The Tommee Tippee Blackout Blind Story: Naps in a Bright Room

The nursery window faces east. I did not think about that when we bought the house. I thought about the floors and the closet space and whether the stairs would be a problem with a laundry basket. Then Milo was born on February 10, and by that spring the sun was hitting the wall beside his crib by 7 in the morning, and nap number one was twenty-two minutes long. I know it was twenty-two because I was writing naps down in a notebook like a person losing an argument.

Before the blind, I tried the usual things. A towel draped over the curtain rod, which came down on day two. A dark sheet tucked behind the frame, which worked for about an hour and looked like a laundry accident from the sidewalk. The thin white curtains that came with the house, which are still up over the blind and which let through roughly all of the light. None of that was a plan. It was a series of small defeats, every one of them happening before 7 a.m.

I ordered the Tommee Tippee blackout blind in January, about three weeks before my due date, in one Amazon order with everything else. It was the last thing on the list. Monitor first, then the audio monitor, then the sound machine, then the swaddle, then the blind. It went up on the nursery window the week before Milo was born and it has stayed up all year. It has come down twice. Once in June for a machine wash, and once in July for a weekend at my mother's house in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Here is how it works, because the mechanism matters more than the marketing. It is blackout polyester with suction cups fitted all the way around the edge. You wet them, press them to the glass, and the fastenings let you adjust the size to fit a window up to about 51 by 78 inches. Ours is close to that. It takes a few minutes to fit properly, and it folds down into a travel bag roughly the size of a folded sweatshirt. That is the whole product. No cord, no bracket, no drilling.

The east sun put a stripe across the crib wall by 7 a.m. The blind took it away in about four minutes. That is the entire story, and it is the reason it is still up.

Fitting it is not nothing. The suction cups want to be wetted and pressed hard, one at a time, and in winter the glass gets cold and one corner lets go every few weeks. I press it back. That is a thirty second job and I have never once been annoyed enough to pull the whole thing down. The blind looks plain from the street, which I do not care about and Nate cares about slightly. And the room is dark all day now, genuinely dark, so Milo plays downstairs and the nursery is for sleeping. That was an adjustment for me more than for him.

What changed was not dramatic. Nap one went from twenty-two minutes to something closer to an hour, and the early waking got later as the room got darker. He still wakes some nights. He woke twice last week. I am not going to sit here and tell you a window covering fixed our sleep, because it did not and it cannot. What it did was remove one thing I could not control, which was the sun coming through that glass. That is worth a lot when you are nine months in and counting naps in a notebook.

The July weekend at my mother's house is the only trip we have taken, and it is the only reason the travel bag has ever been used. The blind and the video monitor went. The audio monitor and the sound machine stayed home, because one wants an outlet and one just wants a shelf. In Erie the guest room window faces west and the blind went up on wet suction cups in about five minutes, and Milo napped in a strange room in the afternoon, which he had never done before. I am not going to claim that proves anything. It was one weekend. But I packed it again for the next trip without thinking about it.

The honest list, since every review should have one. The suction cups need water and pressure, and on cold glass a corner does let go. Fitting takes a few minutes, which is a few minutes longer than a curtain takes. It is machine washable but it has to come down to be washed, so June was an afternoon of work with a step stool. And it is not attractive. It is a dark rectangle on the window. Nobody has ever complimented it.

It does not make a baby sleep through the night. It does not replace safe sleep. Milo goes down on his back on a firm flat mattress with nothing loose in the crib, and the blind is a window covering, not a medical device and not a sleep trainer. If your baby is waking at night and you are worried about it, that is a call to your pediatrician, not a purchase. Dr. Bell has said some version of that to me more than once and she is right every time.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were across from me with a mug and a tired face, I would ask one question first: does the room get light when you need it dark? Because that is the only thing this fixes. If your nursery is bright at 6:40 in the morning and your baby is waking up because of it, the Tommee Tippee blind is the least complicated fix I found. It goes up on wet suction cups, it adjusts to the glass, it folds into a bag, and it comes off for the wash. If your problem is something else, a bedtime that takes an hour, a baby who wakes every two hours, a room that is already dark, then a blind is not your answer and I would rather you keep the money. Nobody hands you a medal for buying the thing I bought.

One more thing, and I mean it kindly. Do not buy this expecting a different baby. Buy it because the sun is not going to move, and you can put something over the glass. That is the whole pitch, and it happens to be true.