Our Battle with Sleep

I suppose this post is a super long time coming but recently I've been asked a lot of questions about what's going on with the peanuts sleep over the past two years. So I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to do a little review and recap of everything we've gone through with our battle with sleep.

 For starters I should mention that when C was a baby she battled really harsh silent reflux. I believe this and starting solids a little too early had a huge effect on her sleep. For those of you who don't know silent reflux is when infants or children do not show the outward symptoms of reflux, thus making it harder to diagnose. So once we finally understood what the problem was we thought for sure we would be able to handle it turns out her sleep only got worse.

 My peanut as you want to come to know her, has always been tiny and in the lower percentile for weight so when I came to nursing I offered it whenever she wanted. She used comfort nursing as a way to get through the pain of the silent reflux so I was constantly nursing her from the time she was about four months until she was about 11 months.  Because of this we were up all night with constant wakings, and constant mommy cuddles. I was doing anything I could to ease her pain and she was on medicine but unfortunately it wasn't working as much as we would've hoped. When I say we were up all night I'm not exaggerating at the worst of it we were up every 20 to 90 minutes it was horrible. I was groggy, in complete brain fog, I had no idea what day it was, I was constantly forgetting stuff, I was moody and unable to loose weight, It was miserable.

 All I wanted was for our little girl to get a good nights rest and I didn't know what I was doing wrong. For whatever reason my husband and I resisted hiring Heather Irvine from Good Nite Baby probably due to the cost but in the long run the cost is worth our sanity way more than anything else. Once we hired Heather she had me do logs for over 48 hours of everything from when Charlotte went down, when she woke up, anything she was eating literally a daily log of minute by minute life. After that I chatted with Heather and we developed a sleep plan. The first thing we needed to do was wean her from the nursing she was well over the required weight and definitely well over the required age to start sleep coaching. So after about a week and a half of weaning her off nursing and we had to try and get to go into her own room. Unfortunately this ended up happening right on her first birthday and we had a ton of company coming into town. So we just decided to wait till after the company left and we got home from a small trip.  Once we transitioned her into a room which ended up falling on Valentine's Day, it was a really hard few nights of getting her to stay in her crib and resisting bring her into our room but after that it was smooth sailing. The whole process itself took almost a month of working with Heather but keep in mind we traveled during that time and we had a lot of things to wean C from. Like putting her own paci in her mouth, night feeds and not needing to be onto of mommy to sleep.

Unfortunately we  recently went though another mostly regression right before her second birthday but without hesitation after four nights of no sleep we called Heather yet again! She gave us another wonderful set of fabulous tips and helped us through.
Heather is been a pure joy to work with she really knows her stuff and has a very gentle and mild approach to helping these babies get a good nights rest. I honestly can't recommend her enough and I'm so grateful I found her. We have every intention of using her if baby girl chooses not to sleep like her big sister although I will say I will not wait as long this time.
XOXO