About Kate
Kate Reynolds
Certified Holistic Sleep Coach, OCN Level 6
Hello! I’m Kate, a Level 6 Qualified Sleep Coach. I’m Mum to two little girls and live with my husband in the beautiful Surrey Hills.
After graduating from Bath University, I moved to London, spending 15 happy years living in North, South and West London, working for various international travel companies.
When I was Head of Travel product for a large media firm, I fell pregnant with my first daughter. Sleep interested me from day one of when she was born. I felt overwhelmed with the amount of new information you are given as a new parent from a huge range of places such as NCT groups, health visitors and the hospital. So much of it relates to safety, health, illness, changing nappies and breastfeeding, which is all useful, but what about sleep?
What about the part we spend half of our 24 hour day doing? It fascinated me how newborn sleep evolves, how it starts, what affects it? Learning about sleep cycles. Can you impact it? If so, how?
I am instinctively a routine person, so I adopted some good bedtime habits from the start and for my first child it worked well. I read books and made it my business to be educated on how I can do all I can to help. Since then I have always remained interested in this area and have studied on the Holistic sleep coach course, (written and supported by Lyndsey Hookway) where i consolidated all my learning and qualified as a sleep coach.
My passion is to help families with sleep education and support them with their sleep challenges. By making small changes and offering gentle sleep solutions, I strive to improve their own sleep as well as their child’s.
I really look forward to helping you too.
Kate x
About my qualification
I am a registered OCN Level 6 Holistic sleep coach. It is the most comprehensive sleep coaching program there is, and is recognised internationally. It included all the most up to date strategies and was led by the renowned Lyndsey Hookway, author of several books including ‘Holistic Sleep coaching’. The training uses only evidence based research and my knowledge is in depth, accurate and extremely extensive. OCN level 6 is equivalent to a degree level of study.
My Story
As is the case for everyone, my journey to motherhood, through trying to start a family through to bringing our first baby home and getting to grips with newborn sleep, has taken its twists and turns. To be honest, some parts that I expected to find relatively easy have turned out to be a lot harder than I ever imagined!
I’ve always loved children, going back to when I was only 11 years old I used to help my mum with my baby brother. I used to babysit very regularly from 15/16 years old for children locally. From a relatively early age I was aware that due to a medical condition, if I was ever lucky enough to meet someone and try to conceive then it could be more difficult for me than for people who didn't have my condition.
I guess being armed with knowledge about my condition meant that once I had married my husband, we should try for a family quite quickly as we had no idea how long it may take, and that’s if I managed to fall pregnant at all.
As it happened, I reacted positively to clomid treatment and fell pregnant with my first child very quickly. The first year was filled with many new experiences, including jaundice, tongue tie, colic, and an egg and peanut allergy! My first took extremely well to a calm and regular bedtime routine, which I mainly started from 3 months old. Generally she was always a peaceful easily settled baby, but it did not stop me googling ‘can you die from no sleep’ when she was 8 days old! That gives an insight into how I was feeling, and if you have been there, you’ll know exactly how I felt!
We did not wait long for a second for the same reason of not knowing how long it would take, which led to an 18 month gap between the girls. Before I became pregnant with my second I had asked to go back to my job part time, which was refused, so I resigned from my long standing career. Suddenly I was all consumed by motherhood, and two little ones.
This certainly had its challenges. You may relate to this but I would often have anxiety around routines, naps and sleep. My ability to stick to routine certainly had benefits but at times I slowly learnt there needs to be flexibility in this as well. Having been a stay at home mum (with a 2 and 1 year old during the pandemic) I really had some tough times which impacted my own mental health. I also went through a difficult 18 months with regard to sleep with my second daughter which oddly started at 3 years old!
We often think sleep struggles are all about newborns but it certainly is not always the case, as I realised! In recent times I have really struggled with sleep for when my daughters have been 3, 4 and 5 years old. I feel this is an area I have had to suddenly go through a steep learning curve on. I am particularly passionate about a good bedtime routine and have lots of ways to help with these ages as well as younger toddlers and babies.
All of this has led me to really want to support new parents with helpful information on baby and child sleep, and generally become a support for what can be a life changing time.
