We are devoted users of our travel crib. My son slept in it from his first night at home, in the bassinet insert at the foot of our bed. (Well, ostensibly he slept, but I remember nothing about that because if he was asleep, so was I.) We hauled it from country to country, on the train and the airplane and in a luggage rack on top of our car.
When I shopped for travel crib sheets, I was disappointed with the flimsy and scratchy standard options at the baby megastore I visited on a trip to the USA. I read a bit about the sheets, how they frequently popped off the rough canvas mattress and how, with multiple and frequent trips through the laundry, their elastic soon failed to bounce back.
Fortunately, I came across Mr. Bobbles Blankets in my Baby Bargains book. Along with pillows, blankets, and burp cloths, Mr. Bobbles makes some fantastic travel crib (or, as they call it, Playard) sheets. They’re constructed like a big pillowcase with a foldover pocket on one end, so you just slip the mattress inside and slide one end into the pocket. The fabric is thick, 100% cotton flannel, in sweet prints that wash beautifully. They’ll never pop off the mattress or lose their grip, since there’s no elastic involved. Since we bought ours, they’ve added stretchy backing material as a new design feature to make the sheets fit even more snugly.
Our Mr. Bobbles sheets have traveled with us from Asia to Arizona, and seen their way through washing machines on three continents. They are almost as good as new, with no stains or evidence of the various emissions that babies’ bodies inevitably deposit on their bedclothes. In fact, they just get softer as we wash them, so they’re even better than when I bought them. And, now that my son is older, he loves to identify the different cars and trucks on one fabric design, or talk about the froggies on the other.
Mr. Bobbles Playard Sheets cost $19.95 each, with $1 discount per sheet if you buy more than one in the same fabric design. They fit most American travel cribs/playards (standard size 27″ x 39″). See the Mr. Bobbles website for details.
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What kind of travel crib do you have?
We have a Graco Pack-n-Play. It’s probably the most common American model. I bought it in Deutschland from 4mybaby.de (site is currently under construction, I guess). I wanted one with a bassinet insert so we didn’t need to buy a separate bassinet for our bedroom, and only American models seemed to have that feature.
We’ve used the sheets on smaller European travel cots, too, and they were a bit loose but we tucked them in and they worked fine.
By bassinet insert, do you mean the hanging thing that raises the baby up to a higher level, or do you mean the newborn cuddler insert? If it’s the former, we have a no name travel bed we got at BabyOne that has the higher floor option, which is available for most travel beds here in Germany. See Google.de results for Reisebett Einhang. Worked fine for us, but we don’t use it any more since Oliver sleeps with us now.
Yes, I mean the hanging thing – it suspends from the top of the bed and you put the mattress part inside it. I had a hard time finding one in Germany but apparently I wasn’t looking in the right place!