Sleep consultant/help in Bristol

[muesligirl]

Has anyone got any recommendations for a sleep consultant/nanny in Bristol please? We are at the end of our tether! thanks

None. How old is your child?

He's 8 months old and wakes every hour, has to be fed back to sleep :-(

Oh dear, what has the GP said?

What's he like during the day?

You must be exhausted you poor thing, I am a nanny with 18 year exerience I'd be more than happy to come and do some overnights with you to see if I can offer you some advice, so you can get some sleep.

message me if you would like some help

I had a bit of a nightmare with first child waking constantly and being fed back to sleep, and did a lot of reading. Key points of advice are it is really important that you put your child down awake in the bed it is going to fall asleep in. Typically a baby will fall into deep sleep for the first few hours (until 11pm to midnight) and then they go through lighter periods of sleep waking every hour or so - which is completely normal - , until about 5am when a deeper cycle of sleep returns. As you probably realise you have created a habit where your baby needs to suck to get back to sleep. You are going have to go through a bit of pain to correct that. I found a method quite helpful where you put the baby down awake and potter round the room. When they wake up in the small hours, each time you go in, reassure but try not to pick up, and keep going in and out, in and out the room gradually extending the periods that you are out the room (30 secs, moving to one min, and then trying to be out the room for a bit longer). It is a modified form of controlled crying I suppose, but they know you are around if very boring. Initally it will be very difficult but after 3 or 4 nights it made a massive difference for us and we stopped the all night drinking habit, and DD learnt to settle herself when she came into lighter periods of sleep. All the best with it.

I agree with Nickoka - putting them into bed awake is really important. My DS didn't need feeding back to sleep, but did go thru a phase where he would wake, scream, we would pick him up, he'd stop, but the minute we put him back down the screaming would start up again. it was hellish. so we did roughly what nickoka said, so when lo wakes up, check he's ok, but don't pick up or feed. it is really hard to start with and it may be worth clearing your diary and if you can taking a few days off work to really go for it and dedicate a good few days to it. (probably cheaper than a sleep consultant!!)

best of luck - disrupted sleep is just awful.

Just in case anyone else is looking for any help, we used Camilla through night nannies.com - she was excellent!

Camilla at NightNannies is excellent

Hi museligirl / MsInga - what sort of approach does Camilla have? We've got sleep issues with our DS2 and would be up for getting some help but want to avoid CC if at all possible.

TIA

Camilla will work with you to agree an approach that will work that you are happy with. Probably best to give her a call/email.