Hatch Rest Baby Sound Machine | 2nd Gen

I don't write reviews for things I buy very often, but this little machine has changed my life so much that I have to. Whoever invented this should be nominated for the Nobel Prize. This thing is a miracle machine. My son is 20 months old and I can count the number of times that he slept through the night on one hand-- that is until about 3 weeks ago when we bought this machine. I saw the concept of an "ok to wake" alarm but was not sure if it would work for a kid as young as mine. Then I saw a review from a lady with an 18 month old who seemed to have a similar sleep pattern to my son. My son would wake up 3-4 times every night and need some degree of soothing to go back down. If he woke up after about 3-4 am (what we came to know as 'the witching hour'), there would be no hope of getting him to go deeply back to sleep and the best you could do was get him to lay down and nod off for 15 minute increments for as long as you could. That worked best with one of sleeping on the ground beside the crib. At some point, he would wake fully up, and at that point there would be no getting him back to sleep. You just had to wake up and start the day with him. We tried really hard to at least get him to 5 am, but it didn't always work. 5:30 was a stretch goal and 6 seemed like a near impossibility. Enter the hatch. I followed the procedure used by the lady whose review I read-- I set the alarm for 5:30 on the first night after having a talk with him before bed about how the red light meant it was time to sleep and green meant it was ok to wake up. When he woke up in the night, we told him over the baby monitor that the light was still red so he would need to lay down. To our surprise, he actually did after a few minutes. He whined a little bit but didn't start to cry like he normally would if we didn't go in the room. He woke up fully that morning before the light turned green and started crying out for us. Like the woman described, I reset the wake time for about 5 minutes out so he would not have to spend so long in distress. Then when the light turned green, I went in and made a big production of how the light was green so he could wake up. Each day I set the time a few minutes later until we finally got to where it is currently set-- 6:15. I'm not sure why, but he just gets it. It took a couple of weeks of him waking in the night and whining for us but going easily back to sleep when we tell him over the speaker that the red light means it's still night night time. After a few weeks of that he does it completely on his own. If he wakes up, he looks at the red light and just goes back to sleep. Most nights now he sleeps fully through the night and does not wake up until after 6. If he happens to wake up fully before it turns green, he lays down watching it until it turns green then pops up. He's sleeping so well that he's in a great mood when he wakes up. We are sleeping better than we have in a long time ourselves. The thing isn't perfect-- I find the app a little wonky thought it is reasonably easy to use. I think it's a bit difficult to change the routine or wake time while the current routine is running. When you try, it just turns the machine off. That's annoying if you are trying to make a change while he is sleeping. Some of the more advanced features like the stories and lullabies are a bit too complicated for our boy I think. We keep it simple with orange light and quiet music to wind down with books before bed, red light with the ocean sound effect for sleep (I recommend a pretty good volume) and green light to wake up (keeping the sound going so he won't be woken by the change in sound and will still sleep if his body wants to). If we start wanting to encourage him to wake up at a certain time I think I will have the sounds change to birds chirping. Long story short-- this thing changed our lives, and I just gifted one to a friend who is expecting a baby to give her the gift of sleep.