Phoebe was a nightmare sleeper from day 1. In the early days, she would sleep all day then have us up all night. Friends kept telling us it would get better as time went on but it just didn’t for us. We finally got her to sleep from 10pm to 1am and then we would go through a cycle of feeding or rocking her back to sleep 4-6 times throughout the rest of the night. We were exhausted and it was taking its toll on all of us. We started to panic about how we would cope when Natalie needed to go back to work and how our daughter would cope with the long days at nursery.
As part of the plan; we took away lots of unhelpful things (that we thought were helping Phoebe sleep) and introduced a few simple, but positive things. Within 3 nights she was sleeping through the night with no intervention from us and we just couldn’t believe it. Naps took a little longer to figure out but within 2 weeks she was taking 3 lovely long naps. Now 3.5 years old, she still takes a 2 hour lunchtime nap and sleeps from 7pm – 6.30am at night. Sleeping better immediately improved all of our moods and changed everything for us. Phoebe is a happy, bright little girl and we have our much needed mummy & daddy time to look forward to in the evenings!
