marietta's sleep story
HI! I am Marietta and I am the founder and owner of Little Dreamers. Little Dreamers has my heart and my soul! I strive to provide quality services to you each and every day. Below is my story of how sleep became my passion. I've lived through it and I want to help you get to the other side!
My oldest was a great sleeper. He gave us the precious gift of seven hours of sleep the first week home from the hospital. I did not know how great I had it. We got into a routine and he was waking twice a night at 4 months. He was following my sleep book like a pro. Then at 4.5 months he developed some eczema, and by 5 months it was full blown and affecting his sleep terribly. It took us four long months to get his condition under control. Once he was feeling better, he started sleeping much better. I used a few recommendations from Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child, but otherwise, he just figured it out on his own. Of course, as a first time mom, I attributed his great sleeping to the techniques I had implemented from my reading. While I am sure it did help him, I now know I barely knew anything back then.
However, because I thought I did know something I did not listen to any advice from other twin moms. I knew what I did before, and that worked great, so I was going to do that again. Oh, how naive I was. The twins came a little over 3 weeks early so that added a new twist, and oh yeah, don't forget there were two babies this time. Two! Two newborns who did not know how to sleep, let alone sleep through the night. Once they came my sleep left. I honestly cannot remember the first 3 months of their life, because that is how bad it was. Somehow, we all survived and we made it to 5 months where it finally felt like we were headed in the right direction. They were only waking about twice a night! I was hopeful!
Unfortunately, that did not last very long. Very quickly my twins started to regress and wake up more frequently throughout the night. I scrambled to try and make sense of this change, but I couldn't. I tried it all. Trust me. If there is solution that did not involve cry it out, I tried it. It did not work. Finally, I decided to try some cry it out. The only problem was I really did not know what I was doing. I thought I did, but I was wrong. I made some pretty classic sleep training mistakes. When my attempts did not work, I was hopeless. I did not think there was any way my babies would ever sleep.
I am not sure what got me motivated to research more about sleep training. In all honesty, it was probably desperation and exhaustion. Once I started researching, I could not stop. I read everything I could get my hands on about sleep and babies. Once I had learned all there was to know I was ready to try again. And you know what? When you sleep train correctly… it works!
I still remember the first night one of my twins slept through the night. 12. Hours. Straight. It was bliss. She was only 10 months old. Less than 2 months earlier, she was waking at least every 3 hours and nursing at night. My twins were happier too! I was not the only one who was sleep deprived. They were as well! They were happy and I was happy. The great thing was, I was not just happy, I was alert, could focus, I stopped having anxiety attacks at night when they would wake, and I could finally be the mother to my children I wanted to be.
Sleep training works. And I want to help you enjoy your sleep.