I knew I was desperate when I asked my cousin how she got
Sula to sleep through the night. Sula is her two-year-old Weimaraner. I was
willing to look anywhere for help in getting a good night’s rest for my son and
I, even from a dog.
Months of sleep deprivation as a new mom will do that to
you. It will also result in behavior you never could have envisioned
pre-parenthood, like crying hysterically at 4 am,
throwing stuffed animals at your husband’s head, and calling 911 because you
accidentally locked your baby in the apartment.
It all started when my son was a newborn. After the one-week honeymoon phase in
which Avi lounged around in a perpetual slumber and my husband and I
congratulated ourselves on having a great sleeper, he woke up and seemingly
wouldn’t go back down. A typical night involved one of us wearing Avi in a
sling, swaying back and forth like a belly dancer, while the other frantically
searched the radio for static, which seemed to soothe him. If we did this with
all the lights turned off, he’d eventually conk out.
So, when I learned about Smooth Parenting—a sleep consulting
and parent coaching service in the city that helps your baby sleep through the
night—I jumped at the chance to work with the woman behind it, Diana Blanco.
On the phone, I told Blanco my story, which I was sure would
be one of the worst she’d heard. Though he was five months old by then, Avi was
still waking anywhere from 3 to 5 times a night, taking miniscule 40-minute
naps, and getting up for the day as early as 4:30
am. Neither he nor I had slept through the night since the day he
was born.
“This seems like a pretty typical situation to me,” she
said. “It should be easy to fix.”
I hung up the phone feeling relieved—there were other
parents out there just like me, and many much worse off—and tried to control my
excitement when a week later Blanco came for a visit.
Avi resting on my hip, we listened to the click clack of her
heels on the stairs as she trekked up to our third floor apartment—the sweet
sound of professional help!
Blanco was everything she had seemed like on the phone—sweet,
smart, and passionate about baby sleep. Certified by the World Coach Institute
and a member of the American Academy
of Sleep Medicine, she reminded me of a gentler version of the SuperNanny.
“[As parents], we all know in our heart what to do, but we
hear and read so many things about what we are supposed to do that it gets
confusing,” she told me when I shared the varying strategies I’d used thus far
to help Avi sleep, from crying-it-out to picking him up and putting him down
endless times—all of which seemed counterintuitive.
To prepare for our session, Blanco had given me a sleep log
to fill out. It involved charting Avi’s daily schedule, including when he
slept, how he fell asleep, his general moods, when he nursed, and the
activities we did. It was tedious, but worth it. Blanco had studied the log
with the careful eye of a detective. Settling down on my sofa, she pulled a
thick file out from her purse, complete with charts and stats detailing his
sleep patterns. It showed I was working too hard to get Avi to sleep, my
efforts were not working, and he was getting less sleep than was ideal for his
age.
Then, Blanco presented me with every parent’s dream: a
customized sleep plan. It involved a set schedule—including naps that were
spaced close together and a temporary super-early bedtime of 5:45pm. Blanco does not believe in the cry-it-out
method, so instead of putting Avi in his crib and not going back in, we’d
return to soothe him at set intervals. It was ambitious: Avi was to take 2 to 3
hours worth of naps a day, and sleep for 11 to 12 hours at night. Could my
adorable, terrible sleeper really do that? Blanco was confident.
Despite her corporate background—she has an MBA from New
York University
and worked in marketing and strategy for Citigroup before founding Smooth
Parenting in 2009—Blanco has always had a knack for working with children and
families. Born and raised in Galicia,
Spain, she grew
up the oldest of 30-plus cousins. One of her first experiences with infant
sleep was as a teenager. A family friend asked her to babysit, warning her that
their baby was a terrible sleeper. But after one evening in Blanco’s care, the
baby slept for 8 hours straight—her longest stretch ever. Blanco’s secret?
Doing what was intuitive to her, patting and shushing the baby when she woke,
but not picking her up too often or giving her a bottle.
When Blanco became a mom herself about two-and-a-half years
ago, it was to premature twins, Emma and Alba. She essentially lived in the
NICU at New York Presbyterian
Hospital for two months, where she
found moms in situations similar to her own. She started an informal support
group that met in the hospital cafeteria and soon her fellow patients, and the
NICU’s doctors and nurses, began spreading the word about her special way of
helping others. It was largely that experience that led her to establish Smooth
Parenting.
Her parenting philosophy, like her approach to baby sleep,
is gentle. Parenthood, she says, should be enjoyable—not filled with
unnecessary stress. “My goal,” she sums up, “is to teach parents how to be the parents
they want to be.”
Despite her many success stories, however, I was nervous the
afternoon Blanco left our apartment. It wasn’t easy implementing her plan in
the following weeks. But after just two days of doing most of what she said,
Avi went from waking 4-5 times a night to waking just once, and in the course
of two weeks, his naps lengthened to over an hour each. It took a few more
months for him to sleep through the night—my own inhibitions got in the way of
that. Still, by the time I was ready to make it happen and cut out his last
night feed, Blanco was right by my side. “I’ll stay by you until you’re all
getting a good night’s sleep,” she wrote me in an email, offering advice and
support along the way.
Today, Avi is one year old and a great sleeper—something I
never thought I’d be able to say. But the biggest change that Blanco helped us
make wasn’t even in Avi’s sleep habits. It was in helping me become more
confident as a mom. When I was rocking him to sleep for endless hours and
responding to his every cry, I wasn’t giving him a chance to learn to sleep on
his own. I didn’t believe he could do it, and at the same time, didn’t think I
deserved a good night’s sleep enough to let him try. But today we’re both
better off because we’re well-rested.
Blanco knows how much a good night’s sleep can change a
family, which is why she loves her job. “When you have a client say, ‘It
changed us, we have a happier child, a happier family’…I never felt so
fulfilled in cooperate America,”
she says.
For more information, visit smoothparenting.com.
