Jackson’s stars

A month or so ago, Jackson started having some night-time fears – the shadows were scaring him at bedtime, and even though he has always had a soft nightlight, it wasn’t enough for him anymore.  It created a lot of shadows in his room, and they were always “scary shadows” in his opinion.

My first attempt at helping to calm him was to leave his lamp on, with a timer.  Unfortunately, the lamp was too bright, and he wasn’t falling asleep easily.  He was still awake at my bedtime!

My next trial method was to give him a flashlight to hold on to.  He liked being in control of the light, and it wasn’t as bright as the lamp.  But he still stayed up later than he should with the distraction of the flashlight.

So I finally decided to buy the Cloud B Twilight Constellation Night Light and give it a shot.  I had seen this online or a in a magazine a long time ago, and it had been on Jackson’s wish list for some time, but I’d never thought of buying it until now.  Many of the reviews referenced that it worked great for children with fears of the dark at bedtime.

It is amazing!  The light it emits is a very dim light, and yet it covers the entire room with small/dim stars, so shadows are essentially banished (and even if there are some remaining, the children are probably just distracted by the cool stars everywhere!).  The room has to be really dark for the stars to show up decently, so now, he actually asks to turn off his light (and turn on the turtle) every night at bedtime.  It also has a 45 minute timer, so it turns off automatically (which has scared him a couple of times when he happened to stay up past the timer, but I’m trying to teach him that he can turn it back on himself).  Another cool feature is that the child can choose the color of the stars – either green, blue, or amber.  Jackson’s current favorite are the blue stars.  Another bonus?  It’s easily portable, so we can travel with it!  He did fine with it on our recent trip to Atlanta when we stayed with friends.

One of his favorite things to do is “find the mooon.”  There are actual constellation arrangements that are projected onto the ceiling/walls (it comes with a booklet illustrating the examples) and a crescent moon.  Jackson loves when the moon is above his bed.

It was difficult to get a decent picture, because the room is really dark, but this is the best I got (the amazon site has some user pics too):

Here are some shots of J reading the booklet on the turtle and the constellations.  It also has a cute story of how the turtle came to know so much about the stars :)

This is a super cool night light, and it has helped tremendously with bedtime :)  We love it!