Sleep School

Back in early December Ollie and I went to sleep school. Sleep school is a five night residential program in a hospital where Ollie learned how to become a better sleeper, and I learned how to help him do this. I have no idea if this kind of thing exists in Canada, or anywhere else, as none of my friends from other countries have ever heard of such a thing. However they should exist everywhere as sleep school is THE BEST THING EVER. Seriously, I cannot tell you how fantastic the experience was for us. Ollie is now like a model sleeper. I am also a completely different person from the sleep deprived mum I was two months ago. Pre sleep-school it honestly seemed like I was going to be waking up every two hours to feed Ollie for the rest of my life.

We opted for a private hospital sleep school as we have private health insurance so the whole stay was covered, minus our hospital excess fee. I think the full cost is somewhere around $5000. There are public hospitals that have sleep schools that are fully covered by Medicare but they have very long waiting lists. The hospital we chose had a waiting list of about four weeks, and had an excellent reputation. I also had friends that had attended this particular sleep school and spoke positively about their experience. In order to go to sleep school you need a referral from your doctor or a Maternal Child Health Nurse.

When I arrived on the first morning I was shown to my room which looked like a very basic hotel room. I had a double bed which was a nice surprise (partners can stay over if they wish for an added fee), a comfy chair to feed Ollie in, and my own bathroom. There was a highchair and play mat for Ollie in the room, along with a baby bath.

Day 1: Tired but (one of us is) excited to be at sleep school

Ollie was in his own room, furnished with just a cot and a chair. His room was pretty far away from my room which was great, it meant I didn’t hear every little noise he made while he was sleeping. The room was completely dark with no windows, and no cute decorations. This is sleep school tip #1: babies should sleep in a very dark, boring room. We have since put black cardboard on the windows in Ollie’s room at home to make it as dark as possible. (We actually did the same for Ella’s room and as a result she has started sleeping later in the morning!) 

After settling into my room I had a meeting with one of the nurses who asked me a lot of questions about Ollie and his current sleeping routine (or lack of). She also gave me a brief overview of the program and explained the routine they would be putting Ollie on, based on his age and weight. 

The routine wasn’t a big surprise to me, it was pretty typical of what you would find on the internet for a six month old. Apparently a six month old should have 2 x 2 hour naps plus a 45 minute “catnap” everyday, and be awake a maximum of 2 hours between each sleep. This was WAY more sleep than Ollie was having at home. He would have two naps a day, and I was lucky if they lasted more than 45 minutes. He was obviously very overtired! They also promote following a feed/play/sleep routine, which is also pretty standard advice. Since sleep school, Ollie's day looks something like this:

6:30/7am wake up and have milk feed
Breakfast 30-45 minutes after milk
Play
2 hours after wake up: Morning nap for 1.5-2 hours
Milk feed
Lunch 30-45 minutes after milk
Play
2 hours after waking: Afternoon nap for 1.5-2 hours
Milk feed
Play
2 hours after waking: Evening catnap for 30-45 minutes
Dinner
Play
Bath
Milk feed
2 hours after waking: Bedtime!
10:30/11pm dreamfeed (we dropped this feed when Ollie was about 8 months old)

The best thing about this particular sleep school is that for the first two days the nurses completely take over settling the babies during their naps and at night - mums are only woken at night if your baby needs a feed. This is to give the mums a chance to rest and recover, as most are pretty exhausted by the time they get to sleep school. In Ollie’s case the plan was to give him a “dreamfeed” at 10:30pm, and then if he woke between 3am-5am I would feed him again. (A dreamfeed is where you pick up a sleeping baby and feed them, and then put them right back to bed. Ideally they sleep through this. It's like a top up feed so they are full enough to continue sleeping until morning.)  The night feed would be phased out after two days, so that by the time we left Ollie would only be having the dreamfeed overnight. This all sounded AMAZING to me, a huge improvement on the 3-4 night feeds I was currently doing with him. 

By the time we finished the initial meeting it was time for Ollie to have his first sleep school nap. We had a little “wind down time” where I read him a book and sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star before taking him to his cell, I mean room. Putting him down was a quick job: I put on his sleeping bag, tucked him in, gave him a kiss and said “It’s time to sleep. Goodnight, I love you” and walked out. Easy! This is now pretty much what I do before every nap/sleep Ollie has. 

I was then told to go to my room, relax and eat lunch, they would take care of Ollie. Wow! I had lunch and then went along to the orientation meeting with the other four mums who were starting sleep school on the same day as us. 

At the orientation the nurse explained the routines in more detail, the settling technique, and what to expect over the next five days. I can’t get into the exact settling technique (seriously, I had to sign a waiver saying I wouldn't post information on the internet!) however it involves a lot of shhhhing and patting and (almost) NEVER taking the baby out of the cot. It was nice to meet other mums in the same situation and have their support and empathy during the stay. I felt a lot less lonely and it is always nice to have someone understand exactly what you are going through.

At the orientation we also got the crying vs. grizzling talk, which I think is the most difficult thing to learn about your baby. According to sleep school, a baby’s cry is high pitched and constant - basically the sound they make when they have their vaccinations. A grizzle is less constant, changes in pitch and frequency, and there are pauses between the sounds. A grizzle can be loud, which makes it hard to distinguish from a cry, especially if you are the parent of said baby. According to sleep school, a grizzle means the baby is protesting that they don’t want to sleep or be left alone, rather than being in pain or distress. 

If a baby is grizzling in their cot once they’ve been put down for a sleep, they are left for 10 minutes during the day or 20 minutes at night before you go in to settle them. The idea is that they learn to self-settle before you need to go in to help them. If they are actually crying they are only left for 2 minutes before you go in to settle. So this isn’t a “cry it out” method where you just leave the baby to cry until they stop. The idea is you are giving them time to learn to settle themselves rather than always helping them settle by picking them up, rocking them, feeding them, etc. I know some people would completely oppose this method and would prefer that their baby not be left to cry, grizzle, whatever. And that is totally fine, if it works for you! That wasn’t working for us so I was prepared to let Ollie learn to settle - he was almost 7 months old and I was confident that he felt loved and secure and that I wouldn’t scar him for life using this (research backed and very effective) method of sleep training.

One other major piece of advice was that during a baby's awake time they should be as active as possible. This means they should be on the ground playing, rather than being held, in the pram, or in the car. If they are active they will be nice and tired when it comes time for their nap. Time in a pram is really rest time. I realised I probably had Ollie in the pram too much during the day - I often took him out for a long walk when he was cranky, which was often - probably because he was so overtired!

On our first night I did the dreamfeed with Ollie at 10:30pm. I had never done a dreamfeed before and was convinced it would wake him up. But no! He slept and fed with zero fuss and I was back in bed by 11pm. The nurses offer the mums sleeping tablets for the first two nights and I was like “YES PLEASE!” I think they prefer the mums to take the tablets so they a) rest and b) let them do the job of sleep training overnight without a worried mum hovering nearby. Obviously the tablets are optional and you can be woken whenever your baby wakes if you want. I, however, was perfectly happy to be left to sleep! As mentioned above, the plan was that a nurse would come get me between 3-5am on the first two nights if Ollie woke during that time. (If he woke outside of this time the nurses would settle him back to sleep). I was fully expecting Ollie to need to be fed in this 3-5am window, so imagine my surprise when I woke naturally in my bed at 6am! Apparently Ollie woke at 2am and the nurses had to settle him for 40 minutes, but he did fall back asleep. He woke at 6:30am and I was SO happy to know that he did not, in fact, need to feed multiple times a night.

So I already felt like we had a huge win on night number one, and it only got better from there. On night two Ollie woke for 15 minutes and then self settled. On night three he woke for 3 minutes, and then the last two nights of the school he slept through the night. We’ve been home for about two months since sleep school and Ollie has continued to sleep beautifully through the night. We've had a few unsettled nights - mainly when he was cutting new teeth - but we stick to the settling methods and he gets back into his routine pretty quickly.

Naps also improved hugely. For the first 2-3 weeks we still had to go in and resettle Ollie maybe 10-20% of the time if he woke too early from his naps, but now we hardly ever have to. The biggest difference from how things were before sleep school is that now we have a plan for what to do when Ollie wakes early from a nap and this makes everything so much less stressful. 

We were at sleep school from Thursday - Tuesday so over the weekend Andy and Ella came to visit us. Andy was able to learn and practice the settling technique which was great. There was a fantastic park near the hospital so we were able to go there and have some fun time as a family in between Ollie’s naps.

On the last day we had a departure session where we talked about different scenarios: disrupted days, naps in the pram, sickness, travel, moving on to the next routine etc. It was very practical. Obviously you are not going to have your baby doing all their naps at home in a dark room forever, but they recommended to try and be strict with it for the next 2-3 weeks as the baby consolidates their new sleep habits. We've kept to the routine for the most part for the past two months. If we have a disrupted day we try to make sure the next day the routine is strictly followed, and it all works very well. It has restricted us though as we hardly ever take Ollie out for longer than his two hours of awake time between naps. Luckily Andy finished work a few days after we got back from sleep school so it hasn't actually been as hard as it sounds. Over the summer most of the time one of us would take Ella out to do something, and the other would stay home with Ollie while he napped. If we wanted to go out with all four of us we'd just stay pretty local, going to Ceres or a playground. 

Frankly, I loved everything about sleep school and am so grateful that this kind of thing exists. The nurses were lovely and supportive and it was a luxury to get out of the stress of daily life to just focus on Ollie. I loved chatting with the other mums - there were two little play areas in the hospital that were perfect for Ollie to play in between his naps - there would always be at least one other mum with their baby so we could pop the babies down to play and chat about how things were going.

I was pretty lucky that Ollie responded so well to the routines and I did see that some other babies took longer to adjust (it definitely looked like it was much more difficult with the babies that were older than a year). However everyone seemed happy overall to be there and had noticed a big difference by the time they left. If you are in Australia and have a poor sleeper (or even a mediocre sleeper!) and are considering sleep school I HIGHLY recommend it. I learned so much about babies and sleep, and Ollie is a much happier baby now that he well rested. And of course a happy, sleeping baby results in happy parents, (and happy siblings), so it has been a great thing for the whole family.

Day 4: We are both feeling well rested and much happier!