We have exclusively breastfed our baby since birth and she is now one week away from being 6 months old. She has always fallen asleep at the end of a feed and we never really questioned this. We have now realised that she cannot actually fall asleep without being on the breast and that she uses me as a comforter to get her to sleep.

Now that her appetite is increasing as she is ready for weaning, she doesn’t always fall asleep at the end of a feed and so getting her to sleep at night has become increasingly difficult. For the past two weeks it has been taking us three hours to get her to sleep. She is now invariably asleep by 8.30/ 9 pm. Previously she would be asleep by 6pm and would be breastfed to sleep.

We are looking for advice on how to get our daughter to be able to fall asleep on her own and how to ensure that she understands that her cot is for sleeping in so that she goes to sleep at night and naps during the day in it.

Please accept my apologies for taking so long to provide feedback. I feel terrible particularly because I have such glowing praise for your company! As you know, we had two telephone consultations. In a nutshell I can say, hand on heart, that Mel changed our life. We honestly feel as though we are living an entirely different reality from how things were just two short months ago.

The amazing part is that, having spent a good six weeks of our demand fed/ breastfed six and a half month old daughter eating every two hours day and night and taking 3 – 3.5 hours every night to get to sleep, I don’t think we could see a way out. The sleep problems had also spilled over into weaning problems as our daughter was uninterested in solids due to taking milk every two hours.

Mel gave us advice which we felt comfortable in following in order to teach our daughter to fall asleep by herself. The routine felt like a good path to follow and as had been suggested that on the first night it would probably take our daughter between 40 and 50 minutes to fall asleep. It took bang on 45 minutes!!!!

It took our daughter about a week and a half to settle into this new routine. We now simply put her into her cot, awake, she no longer cries and she goes to sleep by herself. It’s amazing.

Mel gave us a sleep, nap and feed routine. Beforehand we were more guided by what we thought our daughter wanted/needed. She now eats and drinks well and has two naps in her cot during the day (unheard of previously!!!).

I honestly can’t thank you enough. I could go on and on. Kind regards and thank you. Nichola from Nottingham.

Our son has never been easy to settle to sleep, so when he was tiny we rocked, fed, walked, bounced etc etc, but mostly fed to sleep. He would always sleep well once asleep though, until 4 months, when teeth and sleep regression started. At this point he was waking more often, and would be almost impossible to settle back into his cot in the night, so we started co-sleeping from 5am then 4am, then 3, then from his first wake up! This was fine, but he would wake 2hrly for resettling, which was easy as I could just breast feed him, but also meant that because he was in our bed, I was concerned about his noises waking my husband, and so never tried to settle him without breast, the wake ups gradually became more frequent, until at 7.5mths, he was waking every 45mins.

When he wakes at night he is almost impossible to comfort. He doesn’t want to be held, or put down, or rocked or sung to. He has become more difficult to get to sleep as he has got older and I have really struggled for the past month to get him off to sleep, but have kept with it, not resorting to breast or pram or car journeys. The overall objective is to stop the night wakefulness. If he needs a feed that’s fine, I appreciate that with BF its impossible to monitor what they have so if he wakes for a feed, that’s fine, I just want him to go back to sleep and not be so furious! Ideally we would also like to be able to get our son to self settle, to stop this sleep regression with future developmental changes, and to make sleep times less of a battle!

I just wanted to express my thanks to your straightforward and sensible advice. Despite asking several health visitors and my GP for sleep advice I was no further forward, but following our conversation, within 2 weeks our son’s sleep had significantly improved and within 1 month it was normal for him to sleep though the night without waking. I tell everyone I know who has baby sleep problems about you, and can only recommend your advice. It really was the best money I have ever spent getting sleep advice – I will be contacting you again for further advice if I have any more problems with this baby or the next one!! Thank you (Zoe from Kent)

My five month old baby has had trouble napping during the day and has often woken up cranky, clearly needing more sleep. After spending hours reading baby books, surfing the net and taking professional advice, I decided to try controlled crying. This left my baby distressed and me completely stressed out. I was at my wits end, desperately wanting to do what was right for my baby but totally confused by all the conflicting advice. So I contacted Mel at Sleep Nannies!

Mel was a breath of fresh air. She took the time to listen to what I was saying and sympathise with the situation. She then offered practical advice on what to do, explained how my baby was likely to respond and gave me an idea of how long it would take for things to get better. I was amazed to see an improvement in three days and can now say that my baby is sleeping much better, waking up happy, refreshed and ready to play. Mel’s main strengths are her experience and her calm approach: I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend her to anyone looking for advice on caring for their babies” (Antoinette from Beckenham Kent)

Within the last 2 weeks, our son has started to wake up every 45 mins or so from 1am onwards during the night and has been unable to resettle. We have had to get up and reinsert his dummy. As a result, we went dummy cold turkey three days ago and it has been a disaster. He is unable to self settle and we now find ourselves rocking/ jigging him to sleep. He wakes up again at 11 and we dream feed him, he goes straight back to sleep. But he wakes a three and it is impossible to get him back to sleep.

He goes into meltdown for about two hours; he is clearly very cross and there is little we can do to comfort him. After three days of this, our happy, sunny boy is overtired and very sombre with few smiles. He seems stressed. We are not totally against leaving him to grumble but not if it becomes a full crying fit and we would want to intervene before that stage. We do not want to do controlled crying. Daytime naps have always been problematic; he won’t settle in his cot at all without his dummy (and even with it was tricky) and will only really sleep properly on someone of in a sling/ pushchair.

When he does go down in his cot, he wakes up after 45 mins even though he is still tired and will fall back to sleep if held.
I just wanted to send an email – some two months after we used your service – to say a huge thank you! We originally came to you to try and get help weaning our baby off the dummy and to establish a better sleep pattern.

Mel was wonderful; kind and patient with excellent advice. When our baby took longer than normal to adapt to life without the dummy, she encouraged us to keep going. It took three weeks in total but it worked. And since then our baby has been an excellent sleeper.

Shortly afterwards he started sleeping consistently through the night. Recently, he has been ill and has had jet lag to deal with which has thrown his sleep patterns off again, remembering what the sleep nanny said, I just re-employed the system we were given and he has reverted to going through the night again! I am so very, very grateful to you! A friend referred me to the service and I have since told everyone I meet about it.
Thanks once again, Susannah from london.

G is 10 & half months old and has never slept through the night. As a newborn he was very resistant of night time sleeps, we reacted by rocking, driving, cuddling, feeding him to sleep. At night, at worst he wakes 3 times and I usually breastfeed him back to sleep or fall asleep in our bed then put him back in his cot. We’ve used several methods to try to get him to sleep longer (pick up/put down, crying it out, totally ignoring him) but nothing has worked and I think we’ve made the whole thing worse.

He has been at nursery for 5 weeks since I returned to work, which he enjoys but has picked up several bugs which have made his night time sleeps even worse. He is very clingy with me, he cries if I’m not nearby but that has improved since he started crawling a few weeks ago. The overall objective is to help G to sleep for a longer uninterrupted stretch at night.

Dear Sleep Nannies, I would like to say a big thank you for the advice and support we’ve had over the last three weeks. I was sceptical that anything could change my son’s night waking but 3 weeks on, he has made amazing progress. For the first time in 11 months he slept from 7pm until 6.30am after previously waking 2 to 3 times a night.

Please pass on my gratitude to Mel for her wise words! Many thanks Joanna from Hitchin.

Our daughter goes to bed at 7pm and will generally sleep well until about 10.45pm when we give her, her last feed of the day. The problems start after that. She used to sleep until about 4am, and on rare occasions would sleep through until 6am. But recently she’s started waking at all hours of the night and we’re experiencing great difficulty in getting her back to sleep for any length of time. My fear is that we’re starting to create bad sleep habits. She already uses a dummy, and last night the only way of getting her back to sleep was to rock her in my arms. I really don’t want to start doing controlled crying. I just don’t know what to do anymore.

“Thank you a million for the practical, kind and effective advice Mel gave us in our telephone calls. She gave us the confidence to start as well as continue her approach to help our 6 and a half month old daughter give up the dummy at night time and sleep through the night. We saw an almost immediate improvement and within a week she had slept through for the first time ever and 3 weeks later is still doing so. It involved no more crying than before and our baby is even more smiley and happy than before. Our best investment in a long time!” (Hannah from France)

He wakes to feed around every 2 hours at night. Generally he needs to be asleep to go back down during the night. He can now settle himself at the beginning of the night and can be put down awake-this works when he’s not ill most of the time. He is allowed to babble and cry a little on this first settle but when he gets upset we go to him and pick him up to comfort him. Sometimes he will then go down again awake but others he needs to be asleep. His big problem on waking at night is that he scratches his face a lot (he has eczema and we use hydrocortisone) we also put gloves on him.
He itches his face/head during the day when he’s hungry or tired but not when he’s content.

He also ‘needs’ to feed. He’s now on three meals a day – meat for lunch and dinner. He eats well, when he’s not ill or teething, but doesn’t much like drinking water. He doesn’t have bottles or formula milk and is breastfed on demand. He seems to feed less during the day now and tanks up at night, aaagh. He is teething off and on but they haven’t come through yet. We would like him to sleep through the night without needing to feed so frequently. We’d like him to be able to settle himself even when he is scratching.

Dear Melissa – Thank you most of all for getting all of us to catch up on our sleep and have grown up evenings. It’s such a lovely change for the better.(Elena from London)

We need help getting our 4 1/2 month old baby girl to sleep through the night. Around 2 months she got to the stage where she was waking only once in the night and having a small feed then back off to sleep until 7am. One night this changed and since then she wakes every night between 3 & 6 times a night. I am absolutely exhausted and i feel that she is not as happy as she should be. She has a dummy and it seems that when she comes into a light sleep she’s awake and sometimes the dummy will soothe her back to sleep other times it wont. Her feeding is all over the place.

The last 3 weeks she is taking probably only 1 full bottle a day the rest she’ll leave usually around a quarter even a third. This is out of only a 7 oz bottle. Its like she gets bored of it, is nosey and cant concentrate on it or keeps being sick and doesn’t want anymore. Because of this i think she must be hungry in the night so we’re back up to 6 oz in the night. She goes down perfectly at 7pm and sends herself to sleep which is why we cant understand why she cant send herself back to sleep in the night. We have tried leaving her to cry and it just gets more and more stressful for her, to the point where she is sobbing, screaming uncontrollably. Its absolutely painful!

“We have been following your advice and are now on our 4th consecutive night of sleeping through and have knocked the 10pm feed on the head. I found your service extremely helpful. The advice was very well communicated and always worked given time. I cant thank you enough for your help, you really helped us especially on the initial call when i was close to despair. You made me feel very comfortable and not like i had failed by having to ask for help. It was reassuring to be told exactly what to expect when we put our new routine in place and your predictions of what to expect were pretty spot on. It helped us get through the really bad nights knowing it was all getting us closer to achieving our goal. I would have no problem in recommending you. Thank you once again for your help” (Maria from Nottingham)

Our 20 months old and is still waking through between 1 and 3 times a night. I have tried leaving him to cry but he made himself so distressed after 40 minutes I gave in… When J wakes, the only way to get him back to sleep is to take him out of his cot and usually feed him. He eats well in the day so am sure this is just a habit rather than need. I have tried watering his milk down gradually but get to a certain level and he realises what I have done and pushes it away and wants milk. J rarely has a problem going to bed and I am very consistent with his routine of – up to the bath around 6.20 – 6.30pm. Into his room after his bath where we put his night clothes on, I then sit with him with his bottle of milk. Once he has drank this, I sit with him for around 5 mins – he either falls to sleep on me, if not, I am able to (most of the time) put him in his cot awake and he will get himself off to sleep. The waking can occur anytime between 12.30pm and 5pm and is really inconsistent. Around a week ago, I had a thought that maybe J had an allergy to cows milk so put him onto goats milk which I thought was working, as that one week he slept brilliantly – was waking once around 11pm having a bottle of milk then sleeping until 7am. One night he even slept from 7pm to 7am. He has however reverted back to the waking. My overall objective is to get advice on how to get J to start sleeping through the night consistently.

“Hello, I had a conversation with Mel last Monday at 11am and she asked for some feedback. I followed the technique she gave for J. I was so apprehensive the first night but it took just 45 minutes to get J to sleep. The second night took 10 minutes and the third night I just went into his room and put his dummy in his mouth and he lay back down himself and went straight off to sleep. Since then I have had 3 nights of J sleeping through – the first time ever!! Last night a small whinge and again, I went in once for 30 seconds came out and he went off to sleep. Thank you so much for the advice it appears to have worked and I cannot recommend Mel enough. Kim” (Kim from Lincs)

As a family of two children, aged 5 and aged 3 it was somewhat of a surprise to learn that we were going to be expecting twins into our family. Having had two children already we felt we had the knowledge to deal with two new arrivals but the sleepless nights were going to be a problem! Friends of ours who also had twins, had also used Mel to help them through the early days and on their advice, we also decided to enlist the help of Our sleep nanny.

Mel provided us with a very valuable support, not only to help us get some very crucial rest but also some very valuable advice. I found Mel to be an excellent support, with so much experience with young babies. Mel provided us with the confidence we needed to get through the early days and establish a good bedtime routine with the twins. Mel has a lovely gentle nature and the babies had no problem with adjusting to their night nurse. I know that without her help the early days would have been very hard. (Judy P from Somerset)