There
are lots of specialty beds that are now on the market for children with
special needs. Many ranging from high-end, medical grade, residential safety beds that are aesthetically pleasing, to special needs travel
beds that offer safe and secure places to sleep while away from home.
Special needs beds are one of the greatest investments of equipment that
a family with a child with special needs will need for the care and
safety of their child. And often times a lot of careful
consideration must be made in choosing the right bed product.
A new travel bed design hit my field of vision this year called Safe
Place Bedding. In pictures I was instantly intrigued with it's simple,
yet clever design. After hunting down a handful of videos about the
product I was even further sold on the idea of not only
how safe this product was, but how fast and convenient it was to travel
with. Our family has been blessed with invitations to travel worldwide
and guest speak about our lives, share our experiences, and participate
in product launches but one of the greatest
worries we face every time we travel is how we're going to keep Noah
safe in a hotel bed when he's away from his Sleep Safe Bed at home.
We've been fortunate that every time we've traveled for special needs
engagements our hosts have taken care of that
worry for us, but that wouldn't be the case if we were to travel on our
own without help and coordination of the sleeping arrangements for
Noah. And it's always hard to be extended an invitation and then have
to gently say you have a list of things that you
need help with in order to travel.
Last year our furnace went out during a snow storm. Noah can't
regulate body temperature and bundling him up in blankets wasn't an
option because he's a suffocation risk with pillows and blankets. Our
only option was to retreat to a hotel and ride out
this snowstorm until we could have the furnace replaced. We sought out
the nearest hotel we could knowing we didn't have anything that we
could take along with us in the moment to keep Noah safe in a hotel
bed. While some hotels have bed rails they can offer,
Noah needs a bed that is fully enclosed or he can get trapped. We
always try to push a bed up against a wall and hope that we have a room
with a bed that has a headboard so we're only trying to enclose two
remaining sides, but that isn't always easy and
in some respects a bit nerve wracking when we have to use pillow to
fill in the gaps of the sides - knowing that pillows could pose a risk
to Noah should he knock them out of place and onto his head. What is an
easy overnight stay at a hotel for a typical
family starts out immediately stressful for a special needs family like
ourselves just because the bed is the first problem we have to
troubleshoot.
When I seen a picture of the Safe Place Bedding - I just knew
instantly that it was rather perfect. Some other competing models I
always worried about as they never looked particularly convenient to me,
and for some reason I was always worried about metal
framing around my child while he was sleeping should it collapse for
any reason. And not to mention price points on bedding also plays a
significant factor of consideration. The Safe Place Bedding is priced
modestly at $462.95 - and it comes with everything
you need right down to this amazing travel bag that it is stored in.
And this isn't just like a cheap storage bag - this bag feels and looks
like luxury luggage.
The Safe Place Bedding also holds true to all of it's claims. It
absolutely goes together in under five minutes from start to finish and
is so easy that you could skip reading any instructions and know what to
do (which is great when you're a special
needs parent who doesn't have a lot of time to fiddle with a device to
get it going). Likewise it comes down just as easy and fast. I like
that it encases the child entirely, so it works for children who cannot
sit up and roll in bed, from those who could
escape from a sleeping situation and need a bed to enclose them during
the night. The bed also can be accessed and opened from either side. It covers all the bases.
And perhaps the detail that I love the most is that it is designed by
special needs parents who were aiming to help their own son, and wound
up creating something that helps the special needs community. You will
find the very best products on the market
are designed by parents who know what their child's needs are and can
translate that idea into a workable concept and design. The passion
that the founders
Jon and Amara Smith have for this product is evident in
investment of their time and commitment to providing a safe yet
universally needed product to meet the travel needs of special needs
families.
We put up Noah's Safe Place Bedding this weekend for the first time
for it's trial run. Noah enjoyed it so much he didn't want to come
out. It became like a safe cave for him. He wanted to lay on the floor
and watch TV in it, you could tell he felt safe
and secure in it. Never once did it trigger a sensory issue for him,
he had good use of space to move around and still remained secure in
it. It was a breeze to put up and take down, and something that would
even be easy for Grandma to set up if Noah needed
a sleep over. And that's huge. He now has a safe place he can sleep
in besides being home bound. I feel this huge sense of relief, as when
you have a child like Noah that requires a specialized hospital bed or
safety bed of some kind to sleep in, and you
worry should you ever have to leave home for any reason, a vacation, an
overnight stay at friends or family, or to retreat to a hotel during an
emergency situation that you have a bed you can take with you. It is
something every special needs parent needs who has a child that requires
specialized bedding and will inevitably use at some point in time. And
I love that the Smith's have aimed to keep their product within
financial reach for families and offer resources of funding suggestions
on their website.
Noah had a really good time in it. And I can tell that he would be
not only safe but very comfortable in it if we left home and it was
placed on top of a hotel bed. It hits all my check marks of a product
that easy to fall in love with. Perhaps the only
thing I would have wanted on my wish list would be a waterproof
removable and washable pad for the bottom, but is something that I
easily could find at a retail store to place at the bottom myself - but I
always love it when additional accessories roll out
later on too.
Definitely put this on your list of things you need for your child
with special needs. Even if you don't anticipate traveling you never
know when you'd need something like this in case of a rainy day or an
emergency. To learn more about how you can order
yours click here.
Love,
Noah's Miracle by Stacy Warden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.