In my professional life as a teacher, I was always one to read the latest research and give new things a try. Now that I am a mom, this hasn’t changed. Many of the things we have tried this year have been a little unconventional, and I have had to do a whole lot of explaining to confused friends and family. Just like with anything, all babies respond differently to different things, but I thought I would share our experience with several of the “weird” things we tried out this year. I have included links to previous posts where I have written about some of these so that you can read more if you are interested.


1. Never room shared – Little Lion has slept in his own room from the day we brought him home from the hospital. We avoided the pack and play to crib transition this way, and have never regretted our decision. LL is a noisy sleeper, and our room is so close to his that we don’t even need a monitor to hear him during the night.

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2. Cloth Diapers (hereand here) – This was a tough call, but I have been really happy with our decision to cloth diaper. I know that we are contributing less waste, and we are saving money in the process. I really don’t have a single complaint about cloth diapers. We do use disposables at night and when we travel, but LL is in cloth almost all of the time.

3. Floor Bed (here and here) – Sigh. This was a major failure. Well, I shouldn’t say that… it was really great from 4-7 months. But once LL started rolling over, all bets were off. Any little thing will disrupt his sleep, and once he discovered that he could get out of bed at 3am and start playing his piano (yes, that happened) we had to call it quits. I hung in there for almost 3 months, using the pack and play and floor bed intermittently, but we finally gave up the fight and got the crib back out of the attic. In a couple months we plan to try again, once he is consistently sleeping through the night.

4. Baby Led Weaning (skipping purees) – Of all of our unconventional methods, this one is by far the one that I have seen the most benefit from. At 4 months we tried some smashed avocado and rice cereal a couple times (since everyone insisted that as soon as I tried solids he would start sleeping through the night. HA.), but the more I read about starting solids so early the more I wanted to wait. At 6 months we began offering large chunks of food and he immediately tried everything we put in front of him. Fast forward to 10 months, and he is still yet to meet a food he won’t try. He is able to self feed with no trouble, even with a spoon (as long as we load it for him) and we eat three meals together every day. I offer a variety of foods we are eating, he decides how much he eats, end of story. No stressing about counting jars of food. No making special foods for him. He eats what we eat (with some exceptions of course). It has been marvelous. I wouldn’t change a thing.

5. Amber Teething Necklace – I have to be honest…I have no idea if this works. But LL doesn’t drool, has minimal pain when teething (we do still have to give Motrin on the really rough nights) and wakes up in the night a whole lot more when he isn’t wearing it. It may be just a placebo, and it is sort of annoying to have to explain every.single.day. to a complete stranger who asks about my son’s “pretty necklace,” but on the off chance it is preventing him from feeling pain, I would do it again in a heartbeat.

6. Travel – This has been huge for us this year. We started traveling with Little Lion when he was 8 weeks old, and he has been to more places as a 10 month old than I had been by the time I was an adult. You can read about some of our adventures here, here, and here. We plan to top off our year by leaving on his first birthday for an airplane trip to Florida. Travel is something that has always been important to Mr. Lion and me, and I am so thankful that we started early with him. We started before we knew any better, and that helped us to not be afraid of venturing out. I love that we can still be spontaneous, and that LL will grow up exploring new places with us. It has been good for us as parents, and LL has gotten to see a lot of family that he would have never met if we had been confined to our hometown.

Despite the constant need to explain myself, I am really happy to have tried out some less common methods during Little Lion’s first year.

Have you ever tried something “outside the box” when it comes to parenting?