At 6 months old, baby Isla was waking 10-15 times at night and her mum, Cara was feeding to sleep for all naps, at bedtime and overnight. Cara was absolutely exhausted and having to drag herself out of bed to tend to Isla every time she woke and was at a loss as to how to get her little angel to sleep for longer stretches at night. Cara had tried giving Isla some formula to see if this would help but it made no difference. Cara also had some anxiety around something being wrong with Isla as she was waking so frequently.
Cara decided to seek help from Emma, the owner of Perfect Little Sleepers. Emma recommended making some tweaks to Isla’s sleep environment and establishing a better routine by changing feed times, encouraging Isla to sleep for longer in the middle of the day, reducing the length of her 3rd nap and bringing bedtime forward so Isla wasn’t going to bed overtired.
Emma could see that Isla had a strong feed to sleep association and therefore wasn’t able to settle to sleep and back to sleep without a feed. Emma worked on a plan with Cara to teach Isla to self-settle and resettle using an out of the room sleep training technique which Cara was comfortable with. Cara did brilliantly and this technique worked wonders for Isla and self-settled from the first night. It didn’t take long before Isla was consolidating her night-time sleep and within a few nights of working together, we were down to just 2 feeds at night.
There were some challenges along the way as despite Cara’s best efforts to get Isla to sleep for longer for her lunch nap it took a while for this nap to fall in to place which is completely normal. Emma recommended making changes to her diet at the lunch solids to help sustain Isla through the lunch nap and encouraged Cara to keep persevering with the sleep training. Within a few weeks Isla was sleeping really well for her naps during the day.
Fast forward 2 months and Isla is now sleeping through the night. Cara can’t believe how much of a difference this has made to her life, she no longer feels exhausted during the day and no longer worries Isla will wake up unexpectedly. Cara is also able to enjoy some quality time with her partner in the evenings while Isla sleeps peacefully.
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Is your baby waking frequently overnight? Please don’t hesitate to contact me or book a 1:1 sleep package, together we can help your little one to sleep better so that you all get a great night's sleep every night!