Review & Giveaway: RealSleep - Simple. Natural. Fast
Are you reading this at 1am on your Blackberry while trying to quiet a screaming child who refuses to sleep? Or maybe after an exhausting day you have a hard time falling asleep. Then you may be in luck.
When we put Special K to bed, she shifts around for about 10 seconds before she's out like a light. However, with Princess P it's a whole different ball game. After tucking her into bed it may take her up to 2 hours to fall asleep. So, when the opportunity arose to test a product that could shorten her 2 hour cool down period, I was intrigued.
The Product
Over the past month or so I've had the opportunity to test out a new product from NeuroPop called RealSleep. It is a CD that embeds different types of sounds in classical music. The theory behind it is that these sounds relax specific portions of the brain, which in turn allows the listener to have a more quality, relaxing sleep, and fall asleep more quickly.
The Good
The claim is that the CD is effective in roughly 80% of the listeners... so naturally, I figured that Princess P was in the 20% who experience no advantage. However, I was wrong. My wife started using the CD at Princess P's 'rest time' (she hates when you tell her it's time for a nap), and the effects were immediate. We thought that Princess P was working herself out of a mid-day nap, but the first day she started listening to the CD, she fell asleep quickly (by her standards).
Also, Princess P quickly grew to like the music because with tracks like Pachelbel's Canon, it reminded her of her Little Einsteins music.
The Bad
I know every kid is different, but with Princess P there seems to be a magic volume where the CD works much better than at other volume levels. Unfortunately, she loves to mess with the volume knob, and since the stereo is a bit old school, it takes a bit of trial and error to dial it back in.
On bit of a nit picky note... I wish it was in digital form of some sort. Our car CD player is kaput, but we do have an aux input. It would be nice to slap it on my mp3 player and take it in the car. I know I could rip the CD and go that route, but anymore I'm too lazy to even do that.
Overall
I'm pleased with the results we've seen. There are still plenty of nights where Princess P is resistant to sleeping, but RealSleep has drastically cut down the frequency. There is a little tinkering to be done (to repeat or not to repeat, and volume), but it's not much of a bother. My only fear is that NeuroPop has also embedded mind control sounds to raise up and army of children whose parents are powerless to stop them... but that may be an unfounded fear.
The Giveaway
In hopes of getting this to you by Christmas (that's right, I said Christmas, not The Holiday's), the giveaway will be running for 1 week only (until 12/17). To enter, leave a comment on this post with the best (or worst, depending how you look at it) experience you've had getting your child to fall asleep.Disclosure: I received a review copy of the CD at no cost to me that I get to keep. Other than that, I wasn't compensated in any way, or directed as to what to say, or not say in this review.
I try to only review things that I think would be beneficial in some way, so if you think this review is useless (or useful), I'd love to hear from you.
My son. When his sister goes to sleep at the same time. He thinks it's playtime. She's tired, but he throws stuff up on her bunk bed and eventually she comes down and plays. Go to bed at 8pm. Fall asleep after 11.
Daddy could not have been more annoyed. Especially since I was working from home.
The last three weeks have been a horror show for bed time. We do a bath around 7:30, read him a few books and put him down. For some reason, unbeknownst to us, that has all changed. For instance, last night I finished his bath and stories just before 8pm. Darkened his room, turned on his soother and talked to him for a few minutes. When I felt him relax I put him down in his crib. Within five minutes of leaving the room he started screaming. I was then back in his room four more times. I even dragged out the Rockabye Baby CD's we had stopped using a few months ago.
Back in the day, I used to lull my sons to sleep singing the ABC song. It worked, and may have helped them learn the song themselves.
My daughter needed music to fall asleep until she was seven years old.
We used to play music for our boys to put them to sleep, and that seemed to work pretty well. I've never heard of this realsleep thing. Sounds like a novel idea.
When my daughter was a baby she was colic from 2 weeks of age to about 9 weeks of age. It was rough. I will never forget the worst night of them all where her crying started at 6pm and didn't stop until 4am the following morning. The hard part was that nothing consoled her except for us holding her while we gently bounced on a ball- ALL NIGHT LONG! We took 2 hour shifts and I had to work the next day-Ugh!
Sometimes all they need is a little background noise to fall asleep. Hell I am a grown man and I usually put the radio on for a hour while going to sleep.
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