A few weeks before I was to return to work after having my second child, I began to get very nervous. Our second, a little girl, is the happiest and sweetest baby on this place…however she had the cat-napper syndrome. You know what I’m talking about. She would wake 40 minutes or so into her naps as she was transitioning from deep to light sleep. I tried everything with her…but to no avail. It seemed that the only way to extend her naps was to go to her when she woke up and hold her for the remainder of the nap. But given that I was returning to work, I started to get very anxious about how our nanny was going to manage caring for our (wild) 2 year old son and a cat-napping little 3 month old. That’s when a friend of mine referred me to Kris. Kris sat down and helped put together a schedule that would give some predictability to our lives, as well as give our daughter the opportunity to learn how to soothe herself back to sleep. We called it “baby boot camp,” but in reality it’s more like “mommy boot camp.” I simply had to learn how allowing my daughter the opportunity to learn to fall back asleep was going to be the best thing for her. They say that it’s the power of 3. It only takes three times for a bad habit to develop and three for a good habit to take place…and boy is that true. By Day 4, she was still waking early from her naps, but she was soothing herself back to sleep with minimal to no crying. All of a sudden it seemed like our house took a collective sigh of relief. Kris has been an amazing resource and a true confidant. I feel like any question I have, even though it’s my second and I feel like I should know, she answers with a very thorough and well thought out discussion. She is constantly reassuring me when I pose a concern and has given me the tools to manage two young children. After we tackled her naps, we also began to work on seeing how we could get longer stretches at night. Now, more than 6 weeks later, she is going down for very predictable naps during the day and sleeping through the night. I would highly recommend Kris to anyone with an infant, whether you are a first time mom or a mom for the second or third time.
Thanks Kris! (October 2012)
