Baby Tent or Dog Tent

Joovy Gloo Portable Baby Travel Tent

TLDR: The Gloo tent is easy to travel with, but I feel guilty having baby girl sleeping in there. It wasn’t her most comfortable sleep and we’re unsure how to clean the bottom of it. A pacifier solved it all and much easier to travel with compared to a pack n play.

Let’s start with some context here. The photo of what I’m talking about is below.

The wife purchased a car seat bag which is SUPER useful. But I only have so many shoulders to carry things on. Car seat bag, pack n play, and my backpack…no. So the wife consulted her Facebook groups and stumbled upon this travel bed for dog..sorry, babies.

Now we place this, folded up, inside the car seat bag, along with a few more diapers and wipes. Greatly simplified the travel process for us but once we got to Gulfport, Florida… a different story.

Let me explain, gees!

Yes, Florida was amazing, but at night baby girl would wake up every few hours and we’d give her the pacifier for her to stop.

The tent is large and we used it for night and day naps. Great air circulation, and most importantly it folds up nicely so we can store it in the car seat bag with out taking up more space out of my suitcase… don’t ask!

The mattress pad goes in a sleeve under the tent. So imagine baby girl yacks inside the tent, removing the mattress won’t help. You have to clean the inside of the tent. Will get into that a little later. The mattress pad is also inflated/deflated like a vacuum sealed meat bag. I understand the quantum mechanics of it but I don’t want to bore you with it…

Back to the inside of the tent.

This means that the baby is sleeping night after night inside the tent where you can’t remove a sheet to clean. So we use a cleaning solution, sound impressive doesn’t it, but really its soap and water. Let it air dry and we are back in business.

After the first night, I’m thinking it is just a new environment that is disrupting her sleep, but after night two I’m jumping to the conclusion that it’s the mattress pad. Not the traveling throwing off her sleep schedule, or a different climate, or even the flickering light outside her “room”. Has to be the mattress pad! The nerve of Joovo to put this product out to market.

Being the “don’t complain until you slept an hour in my shoes/bed” kind of person, I laid on the mattress pad myself. Well part of me fit. Wasn’t as bad as I thought! BUT I continued to tell my wife that was the issue because if I didn’t she’d ask me what happened with the mattress pad. And of course HER EGO won’t let me live it down. Not MY EGO unwilling to be wrong, right?! You know what I mean.

ANYWAYS! To me, it looks like a dog travel tent, BUT it is super functional, and slightly comfortable.

If you have a lot of bags that you travel with, I’d suggest grabbing this or something similar. Just cover the tent completely so no light gets in a night, and have your phone flash light ready to find the pacifier at night while trying not to wake up the wife or the baby.