Baby 2 Sleep Build Your Own Sleep Plan Review
Disclaimer: The Baby 2 Sleep Build Your Own Sleep Plan mentioned in this blog post was gifted by Baby 2 Sleep for the purposes of honest review. There has been no editorial control over this post and all opinions remain my own.
This post has been such a long time in the making, but I am finally able to say that E is sleeping through the night. I feel that we nailed naps such a long time ago but I put myself under no pressure to change sleep associations to make that final transition to get him to sleep through the night. By that I mean in his own cot, putting him down awake and allowing him to settle himself to sleep.
As you can see from the picture above – I tried white noise but it didn’t work for us! (Yes he’s on his front, this is the only way he would ever settle and I was sat on the floor next to him).
I needed to understand the mechanics of sleep, what would work best for us and without a looming deadline and that is exactly what Nicole’s from Baby2sleep build your own sleep plans offer. The series of videos that provide different explanations and advice were great and not overwhelming.
With having another child, the end of maternity leave looming and needing to work to a timeline that wasn’t going to put any additional pressure on me ( I was really struggling with postnatal thyroid issues coupled alongside sleep deprivation) I couldn’t deal with having a deadline put on me – slow and steady wins the race!
This plan was great because I was able to work towards smaller goals. It allows for a holistic understanding of sleep and to make small changes that can aid sleep.
This helped with our naps massively in a very short amount of time. Awake times, sleep associations, what happens when a child is overtired and why is all explained in such an easy to understand way, it was incredibly easy to follow my baby’s cues.
I found this way of helping E worked much better for my learning style too because if someone was simply giving me a list of instructions to follow, I’d want to know why – so Nicole’s style of explanation rather than rules really worked for me. You could really tell that she is a mother who has gone through this too, so is talking from experience and not just a textbook, although I know she is qualified alongside her having lived through sleep issues with her eldest daughter.
So why has this post taken me so long to write? I got the sleep plan around seven months ago to review and I wrote about how we had made progress immediately with naps but I took the easy option for a while of allowing sleep associations to continue and allowing feeding to sleep. I started to work on this a few months ago when I decided to stop breastfeeding but I simply replaced this feeding with another association – the comfort of cosleeping when he woke, which meant the process took longer. Slowly but surely he stopped waking and we got there! So I have taken much longer, but I think that is the absolute bonus of this sleep plan – no deadlines, no pressure on parents from anyone other than themselves. I had the tools to do it in my own time, which is the most important thing. It empowered me to make the changes in ways that suited me.
I can’t tell you how much better I feel for him sleeping through. I had constant brain fog, which I now know was ‘cortisol brain’ and cortisol had been an ongoing pest in our house. But I had never even heard about it before working with Nicole.
If you’re in the same situation as me: you couldn’t deal with pressure of progress checks, you need to understand the reasons why you need to do things, you need the tools to allow you to do this in your own rhythm because you have other children, maybe you’re going back to work or don’t have any support systems – I can’t recommend this sleep plan enough. The fundamentals are ones in which will still with me for life.
Originally published in 2020 and republished in 2023.
