As a mum and baby who ‘failed’ Tresillian, my family were at the end of our sleep tether by the time we met Karen. Our baby – Charlie – was seven months old. He’d started life with nasty reflux and had never formed the habit of properly linking sleep cycles. That meant he was up every 45 minutes almost around the clock but especially between 2-7am. My husband and I broke the night into hourly shifts, hired night nurses for respite, used family to do dream feeds – anything we could think of to get more sleep so we could effectively parent Charlie and our three year old daughter. We were exhausted, desperate and out of ideas. A friend recommended Karen and I almost hung up on her before booking Karen for a night one week before Christmas. I was too tired to remember much about those days but I clearly remember Karen saying ‘A full night sleep will be your Christmas present’. Hope flickered.

Karen’s confidence, knowledge and kindness were clear the second she arrived. Her Parental Presence technique was kind yet firm and Charlie realised within minutes that change was happening. It took us that week of working with him to alter his diet, massage his routine and teach him how to link sleep cycles but Karen was right: our Christmas present – the best present ever – was a night of uninterrupted sleep.  It was hard work: Charlie fought the change, wanting the five star treatment of us being near every time he woke. When he started to sleep more and better, he was a changed boy. He was relaxed, curious about the world, happy and ravenous. The more he ate, the more energy he had for play and the more he played, the more he slept.  Suddenly we were out of a vicious cycle of sleep deprivation and into a happy cycle of being a more relaxed family, able to enjoy each other and nurture everyone’s needs.

The list of people and organisations who couldn’t help us is long. The single person who changed everything for us is Karen.

Thanks,