Andrea Grace and Millpond

[hardboiledpossum]

I am desperate for DS (8 months) to sleep at night. I'm exhausted, he wakes up every hour sometimes more at the moment. I don't want to use CC or CIO. Has anyone used Andrea Grace or Millpond to get their baby to sleep through? Can you give me a brief description of what methods they use? I don't want to spend hundreds of pounds only to be told to do what we're already doing. Thanks

We used Millpond for DS1. He was 6 months (when we started - 6 week package). They gave us a gradual retreat programme to follow - I have outlined it in detail on another thread here (www.mumsnet.com/Talk/sleep/1324357-Anyone-had-a-good-sleeper-regress-What-did-you-do.

They gave us detailed advice about daytime routine, feeding etc, not just night time sleep. We had to keep a sleep diary for a week before we started. When we got the sleep programme from them, my initial reaction was that it was very standardised and not tailored to us / DS. I was a bit disappointed. However we followed it anyway, because we had paid the money by then, and my goodness it worked. DS1 was a truly appalling sleeper (I looked back at the sleep diary recently - then night before we started the Millpond programme, he woke up 13 times!). Things improved almost immediately - from night one we went down to 3ish night wakings, and on night 7 he slept through from his dreamfeed until 7am. He's been a great sleeper ever since, a model 7 - 7 child (sleepwise, anyway!!), great napper, and we have only very rarely had bedtime issues.

I'm not sure that Millpond tell you anything you can't find out for yourself from books, but they do kind of piece it all together for you. For me the main benefit was the weekly telephone consultations when I was so bloody sleep deprived that if I hadn't known I was going to have to have a conversation with our sleep consultant, I would just have given up on about night 2 and gone back to him sleeping in with us. And also knowing that we'd paid the money kept me going!

I'm not going to pretend that there was no crying involved - night one was quite bad and involved 1.5 hours of screaming, but he was cuddled all of the time, so to me it didn't feel as bad as cc.

We are considering going back to Millpond with DS2 if we can't sort him out ourselves - even technically having done it before I can't seem to get DS2 to sleep well, and I wouldn't hesitate to go back to Millpond for advice if we're still in the same position in a month.

Thank you so much. DS can self settle but only with his dummy so I'm going to ditch the dummy and follow that plan you gave. If that doesn't work I'll have to call them and see if they can help me!

I used Andrea Grace and thought she was great. I don't know if her service has changed - it was 6 years ago - but she visited us and spent an hour or two talking through what was going on. She then emailed us a sleep plan which basically involved getting a bedtime routine (she even recommended particular books!) and basic rules like: once baby is down you can't get her out of the cot. You can, however, sit beside her patting her back or holding her hand while she gets used to getting herself to sleep. She pointed out that my baby would be cross because she wasn't used to doing this, but couldn't get traumatised because I'd be there with her throughout. Obvious, really, but I was too sleep deprived to think it through for myself.

I then had to ring her every morning for up to a month, so she could keep adjusting the routine and telling me what to do next. For this I paid £100 - the best £100 I ever spent.

She said that this method does work, but takes twice as long as cc. However, my dd was sleeping through by day 4.

I know a couple of other parents who have used her and they were very impressed too.

I used Andrea too and recommend her to everyone I meet. It was £250 - gone up a bit in six years! - but worth every penny. DS woke every 45 minutes when we started but after five weeks he slept trough and has ever since :).

It took the whole month for us but he was little (5 mo) when we started.

Good luck!

I used Andrea too and recommend her to everyone I meet. It was £250 - gone up a bit in six years! - but worth every penny. DS woke every 45 minutes when we started but after five weeks he slept trough and has ever since :).

It took the whole month for us but he was little (5 mo) when we started.

Good luck!

Millpond here for older child but was fantastic.

I also used Millpond for an older child (just turned 2) and the results were great. They offer either CC or gradual retreat options and I chose the latter although they were quite keen for me to do CC as DD was relatively old.

It was pretty much all stuff I'd heard before but there was the odd gem in there that wouldn't have occurred to me. It was also really helpful to have someone look at our specific circs and give me a relatively flexible plan to follow based on them - left to my own devices, I'd been floundering a bit trying to work out suitable bedtimes and nap times for an early-rising reluctant napper. The plan was a bit of a cut-and-paste job (referred to DD as 'he' at one point) but did the trick.

I was so keen to crack the problems that I think just the initial consultation + report would have sorted us out but it was quite helpful to have the discipline of regular calls.

We used Andrea Grace and it didn't work, tbh. She is dead set on full night weaning (12 hours) from 6mo which I was never really comfortable with.

DS got better by himself. He's 13 mo now and I still feed him to sleep every night. But he sleeps through 8pm to 6am three or four nights a week. The other nights he wakes once and I feed him back to sleep. (This after he was waking every 1-2 hours from 4 mo to 8 mo.)

He's never been able to self-settle. Just screams his head off. I think Andrea was a bit flummoxed. Even gradual withdrawal left him completely hysterical.

She is a lovely, lovely woman, though, and really did her best for us.

*CountBapubla" you've given me hope... despite a promising start my DS2 is not the world's best sleeper (we just seem to make them wakeful!), and I've done everything I can possibly think of (short of cc) to try to improve things but nothing is working... maybe I just need to stop pushing him and let him get better in his own time.

I felt like that too, nearlytherenow. He seemed resistant to every sleep training method in the book! Things got better when he figured out how to roll onto his tummy to settle himself. He was waking between sleep cycles before and couldn't go back off. We could time it to the minute! Now, after precisely two hours and twenty minutes most evenings, we hear an almighty clunk as he turns over and crashes into the cot bars

Sleep consultants and books usually say that if a baby can't fall asleep unassisted at the start of the night, they'll never sleep through. I'm sure this is true for some babies but not DS.

We'e actually in the opposite situation. Determined not to make the same mistake as I did with DS1, we have encouraged DS2 to self settle from birth. Apart from a brief blip for a few weeks at 5 months, he does so, beautifully. Goes in the cot awake, and goes happily to sleep. Up to 6 times a night. The books seem to suggest that if they can self settle they will sleep through (and it was true of DS1), but DS2 clearly hasn't read that chapter. He finds it much more interesting to wake regularly to shout through the cot bars, practise crawling, and ultimately demand to be fed (but not actually fed to sleep, he just wants a snack and then will go back in his cot awake).

Maybe tummy sleeping will help him (I hadn't thought of that) - he certainly rolls onto his tummy at every opportunity through the day. Hoping that he figures out how to do it at night sometime soon!

nearlytherenow I'm in a similar position. I read all the books about self settling so encouraged it from day 1 and he can self settle at first (though not as consistently as he used to) but still wakes up all the bloody time and can't seem to settle himself back. He did used to sleep through between 3 and 6 months.

CountBapula I night weaned at 3 months except for a dream feed at 10.30 so that shouldn't really be a problem as he is fine to go 12 hours without a feed now.

I'm going to try and ditch the dummy and see if I can get him to self settle without it and see if he will then sleep through. If not I shall be using either Millpond or Andrea Grace.

Thanks for all the replies!

Ha. See, it's all bollocks. They get the hang of it eventually. Hope things improve for you. And you, OP. I remember those days with DS and it was hell.

Can I throw another one into the pot.....she is fab!

www.sleepthroughdawn.co.uk/

They may well get the hang of it eventually. But eventually was too long for me. By eight months I was losing my marbles: if I had to go through even another week of being woken up every hour of the night (literally) I think I may have lost it.

Andrea Grace is a goddess in my eyes

Agreed Hester. I was lying on the floor by the cot sobbing every night by 5.5 months - another 6 months and I'd have cracked up. Plus I went back to work at 6 months - giving lectures on 2 hours' broken sleep would have led to some complaints I'm sure

Count I'm so pleased your DS is finally mostly sleeping through!

When is it safe to put toys in their cot? Any hope of that distracting them when they wake NTN and HBP?

We used Andrea Grace with our then 6mo. Basically night weaning and extinction with parental presence followed by gradual withdrawal. Took a few weeks but has slept through since bar illness/teething. Naps took several months after her support finished and they are still hit and miss. Don't think any of it is rocket science but I found it useful seeing her so that we didn't have any decisions to make (or arguments about tactics!) and because you have phone sessions twice a week, you are under pressure to follow through! I think if we had done it ourselves we might have given up. I'm very glad we did it then before DS became mobile or started to understand too much what was going on.

Andrea Grace tells you NOTHING you can't get from an online forum or a book. I'm sure the same is true of Millpond et al. What you pay for is an authoritative voice telling you exactly what to do, not allowing you to be inconsistent, handholding you all the way through. Which is exactly what you need after a few months extreme sleep deprivation.