From Waking Every Hour to Sleeping Through

Leo was 8 months old, a genuinely happy, chill little guy, and he was waking every single hour, all night long. His mom was running on fumes while also parenting a toddler, and by the time she reached out, she had already tried a check in based method from the internet that made everything worse. Every time she walked in to reassure him, Leo escalated. She came to me convinced her baby couldn't be sleep trained and half convinced the problem was her.

Two things, and neither was her fault. First, Leo's entire settling history was in arms and in motion, so every between cycle waking overnight required the full production to be restored. Second, the method she had tried was wrong for his temperament, not wrong in general, wrong for him. Some babies find brief check ins reassuring. Babies like Leo find them activating. A cookie cutter plan cannot know the difference. A person can. His schedule also needed an anchor: mornings were drifting, and a stretch of 4:30 am wakeups had crept in.

We anchored his day at a 6:30 am wake, with everything earlier treated as a night waking. Two naps, no more third catnap, and permission to pull bedtime as early as 5:45 pm on short nap days so bedtime absorbed the strain instead of his nights. We moved his feed to the start of the bedtime routine, in a different room with the lights on, so there was a solid 20 to 30 minutes between milk and crib. And critically, we tailored the settling approach to his temperament: less is more, calm and boring, stripped of everything that read as a pickup tease. Naps stayed fully assisted for the first week, one battle at a time, so his toddler sister's days kept running.

When a method fails, it is almost never proof that your baby cannot learn to sleep. It is usually proof the method did not fit your baby. Temperament matched plans are the entire reason I do this work.