- All parents know that sleep is an enormous issue. And lovies or blankys, you might here them called transitional objects, they fall into the category of what we call helpful sleep associations. Helpful meaning that your baby can get to it herself in the middle of the night she doesn't need you to come in and do something for her. Babies are very tactile. And even when they are very young. You start to see them starting to finger things. You start to see them moving their fingers. You start to see them maybe when you are holding them they are touching your shirt or your skin. You start to see them touching their own hands. So if your baby is swaddled you'll have to wait til they're no longer swaddled. And if they are not swaddled then you can start using a lovie at any time. I like to describe how to use the lovie in two stages. The first stage is creating the attachment of your baby to the lovie. And the way you do that is by keeping the lovie around your baby all the time. When you are holding them, when you are feeding them, when they are in their car seat, wherever they are, you put it where they can touch it. What you are looking for is seeing them starting to finger it. Babies will often rub it all over their face. The moms and dads know when the baby starts to like their lovie. It's clear to them. Once you know that, once you see that your baby loves their lovie, and loves to finger it and rub it, what stage two is, is put the lovie in their bed and leave it there. What this does is it, it maintains its potency. Now when they get into bed at night, they are so happy to see their lovie. And they just roll over and grab it and it becomes an incredibly helpful sleep aid for them. So an important thing to know about lovies is the size, they are small. They are usually made of a light or fairly breathable fabric usually no more than about 12" on either side. This is an example of a gauzy lovie with a satiny ribbon. Babies tend to really love these little headed lovies like this little elephant or this little monkey. For some reason these tend to be the ones that most of the babies attach to. But you can really, you can really use anything that they start to finger. When my son was a baby his lovie became his cotton burb cloth. And um I didn't really know what was happening but he showed me that he became attached to that that little cloth diaper.