I met Amanda at Ten Harley Street, her new venue for meeting with clients. We talked about her work and got onto the subject of my daughter Madison (we call her Maddy!)
Maddy is 7 years old, she still needed the comfort of a bottle of milk to get her to sleep and needed me to cuddle her to sleep every night. She subsequently then woke one, two or sometimes three times a night wanting more milk or the toilet! Due to my work commitments and not getting home until 7pm she was never really in bed much before 9pm.
Subsequently Maddy has always been a challenge! We had a lot of tantrums which I only now realise was due to her tiredness all the time.
We arranged that Amanda would help me with getting her into a better night and morning routine with more solid sleep. We sat down with a 2-hour Skype Consultation initially which was mainly between the two of us with Maddy and my husband contributing towards the end of it. We looked at our lifestyle, current evening and morning routines, and Maddy’s new school life and routine.
The first day we cut up the bottles and introduced the magical bedtime chair. Our routine started by bringing her bed-time forward to 7:45pm with 30 mins Mummy/Maddy time and lights out by 8:15pm. We had 3 difficult nights where going to sleep took up to 4 hours, but each night grew easier and she very quickly started sleeping through the night (fantastic!). This had the knock-on effect that she now wakes in the morning of her own accord and we have time to sit down and have breakfast together before being dropped at school for 8am.
Maddy was rewarded by using a specially decorated pasta jar in which she would collect one piece of pasta if she achieved all our nightly goals and this equated to a special treat with Mummy on the weekends.
It worked a treat and now most nights she sleeps through and the tantrums have definitely reduced. We do still have odd nights where she won’t go to bed on time, but she is so much better and her teacher has commented how much more alert she is in the mornings after a good night’s sleep.
I thought before undergoing this sleep training that the Skype Consultation would be enough, however soon came to realise how valuable it was in the whole process to have Amanda on Skype and WhatsApp for support over the initial 2 weeks, we couldn’t have done it without her!
Thank you so much Amanda for all your help and support it has made a huge difference to our lives.
