Our Favorite Things: Alarm Clock

Since we’ve reached that age where everyone we know is having a baby, or their second, or third, I’ve decided that I’m going to share some of our favorite baby/kid products that have worked for our family.  Key words: our family.  These are things we have purchased and found to be helpful for us.  Will they work for you?  Maybe, maybe not.  I’m not going to tell you to go buy our favorite things because they may not work for you.  BUT, I’m hoping that sharing our favorite things will help you if you are ever in the market for a similar product.  If our favorite things don’t become your favorite things, that’s ok too.  Before I start I want to let you know a few things:

* I am a researcher.  When it comes to most things, I scour the internet for reviews and ratings.  I would love every product I buy to have a five star rating, but that just isn’t reality.  However, I do read reviews and try to pick the best product for the price. 

* Just because something isn’t my favorite thing, doesn’t mean it isn’t a good thing.  I have many friends and family members that used different products than I did and they work just fine for them.  My favorite things aren’t necessarily the best things and certainly not the most expensive things, they are just things that have made our lives a little easier as we are moving along on this journey called parenthood.

* These opinions are my own opinions.  No one is paying me to write nice things.  I wish that the alarm clock company knew who I was and would send me 5 million dollars for writing about how much I love their alarm clock,  The truth is, they don’t know who I am and they don’t even know that I like their alarm clock.  However, if they ever send me 5 million free alarm clocks, I will give you one (or 2 million, I’ll have a lot left over). 

Sooooo, one of our favorite things is this:

Teach Me Time Alarm Clock and Night Light

After many months of Hannah waking up between 5 and 5:30 we’d had enough and needed to do something to get her to either sleep longer or stay in her room until a certain time.  I remember Kyle saying one morning at 5:00 “Hannah, you CAN’T keep doing this every morning.”  She had no idea what time it was, she just knew that she woke up and it was time to get up!  After researching for a few days about what type of clock I wanted, I decided on this one because it has many features and can “grow” with her as she gets older.  The feature that we use right now is the night light.  You can set the light to change colors from yellow to green at a certain time.  We set the clock to change colors at 7:15.  If she wakes up before the clock turns green, she can play in her room or down stairs.  Once it turns green she comes bounding into our room saying, “Mommy!  My clock turned green!”  This has worked like a charm!  She no longer is in our room before dawn and some days she even gets busy playing that she forgets to look at the clock and we get 15 extra minutes of sleep.  That makes mom and dad even happier! 

We haven’t used some of the other features but this clock will say the time if you push one of the buttons, it has an alarm clock and you can set it to read only the digital time or the clock face.  So far, this has worked so well for my little rule follower, Hannah.  I’m fully expecting it not to work at all for Sadie.  Having two kids exactly the same?  That would be WAY too easy.  

So there you have it,  our first favorite thing.