Chloe and I decided to turn to Jen after months of frequent night wakings and extreme difficulties settling. Hentley, our beautiful little 10 month old boy, had left us both broken through sleep deprivation and struggling to see how we would get through the next few days; never mind weeks or months. Sleeping soundly for all of us was so impossible.
Unfortunately, Hentley had some challenges in his first months and so we had to show patience and focus on his health first and foremost, but once we felt that was under control, we were comfortable turning our attention to trying to resolve his sleep issues.
A typical night would be a max of 3 hours sleep during the first hours before he needed to feed, and from there, he would need settling almost every hour, and sometimes even more frequently. This might need to be with a feed, other times with a dummy, and almost always needing to be picked up and cuddled. And then there was his morning chorus… loud (but happy) and wanting to start the day from 4am when he would then be up and active and ready to get rocking!!
We decided to go for the full 3 night package. As we discussed our options, we felt we couldn’t imagine anything worse than doing one night or two nights and not quite solving the issues. If the little guy did a great job and got there early, then brilliant. We might have spent a little more than needed but if a full night’s sleep was the result then it was worth it! Would rather that than be laid awake regretting we hadn’t booked more nights with Jen.
Chloe had spent a lot of time reading and prepping, so we felt Hentley was close to finding his way to sleeping soundly. When Jen arrived, it felt initially like she just made a few tweaks here and there — slight change to the evening routine, slightly longer wait before going in to settle, a new strategy for when he got very upset, a little different choices for white noise, temperature, etc etc. But what a huge difference those changes made as they accumulated, and within the first night, he was sleeping for much longer periods and she helped him through the ‘airplane’ phases so that he resettled himself.
By night 3, he slept through the night other than for the dream feed which we all agreed we needed to keep in! And the little start is still going well now 3 weeks after Jen’s visit. Last night was another first — not only was he sleeping soundly the whole night, but he didn’t cry, murmur or make even the smallest noise from start to finish.
I think Jen has not only trained him how to sleep better, but how to train himself to keep sleeping better and better!
We couldn’t recommend Jen enough! We appreciate more than most that there could be various legitimate reasons why today might not be the day you can recruit a sleep consultant. But on the very first day you can, do, and make sure Jen is top of your list!
