Day in the Life: Baby Sleep with a Doc Band

You.

Time for another day in the life. We get to hang out with Janine today and her nine month old little guy named Oliver. Now what you'll quickly notice about Oliver is he's wearing a dock band, a helmet, he had a flat spot on his head. And so not only get to see a normal day in the life with a nine month old, but mom's going to talk to us a lot about this helmet. So I think it'll be a great one for you to watch. One thing I do want you to know is back in the 90s, the back to sleep campaign started where in order to reduce sids, it's been recommended that babies sleep on their backs. And since then we've seen an increase of flat spots and babies who have needed helmets, but we've seen a decrease of sids. Okay? So I just want to remind you that flat heads are fixable, it's reversible, and SIDS is not. So is always, always, always best when it comes to sleep. I just want to remind you of that. And I think after hanging out with Oliver today, you're going to find he does great with that helmet. It doesn't bother him. So I hope that gives you peace of mind. Let's hang out with Janine and Oliver and see how their day goes.

Good morning. Hi. Sweet. All right, we're gonna take him back to my room, we're gonna eat, and we're gonna have some snuggles with dad. Okay? So as you can see, Oliver wears a dock band. He has to wear it for 23 hours a day, but we have to take it off a few times a day to wipe it down in case there's sweat on it. And since he's just worn it for 13 hours straight over bedtime, we're gonna take it off, wipe it down, and then he's gon for just a few minutes to kind of let his head breathe. He's had it off for a few minutes. We've diaper changed and changed his clothes and everything. So now we're just gonna put it back on him. This is our favorite playtime activity, chasing the cat. Cats. It's been almost two hours since he ate this morning. This morning feed. So going to have some breakfast. And he's already kind of starting to show some sleepy signs. So after breakfast we're going to go ahead and try and kudam burnout. All right. He's asleep. All right. He just woke up. It's been about an hour. Usually he would take an hour and a half nap. So I'm gonna give him a few minutes and see if he won't put himself back to sleep. So it looks like little one didn't take a full nap because we had a poopy diaper. Yeah. So we'll go ahead and change that and. Did you get the book? Good job. Twice a week, I take Oliver to my chiropractor who does therapy on his head. And we've been doing that for a few months now. And I can. I'll talk more on that later, but it's about a 20 to 30 minute drive there. And so I've got. He's got toys back there, and I've got some toys up here that I can give him if he gets fussy. But normally he's really. Yeah. Hi. Hello. Hello.

Oh, that feels nice, doesn't it?

Yeah.

You can see Janine took Oliver to the chiropractor. And I want you to know that lots of families have great success with chiropractic care with babies. The other thing I want to tell you is I have a lot of physical therapists who follow this account. And many, many, many will say, talk to your doctor. If you start noticing a flat spot, physical therapy can help. So you do what's best for you and your family. You talk to your doctor. Lots of this can be used in conjunction one another. But I just wanted to add in a little piece here that physical therapy can also be very helpful if you and your family and your doctor are open to it.

All right. Just got back from our appointment. He was seeming pretty tired when we were leaving our appointment. I think he may have gotten a little burst of energy. Yeah. So we're gonna have a snack and kind of see how he's feeling. He was not flashing me any sleepy cues. So since it had been about 2 hours and 40 minutes since he ate last, I decided to go ahead and feed him a little bit. And he's getting a little fussy, so I think we're gonna go ahead and try and put him down for his nap. So we're gonna read a book, then we're gonna put him in his sleep sack and sing a couple songs and. And he's gonna go on the crib. So I wanted to take a minute and talk about his stock band. First of all, some things that we noticed. Well, when he was born, he was born with a cone head. And so from that point on, having him sleep on his back and everything, that just kind of made for a flat head in the back. He never really turned his head from side to side when he was sleeping. So that's, that's why he had the flatness. That's brachiocephaly instead of plagiocephaly, which can be like in other. So we always knew it was there. And the doctor at first couple of weeks said, just tell me time, we'll see, you know, it'll work itself out. And at two months it had not very much so. And so at two months she suggested we go to get him a helmet. And we thought we were very fearful of it. And so we decided to. Two and a half months we started doing sacral occipital therapy as well as doing some exercises at home with him. And so for about four months we were doing therapy twice a week and his head was rounding out pretty well. But at about six and a half months, it was still pretty flat in the back. And so we decided that we needed to go ahead and get him in the dock band about a week to get him used to it and everything. But after about a week, we've had it on 23 hours a day, every day, and he's been doing great with it. We did have a lot of fears going into it. We were worried about just him being uncomfortable. We were worried about his sleep, we were worried about the fact that he is such an energetic and just little ball of energy all the time. But pretty much all of our fears were put to rest. I mean, he's been a great sleeper before having it, and because of that great sleep foundation, it really didn't affect him at all. His sleeping remains good, he sleeps at night. And his developmentally, he's learned to crawl properly and pull up while wearing the dock band. And he's still just the happiest baby. He hardly notices it. We have had a lot of guilt. You know, why didn't we start this sooner? Why didn't we do more tummy time? But you don't know what you don't know. And we didn't know that we should be doing more, that we should be moving his head from side to side. And that guilt is only made worse by not knowing anybody that had to go through this, not seeing anybody else's kids who had to have this, have the dog band. But almost 100% of the time I take him on errands. I have at least one person come up to me and say, my kid had to have that. My grandkid or I know somebody. And it's never coming from a place of judgment or shame. It's just, hey, you know we did that too. And it bad. And anybody who doesn't know about why, what it is or why we have it, you know, I explain to them and nobody's ever judgmental, like, why didn't you fix that? Or one thing I was kind of worried about, which I don't know why, but I was worried about our routine changing. You know, we've gotten in such a groove of what we do that I was worried this is going to ruin everything. But honestly, our routine hasn't changed at all. Our nap time routines are still the same and bedtime is the same, except for he did. Now he takes a bath every night except for every other instead of every other night. And that's really about it. The process is still the same. And everything, I mean, he does everything in the helmet, so nothing's changed there. One thing I will say is that us going to the chiropractor has been really great. The chiropractor can help with torticollis if the baby's neck is tight on one side. And obviously our chiropractor is the one who does his therapy every week. And so that is something obviously I'm not a doctor, I can't suggest, I can't give any medical advice. But I will say that chiropractors can be good for children and babies. And I've seen babies as young as one week old going and getting a chiropractor adjustment. And that can help if you're worried about torticollis and maybe your baby developing a flat spot on one side or the other. Oliver had such a good nap, I had to wake him up because it had been two hours and he was a little bit grumpy because he had to be woken up. But we are doing better now. I had a diaper change, took the helmet off. So normally Oliver takes two hour and a half naps. But since his first nap today was only an hour, he kind of made up for it in his second nap by taking a two hour nap. Hey, it's 5:30, a little after, and we're going to take off his helmet so that he has an hour without it. Put it back on just before bedtime in about an hour. All right, I'm cleaning his helmet with rubbing alcohol. I'm just going to rub it all over and then I'm going to set it out to dry and he'll get it back on right before we start our bedtime routine. And while daddy plays with Oliver, I am going to make dinner for all of us because we like to eat dinner all together. So I'm gonna make it so that we're gonna start eating dinner about 6 o'. Clock. Let's go. And he knows what we're about. All right. Well, daddy gives him a bath. I'm going to get all this stuff together. Sleep sleeper and diaper and lotions and all that kind of stuff for after he gets out of the bath. We trade off doing the bath. And he get a full bath every night. Sometimes it's just his head. Okay, we're a few minutes behind tonight, just maybe five minutes. But we had to give him a few minutes to let his hair dry before we put the helmet back on. And so now we're gonna. Just gonna eat the nurse and then we'll read him a book, sing him some songs, and then go on to. All right, he's asleep. Took him about eight minutes to fall asleep after I put him in the crib. He only cried out a little bit in the middle, but for the most part he was just calm and moving around. Now we're just gonna chill out and watch some TV and hang up.