the success and sleep that clients of mine find is what makes this such a rewarding service!  i love to hear about the break through with their children and how they are finally learning to sleep properly!  each family has a different experience, different time frame it takes to fully sleep train, and different battles along the way, but the beautiful thing is they all find sleep in the end! for erika and isabella, the road to sleep is different than that of a newborns.  being 1 year and previously sleep trained as an infant, our goals were to get isabella sleeping well again.  we needed to assist isabella in getting back on the sleep train that she so disruptively (in her parents' eyes) had fallen off! below is erika's update for how isabella is doing by the 3rd night.  keep in mind during these 3 days we had many back and forth emails with suggestions for her to follow in order to make this process as smooth and easy as possible. NIGHT 3: erika’s reply:

 "hi tia,

 we had success last night...YAY!!!  we put isabella to bed at 7:30 (our goal is to have her in bed and sleeping by 7:00 pm, with a wake time of 7:00 am) and she woke up at 9:20pm.  normally, we would have gone in her room and soothe and rock back to sleep.  instead, we set the timer for 10 minutes and by 9:26, she had stopped crying and put herself back to sleep.  we didn't hear a peep out of her until 6:45 this morning :)  for the last two nights, we've put her to bed closer to 7:00-7:30 instead of 8:00 as you suggested and we can really see the difference an earlier bedtime makes.

 i see what you mean about milk being offered in a sippy cup only and we will start doing that on the weekend.

thanks for much for everything...we can already see a big difference with just the one or two changes we've made so far!

 erika"

some of the suggestions i gave to erika have been spoken about in previous blog posts.  for example how to get your 1 year old off the bottle is explained in the post titled, "bottles are for babies, right?"  i also wrote a nap and bedtime sleep training process to help erika get isabella retrained to self-soothe and stop relying on her parents to rock her to sleep.  my nap training tips are in the post titled, "are you a victim of cat naps?"  please review these posts of you are having any similar issues to little isabella!  i am happy to say that isabella is officially back on track and threfore, everyone in her household is catching their zzz's! she is sleeping all night, napping 1 solid nap a day, both at daycare and when she is home, self-soothing to fall asleep and in the middle of the night if she wakes, she is taking a sippy cup, and no longer drinks a bottle before she goes to sleep!  success all around the clock and, for the time being, there are no more bumps on isabella's sleep train! INITIAL SLEEP CONSULT: to see isabaella's initial consult post click here.