My Favorite is a deep-dive into the absolute best versions of things you use every day, from headphones to keychains to doggy poop bags
New parents will be inundated by clever inventions, but before you go filling up your baby registry with silicone bibs and ingenious bottle drying racks, I want to share with you perhaps the most impactful purchase we’ve made as parents – a purchase that has fundamentally changed the way both we as parents, and our child, interact with the day, and with each other.
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The Kid Doesn’t Sleep
But first, a bit of context. Our daughter has never been good with sleep. At 8 months old she slept through the night the first time – a feat which took another 4 months to become a fairly regular occurrence. As a toddler, her naps have remained unreliable, no matter how exhausted she may be. The fact is, the kid just doesn’t love to sleep (or at least, nothing close to as much as her parents do), and her at-dawn wakeups were becoming a problem.
So, what was this miracle solution?
The Mella: The Perfect Alarm Clock for Kids
This little smiling sphere was designed to help both your kid – and yourselves – get more sleep. How?
It packs an alarm clock, a sleep timer, a nightlight and a sound machine into one compact package. The Mella uses the clock’s facial expressions and the changing ring light to allow toddlers to understand what time it is. Set the ring light to your kid’s favorite color, and it’s a world-class nightlight. But come 30 minutes before wakeup, that color shifts to yellow. And once it’s time to wake up? It changes to green.
Features I Fell For
Here are a few more things to love about The Mella:
- Facial expressions that change with the time of day (sleeping, waking, it even blinks every minute!)
- 3 different sleep sounds
- 5 different nightlight colors
- Incredibly easy to set up
- Cute rubber foot-balls
A Sleep Solution That Just Works.
The thing’s like a clever traffic light for your kiddo’s sleep. And the best part? It works. Most young children thrive on structure and predictability, and the Mella provides just that. Our daughter will wait patiently, every morning, until her Mella turns green, after which she knows it’s time to get started. Meanwhile, my wife and I are happily snoozing, or reading, or doing whatever it is we feel like doing in those precious 20-30 minutes we get between our own wake-up, and hers.
