Hatch Rest Mini Review: The Sound of Comfort.

Discovering and Elevating a Hidden Gem: An Interesting Story

There is a song on Soundcloud. A random song from possibly an Indian artist in a language that neither me nor my husband understand. It’s apparently quite popular because when we discovered it, it was sitting at around a million views/listens. And then from the duration of when our first baby was two months old, till she was over a year, the count must have gone up by at least two million more – solidly thanks to us.

 
For some strange reason, it became the only song that our child could sleep too. We tried everything else; white noise, the sounds of the waves, the rain. Nothing worked. We had to play that 6-minute song for any respite and sometimes the moment it would stop, she would wake up. So, it endlessly played on repeat. 

A few weeks down the road it felt like our ears would bleed whenever it would play. I remember asking her pediatrician why she didn’t respond to any normal white noise and he asked how it was that we normally slept in the house before the baby’s arrival. I told him I was used to sleeping in absolute silence, sometimes without even the sound of a fan and my windows were also soundproof. He said that may be a reason why the child didn’t respond to a normal hum of white noise and eventually landed on some third-party tune, completely opposite to my taste, to soothe herself. 

I was recommended that the next time I plan on having a child, I better introduce a healthy white noise right from the get-go because as it is, that’s what the children are used to in utero as well. 

Learning from Experience and Embracing a Better Sleep Solution

So a few years later, when my second one was due, I knew this was a mistake I wasn’t going to repeat. I’m going to find a soothing sound and introduce it to the baby from the first night back. With my first child, I remember scouring videos on YouTube. Not that it worked, but it would be so annoying when ads would randomly start playing in it disrupting the peace. Or if the phone had to be used or someone would call. So, this time, I was certain I was looking for an independent white noise device that could be independently dedicated to soothing the baby to sleep. 

We actually ended up putting that in our baby registry and one of my seasoned mom friends, gifted me the Hatch Rest Mini White Noise, Smart Sound Machine. It felt exactly like the tool I was looking for. 

Features – Hatch Rest Mini

Simple Design and Usage:

• Hatch mini sound machine with a plastic body that weighed only 18 items, It was a lightweight product, fairly simple in design and usage. It was easy to put it anywhere close to the baby, on the nightstand or by the crib.
  
• Because it was a smart product, I could easily connect it to my phone, and operate it from anywhere in the house.
  
• It was compatible with Android and iOS, which meant my husband and I could use it since we each used different phone software. 

Variety of Sounds:

• The product came programmed with eight different soothing sounds, all of which were carefully selected by the best sleep experts across the world.
  
• Hatch Mini Rest didn’t just have the traditional sounds of waves and rain, but also of heartbeat which is the first sound I plugged in as soon as the new baby came home because the nurse told me that’s the natural sound babies are most used to in utero, also, why they liked to sleep cradled in an adult’s arms because they could potentially feel the heartbeat from the caregiver. 

Custom Timer: 

• Hatch Rest Sleep Machine product came equipped with a custom timer where I could set the time for how long a particular sound had to play and at what volume.
  
• This was a feature I had not used, but once I hired a professional babysitter for some days, she advised me that if I set a timer and put the baby in their crib, the child becomes automatically programmed to doze off within a certain time. So, with my baby, we experimented together and I noticed that the general time of dozing off was within seven minutes of the white noise being played. That way I didn’t have to keep the device playing all the time the baby was asleep. 

Trial of Hatch Premium: 

One of my most favorite features about the Hatch Sleep Sound Machine device was that it came with a free trial of the Hatch Premium which was a subscription-based model for the device where you had access to unlimited music and bedtime stories. This meant that the product became useful not just for my newborn but also for my toddler whom I used to read to sleep. On days when I was super exhausted and the baby had dozed off, I would hand over a book to the toddler and play a bedtime story on the device. This gave my older one incentive to try and independently read as well as she followed along to the audio of a bedtime story with all its sound effects and music. 

Hatch Sleep Machine – Review

Overall, the experience with the hatch sleep machine has been seamless. I just wish It came with a battery pack as well so it was easier to travel with instead of constantly having to worry about plugging it in to make it work. Perhaps that’s something the brand can look into since the size and simplicity of design make it ideal for being portable as well.