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Two weeks at my mom's house undid six weeks of Ferber. And redoing it made things worse. I used to think sleep training was the answer to everything. And for four months, I really believed it was. My daughter Lily went from waking up six times a night to sleeping through the night. And I remember the first morning I woke up before she did, just lying there in my bed and, not believing it was real. It took me and my husband six weeks of hard nights but we finally did it We had done the work. The hard, awful, necessary work. The nights of sitting outside her door with my heart in my throat. The timers. The intervals. The checking in and walking back out while she cried. And for four months, it worked perfectly. So when my mom called asking us to come to Italy for the summer because she hadn't seen Lily since she was born I thought ok Lily is sleep trained now She won't be awake constantly and we can actually enjoy the trip I told myself it would be fine because we have our routine it would just be a different country and house, so she'd adjust. And honestly, the first night wasn't bad. She woke up twice. I just thought it was the travel, maybe a little jet lag, the new smells, the sounds of a house she'd never been in. So I got up, settled her back down, and she went straight back to sleep both times. I remember thinking, okay, we've got this. The second night, she was up three times, it was still manageable, nothing we hadn't gone through before, it was just the adjustment period The next few nights were the same, not great but manageable. Lily kept waking up, two times, three times, and I kept getting up and settling her back down. It wasn't perfect but we were managing, and I told myself it would work out. Then, around night six, something changed. She stopped waking up two or three times she started waking up every hour. Sometimes more. Like we had been put straight back to the newborn phase, except now she was heavier and louder, and I had already done this once, and I did not have it in me to do it again. That's when my mom started getting up with her because I was exhausted and I was on what was supposed to be a trip to see family I just wanted one evening where I wasn't the only one responsible for everything. I did not understand what I was watching happen. And when we flew home, I was actually hopeful it was our house, her room, her crib. Familiar smells, familiar sounds, everything exactly where she left it. I thought she just needed to be back in her own space, and she'll bounce back. Give her a few days to shake off the jet lag and we'll be fine. But she wasn't fine. We gave her the adjustment time. We waited. And even after the jet lag should have been gone, she was still waking up every hour and a half, crying until I came in. As soon as I got to her, she'd go straight back down, which meant she could clearly sleep. Which almost made it worse because it was the same pattern we had spent six weeks getting rid of back, like we had never fixed it. So I tried to go back to ferber the same method that got her to sleep perfectly so I did everything the same But for some reason, Lily fought it in a way she never did the first time The first time, she was able to settle herself within a few days But this time it had been two weeks of trying, and she was getting worse, not better. She screamed and cried for longer, and she was just waking up more It was like something changed her during that two-week trip, and Ferber just wasn't able to help anymore I went online that night trying to find something, anything, that made sense of what had happened. And I found a thread where a mom wrote something that shocked me. Something no one had ever told me when I started sleep training. She said: "Pretty much any change in routine messes up sleep training” “We had to retrain our son after every sickness, every vacation, every vaccine, every nap adjustment. We gave up eventually because it never got easier." I read that three times. Another mom in the same thread wrote: "Sleep training is generally not a one-off event. It's likely that you'll need to go through the process of retraining multiple times later on." And I just felt angry. Because I had gone into sleep training thinking it was the answer. Lily kept waking up constantly and I thought okay, this is the fix. Six weeks of the hardest nights of my life because I believed that if I just got through it, we'd be done. We'd have solved it. But reading those threads I realized I hadn't solved anything. I had just bought myself a few months. And one trip to my parents' house took two weeks to undo four months of work. What kind of solution stops working the moment you go on holiday? And I started to wonder if I'd been solving the wrong problem the whole time. That was the thought sitting in my chest when I posted in the Facebook group at 2:30am About how we'd sleep trained for six weeks, And how one trip had wiped out all of our progress, how I was too exhausted to start over and starting to question whether any of this ever actually worked Or if I'd just put both of us through all of that for a fix that wasn’t permanent I hit post and put my phone face down on the couch. A few minutes later someone named Danielle sent me a DM and that’s when everything changed. "I went through the exact same thing, almost word for word. Can I tell you what I figured out?" I typed back yes. "Okay so here's what I used to think," she said. "I thought when the trip messed everything up it was because she forgot how to self soothe. Like the skill was gone. And if I could just get her back into the routine she'd remember." That's exactly what I thought, I told her. "Right. But that's not actually what's happening. And this is the part that changed everything for me when I finally understood it." I kept reading. "When babies first fall asleep at bedtime, they drop straight into deep sleep. Heavy, solid sleep. Nothing wakes them." "But after that first sleep cycle, about 90 minutes in, the rest of the night is lighter." "And during light sleep, if their breathing isn't perfectly smooth, their body tenses up. Tense body means awake baby." I typed back, she's not congested though. I don't hear anything wrong with her breathing. "You wouldn't be able to. It's not the kind of congestion you can hear. It's just tiny airway resistance. Even the smallest amount is enough to make breathing feel like work." "And when breathing feels like work during light sleep, the nervous system goes on alert. Which means awake." I sat there for a second. That's why she keeps waking up at the same intervals? Every hour and a half? "Yes. And here's the part about the trip that nobody talks about." "When you were at your parents' house, your daughter had more stimulation, more people, more everything. Different air, different smells, different temperature. Her body was working harder just to be there." "And every time she stirred at night someone was there. Being rocked back down, being held, being soothed. Which means her nervous system never had to do it alone." "So when you came home, it wasn't that she forgot how to self soothe. She never stopped self soothing at bedtime, right? She still goes down okay?" I thought about it. She did. Bedtime was actually fine. It was the middle of the night that was falling apart. "Right. So the self soothing skill is still there. But at night, in those light sleep phases, her body is hitting a wall. And the wall isn't behavioral. It's physical." I read that three times. "Everyone focuses on calming the nervous system that’s warm baths help, why white noise is recommended. You're lowering stress hormones so the baby's body can relax. That's the first half." "But the other half, the part no one talks about, is keeping the airways open so breathing stays smooth during those light sleep phases." How do you do that? I typed. "Fir needle," she said. "It helps open airways, clear mucus, makes breathing feel easier. Like eucalyptus for adults when you're stuffed up, but gentle enough for babies." "When you combine it with lavender, one to calm the nervous system so they can fall asleep, one to keep airways clear so they can stay asleep, you're addressing both parts of the problem." I had never heard of fir needle. Not once in four months of reading everything I could find about baby sleep. "Most people haven't. I found this organic sleep cream called Slumberlee. It has both lavender and fir needle, with jojoba and olive oil as the base” “And I started using it on my daughter's chest and feet before bed and within three days she was sleeping six hour stretches. After a week she was sleeping through the night." I told her I didn't want to get my hopes up. That I'd tried things before. "I know," she said. "But this was the first thing that made sense to me. Like it wasn't just another thing to try. It was actually addressing what was happening in her body." I thought about what she said for a long time after that. Because she was right about one thing. Lily could still go down awake at bedtime. The training hadn't disappeared. She still had the skill. Which meant the problem at night was something else. Something that wasn't about what she knew how to do. Something physical. And suddenly the whole trip made sense in a way it hadn't before. Different environment, more stimulation, more people handling her, her body working harder just to be there. Her airways more irritated. Her breathing less smooth. Her nervous system hitting that wall every hour and a half. Sleep training had taught her to fall asleep alone. It had never touched the thing waking her up. That was always a different problem. And nobody had told me that. I got the link from Danielle and ordered it that night andn It came two days later. That first night I rubbed a little on Lily's chest and feet before bath and bed. She went down at 7:30 like normal. 9pm. Still asleep. 11pm. Still asleep. I woke up at 1am and grabbed my phone in the dark because the monitor had been silent for so long. Pulled up the camera. She was on her side, completely out. She woke up at 4am. That was it. Eight and a half hours. The second night she slept from 7:30 to 3am. The third night she woke up once. I heard her on the monitor, fussing for maybe two minutes, then silence. She went back down on her own. By the end of that first week she was sleeping in longer stretches than anything we'd seen even at the peak of her sleep training. And she was still going down awake at bedtime. Still putting herself to sleep. That part had never left. The self soothing was never the problem. The problem was what was happening in her body at 1am, at 2:30am, at the forty-five minute mark of every light sleep cycle when her airways tightened just enough to make her nervous system say wake up. That was the thing the sleep training never touched. Once that was addressed, everything she'd already learned came back. Because she never really lost it. She was just stuck. I'm not saying sleep training doesn't work. I'm not saying those six weeks didn't matter. But if your baby was sleeping through the night and one trip to your parents' house undid all of it. If you're sitting there looking at weeks or months of hard work dissolving and you can't understand how something that worked so completely could fall apart so fast. It might not be that she forgot. It might be that there was always a second half to the problem that the sleep training never reached. And if you fix that half, everything you already built comes back. Because she never really stopped knowing how. She was just stuck. Thank you for reading my story if you’d like to try what worked for me and Lily I’ll put the link to Slumberlee here https://slumberlee.com/products/organic-sleep-cream