The east window in our nursery takes sun on the crib wall by seven in the morning. I learned that in January, standing in an empty room at dawn with a paint roller in my hand, three weeks before Milo was born. The Tommee Tippee blackout blind went up on the glass a week before he arrived. Naps in that room started at about two weeks old, and they started dark.
I am not going to sell you a sleep solution. I am one mother in Dayton with one baby and one badly placed window, and I can only tell you what this thing did in my house. It is the plainest item in our nursery and the one I would replace first if it broke. Here are ten reasons it has stayed on that window for about nine months, in the order I would explain them to a friend who texted me at 5:40 in the morning.
The sun hitting the crib wall at 7 a.m. is a fixable problem
One blind, wet suction cups, a few minutes of pressing. Our east window has been dark for nine months because of it.
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From about seven in the morning that window throws light straight onto the crib wall, and a nap at ten in the morning looked like a nap at noon. For two weeks I blamed the swaddle. It was the light. I will not tell you a dark room made Milo sleep longer, because I do not know that and neither does anyone else. I know the room stopped looking like daytime, and settling him down got less like a negotiation.
It adjusts to fit a window up to 51 by 78 inches
The fastenings let you size it to the glass, up to a maximum of about 51 by 78 inches. Our window is smaller than that, so I had slack to work with, and slack is the difference between a tight fit and a stripe of light down one side. Measure your window before you order. If yours is wider than the maximum, this is not the blind for that room, and no amount of clever pressing will change it.
The suction cups run the whole way around, not just the corners
This is the detail that decided it for me. A blind held at four points bows in the middle and leaks down the edges. The Tommee Tippee blind is attached with suction cups fitted all the way around the border, so it sits flat against the glass instead of hanging off it. One corner of ours lets go now and then when the glass is cold. I wet it, press it, and it holds again for weeks.
It goes up with no drill, no rod and no holes in the wall
It mounts inside the window, on the glass. No anchors in plaster that crumbles if you look at it wrong, no bracket, no trip to the hardware store. I put ours up hugely pregnant, standing on the radiator cover, and the slow part was getting it straight, not getting it attached. If you are renting, or if you have an old house like ours where every hole is a commitment, that matters more than it sounds.
It folds down to 11 by 9 by 2.4 inches in a bag
The travel bag comes with it, and the whole thing packs down to about 11 by 9 by 2.4 inches. That is smaller than a folded sweatshirt and it goes in the diaper bag without a fight. I have a tote bag of baby gear that lives by the door and this slides in flat against the side. Nothing about it is bulky, which is not something I can say for the sound machine on our dresser.
It goes in the washing machine
Ours has been washed once, in June, on a normal cycle, and it came out the same size and the same shape. It is polyester and the care instructions say machine wash, so I did not handle it like glass. I hung it over the shower rail to dry, because the instructions cover washing and I did not want to guess about anything hotter. It went back on the window the next afternoon.
It travels to a guest room with a streetlight outside
The only trip we have taken was one July weekend at my mother's house in Erie, Pennsylvania. Her guest room has a thin curtain and a streetlight doing its thing all night. I wetted the suction cups, pressed it around the frame, and had that room properly dark in a few minutes. It came down the morning we left in about the same time. The monitor went with us. The sound machine stayed home, because it needs an outlet.
It makes the room look the same at 2 p.m. as it does at 8 p.m.
The blind is not a sleep trainer and I am not going to pretend it is. What it does is make the nursery look identical whether we are starting a nap or starting the night. Same dim room, same crib, same everything. I think that sameness does something for him. I cannot prove it, and Dr. Bell would tell you to follow your baby rather than a theory. I can tell you I stopped having to argue with the daylight.
It does the job I was about to buy blackout curtains for
I had a curtain rod and heavy panels picked out and never bought them, so I will not claim I tested them. What I know is that curtains hang off a rod and light comes in at the top and down both sides unless you box the whole thing in, and a curtain rod does not travel to Erie. The blind presses flat against the glass on all four sides. Curtains look nicer from the street. The blind is plain from the street. I made my peace with that in about a week.
Nine months up and it has never needed replacing
Of everything in that single January order, this is the thing I would buy again first, ahead of the monitor and well ahead of the sound machine. It went up the week before Milo was born and it has come down exactly twice: once for a wash and once for that weekend in Erie. No replacement, no repair, no second purchase. That is a very short list of baby gear I can say that about.
What I'd Skip
Two things I would skip. I would skip buying a second blind before you have measured anything, because the adjustable fastenings cover a wide range and one large Tommee Tippee blind handled our small window perfectly well. And I would skip hanging heavy curtains on top of it. We still have the thin white curtains that came with the house, and they sit in front of the blind doing nothing at all. You do not need both. What I would not skip is a wash before the first hanging, if your window glass is as grimy as ours was when we moved in.
The blind went up with wet suction cups and a few minutes of pressing. No drill, no rod, no anchors in plaster that crumbles if you look at it wrong.
The nap is the part of the day you can actually set up
You cannot control when your baby wakes up. You can control whether the room still looks like noon at naptime. That took one blind and one afternoon for us.
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