Guest story from an anonymous Little Trees Sleep Consulting client
This story was voluntarily submitted by a former Little Trees Sleep Consulting client who reached out to me because she wanted to share her family’s experience with other parents. She has chosen to remain anonymous to protect her family’s privacy and received no compensation for sharing her story.
If you are a parent drowning in exhaustion, you might not need more information. It might be time to have someone experienced to walk beside you.
When my daughter was born, I expected to be bone-tired. I imagined cozy contact naps and eventually laying her down in the beautiful (and pricey!) bassinet we’d carefully chosen.
That bassinet was never used. I would go the next 5 months getting as little as 45 minutes of sleep at night, and no more than 2-4 hours a day. Evenings were hours of bouncing and holding our beautiful baby to lessen her screaming. Eventually our daughter was diagnosed with silent reflux. Despite specialists and prescription medication, every feed was followed by a 45-minute upright hold before we could even attempt to transfer her. She woke every 30–90 minutes throughout the night, meaning the cycle repeated over and over. She slept only in someone’s arms, and I spent most nights in a recliner.
We’ve all heard about the risk of SIDS associated with co-sleeping. Yet evidence also shows that falling asleep with your child on a couch or an armchair is shockingly dangerous. Having previously cared for an unresponsive baby in my emergency nursing career, I was petrified that falling asleep holding my baby would have catastrophic results.
Like so many desperate parents, we tried everything: books, workshops, our GP, our pediatrician, nurses, online courses, Reddit, and countless hours with ChatGPT. Every new suggestion seemed promising for a day or two before everything unravelled again. Seeing our daughter in great distress was excruciating, so we’d end up back in the cycle of long nights in the chair, biting through our cheeks until they bled as we tried to stay awake. We were incredibly lucky to have support from family members several nights a week, so I could get a few hours of sleep.
“It will get better,” people told us. Instead, it felt like we were moving backwards. By five months, we were still trapped in 30- to 60-minute sleep cycles, and I had begun falling asleep standing up, waking only because I was starting to fall over.
And then we learned one of us had cancer. A big surgery was in our near future.
That was the final straw. I had heard a bit about sleep consulting, and I was determined to try anything to help our family survive the coming challenges.
Finding A Sleep Consultant
With the help of Google, I found and interviewed multiple sleep consultants. Some dismissed our reflux diagnosis entirely; others gave advice no longer recommended by medical guidelines. Then I met Teresa Sedlmair, owner of Little Trees Sleep Consulting. Teresa immediately understood that reflux babies often have multiple layers contributing to poor sleep. She quickly sent practical suggestions we could begin using immediately. Instead of giving us a generic sleep-training algorithm, she built a detailed guidebook and 3-week plan tailored specifically to our daughter and our family.
I expected small improvements. Instead, we witnessed a transformation. Within a week, our daughter was sleeping independently in her crib. She began sleeping more than ten hours overnight. She started taking regular naps in her crib. She became happier and more engaged. She even began reaching developmental milestones that had seemed delayed, which was incredibly encouraging for us.
The changes were measurable:
Sleep data from the first week of sleep training, as recorded by the family.
Like many parents, I had feared that helping her learn to sleep would mean endless crying in between reassurance check-ins. Our data told a very different story. The first couple of days were certainly challenging. But the crying decreased dramatically as she learned what to expect, and by the end of the week our home felt almost unrecognizable. Not because she had “given up”, but because she now knew how to fall asleep on her own, and we now knew how to give her a daytime routine that would set her up for nighttime success. You can see in the graph below just how quickly the longer crying periods decreased.
If you’re reading this while exhausted… I know how overwhelmed you must be. You have probably read every blog post, joined every Facebook group, watched every Insta-reel, and tried every TikTok tip. You may feel like you’re somehow missing the one magic trick everyone else knows. For our family, Teresa was that magic.
If you’re thinking “my situation’s not that bad…” You don’t need to be in dire straights! The framework Teresa built for us now helps us have consistent naps (guaranteed me-time twice a day!!) and consistent full-nights’ sleep. If you just want to tweak or improve a piece of your baby-sleep-journey, please don’t wait.
What about travel? We recently did a big trip with our girl, which made me quite nervous: Would we be back in zombie-land after leaving our established set-up at home? Our guidance included tips for travel – and our baby rocked it. Despite a cancellation resulting in a last-minute AirBnB, and then dealing with a heat wave, she kept her consistent naps and 10-11 hour sleeps at night!
Hiring a sleep consultant remains one of the best investments we’ve ever made—not because she simply helped our daughter sleep, but because she gave our family back the capacity to thrive during one of the hardest seasons of our lives.
About This Guest Story
This article was voluntarily submitted by a former Little Trees Sleep Consulting client. The author received no compensation for writing or publishing this story and has chosen to remain anonymous to protect her family’s privacy.
Individual results vary. This family’s experience represents their own experience with sleep consulting and is not a guarantee of outcomes for other children or families.