving you starving at 8.  Then, you share quarters with either the friends who managed to talk you into this exciting event, or even better, with strangers you feel the compulsion to chat with to get to know (because that’s what nice people do).  At the end of the weekend, you realize you spent $100 to sleep uncomfortably and eat too many carbs.

I didn’t know it got worse.  Evidently, meeting your husband at a college retreat means that you owe the retreat god big time because somehow, without knowing how, you find yourself looking at a retreat with said husband…and your 2 kids- both under the age 0f 4.  This should go without saying, but a retreat with children isn’t really a retreat at all.  I mean, grandparents take my kids for the weekend or give us an adjoining suite, and I’m all about it.  Truly.  I would actually openly embrace a retreat as what it’s meant to be- time away from what you normally do.  However, packing up 4 of us and loading our car with sleeping bags, duvet covers (what the what?) towels, pack n plays, and car seats is only the beginning.  We are paying to leave the comfort of our 3-bedroom flat and the ease of our own routine to share a room at a retreat- and calling it “a weekend away” in a charming Scottish brogue does not atone for the fact that we are sharing a room.  All 4 of us.  If you read anything I write, you know I do not sleep with my children.  Not even in the hospital- I feed them, I love them, I grin at their sweetness, then I send them right back to the nursery because night time is for sleeping….not for listening to every coo, cry out, and bad dream.  We have 4 white noise generators for a reason- we believe in rest to the point that we invest heavily in the white noise. Praise the Lord our sound machines are portable.  I might set up all 4 in the room just for good measure.  What do you think?

Anyway, pray for us and that the retreat god will be appeased…I cannot endure this again.

Living in Scotland

We live in Aberdeen, which is as far north as Moscow. That makes for some dark winter days.

Whenever I tell people that we live in Scotland, they practically get stars in their eyes and ask if it is wonderful.  Sometimes I say yes, sometimes no (it really depends on my mood), but I can always picture what they’re imagining.  If I am feeling particularly rude, I might mention that we don’t live in a castle, next door to Sean Connery or James McAvoy.  We live in a small flat that is cold more often than not.  We get more rain that I could ever have imagined, which does lend itself to lush vegetation and green, rolling hills.  However, we don’t always get to get out and actually enjoy aforementioned backdrops due to the cold, the wetness, and the dark.  While summers are great with a sunrise at 3 or 4am and a sunset at 10 or 11pm, the exact opposite is true for winter.  This morning, I didn’t even bother to open the blinds until 8:30am because there was no point.  We don’t even have to close the blinds to go to sleep November-February because I can guarantee that NO SUNLIGHT will be peeking through during that time.

How much sunlight do you get in winter?

The worst most extreme days are when the sun rises at 9am and sets at 3pm.  That means that Scottish children walk to and from school in the dark.   The peak is December 21st- we get 4 minutes back a day form that point forward: 2 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon.  I personally celebrate those 4 minutes- 4×7=28 minutes a week!  In all seriousness, that much darkness is tough.  Many people suffer from seasonal affective disorder (SAD).  In everyday terms, SAD is when people feel depressed as a result of the seasons.  Usually, it is the winter’s lack of light that affects people.

How do we cope with so much daylight in the summer and so little in the winter?

Well, these are opposite issues, but I’ll list a few things that keep us sane:

1. Kids tend to sleep more in the winter and less in the summer.  Deal with it, whether you like it or not.  Something about Circadian Rhythm, but their bodies adjust nicely.  We enjoy this and take advantage- if the sun is out, why not delay bedtime or a nap?
2. We usually get to go home (Texas) once a year.  We plan this trip for the winter- we try to overlap it with Thanksgiving and Christmas, so we can enjoy those days with family and miss a lot of the darkness.  This doesn’t work for everyone’s schedule/work, but it’s what works for us.
3. We never travel home during the summer.  Since school is year-round here anyway, there are lots of breaks that aren’t just in the summer we can take advantage of (such as Christmas, see #2), while staying home to enjoy the extra degrees and sun in the summer months.
4. To preserve sleep, we invested in blackout blinds.  They are worth every pound.  I prefer the velcro kind that adheres directly to the window so as to literally black out a room.  While it’s kind of a pain to initially install the velcro strips, once installed the blinds are easy to take off and on.
5. On the flip side, light therapy can be useful, especially if you’re prone to SAD.  My friends call it a “happy light“- true to its name, this happy light keeps us happy instead of wallowing in misery.
6. If there’s a sunny day in the winter (or the summer for that matter!), we drop everything and enjoy it.  There is time to work later, but you can’t count on the sun this far north.
7. We also find that having something to look forward to is helpful: a play date, a real date, movie night, downloaded TV shows from home, a trip, a visit from family, etc.  It keeps our minds off the dreary weather.

Hope that helps anyone out there who hates the winter as much as I do!