Why I Never Look at a Baby’s Sleep in Isolation — The Story Behind Fox and the Moon Sleep

By Emily, Founder of Fox and the Moon Sleep

I did not come to this work through a textbook. I came to it through my son.

Before Henry was born I was already a mother. Arthur had come into the world via a traumatic birth, and those early months with him — the reflux, the colic, the exhaustion — had given me what I thought was a fairly honest picture of how hard early motherhood could be. I was not naive. I knew it could be brutal.

It still did not prepare me for Henry.

Henry’s Story: A Birth That Changed Everything

My waters broke at twenty-eight weeks. I was in labour for a long time before anyone believed me, something that, we would later learn, is actually common with his condition. He was born at thirty weeks, in an emergency, and I was intubated before the anaesthetic had time to take hold. He was born within two minutes and had to be resuscitated. I did not hold him. I did not see him. I went to recovery not knowing if my son was alive.

I met him twenty-four hours later, wheeled into the neonatal unit still recovering from everything my body had just been through. I heard his paediatrician say the word harlequin. My mum, sitting beside me, quietly googled it and went home and sobbed because of the weight of that word and what it meant.

What followed was a conversation about the possibility of Down’s syndrome (the skin Henry had shed in utero, due to his condition, had altered his facial features and he had other markers, including one palm crease), and a form of ichthyosis, but there were many different strains and they did not know which one he had. They did not know his prognosis. They could not tell me what his life was going to look like.

He had genetic testing. We did not get the results until October. He was born in June.

Four months. Four months of caring for a critically ill premature baby without knowing what we were dealing with or what the future held. Four months of going back and forth to the hospital, of watching monitors, of learning to read his body in the way you only do when you have no other choice. Arthur was at home needing his mum. I was in pieces trying to be everything to everyone.

When Something Was Wrong — But Nobody Was Asking Why

During those four months Henry had apnoeas multiple times a day. His reflux was attributed to his prematurity, something he would grow out of, we were told. Something to manage. He was put on omeprazole and thickened feeds.

And then one day he stopped breathing and did not start again on his own, and I administered CPR to my baby.

When the genetic results came back in October, we learned that Henry had two mutations in his FATP4 gene. One was consistent with ichthyosis of prematurity. The other had never been recorded in medical history. He had inherited one mutation from me and one from his dad. There was no roadmap. No specialist who had seen exactly this combination before. No other family we could call. We were completely alone in it.

What followed was two years of chest infections so severe and so frequent that Henry was hospitalised around forty times before his second birthday. He was constantly struggling to breathe, sucking in at the chest, always wet sounding. He was tested for cystic fibrosis. He was given inhalers and presumed asthmatic. At six months old I pushed for Manchester Children’s Hospital to admit him, and an MRI and nasendoscopy diagnosed severe reflux and aspiration.

But the root cause, the reason the reflux was happening in the first place, the reason the aspiration kept occurring despite the medication and the thickener — that was not found.

The medical system had identified what was happening. Nobody asked why.

How Sleep Coaching Led Me to the Answer

I started my sleep coaching training in 2020, a year after Henry was born. And as I began to learn about feeding mechanics, oral dysfunction, and the relationship between what happens in a baby’s mouth and what happens in their body, something started to shift. I thought about the way Henry fed from his bottle. I thought about the patterns I had been watching for two years and not been able to name.

We saw a private myofunctional therapist and a dysphagia consultant. They told me Henry was tongue tied, something I had suspected but had never been able to get taken seriously.

What I had not understood until that moment was the chain of events that tongue tie had set in motion. He was swallowing air with every feed, aerophagia. That air was causing reflux. The reflux was happening silently, predominantly when he was laid flat and asleep, and he was aspirating it into his lungs. Every chest infection. Every hospitalisation. Every time I watched my son struggle to breathe. It traced back to his tongue.

It was not the NICU that found it. It was not the paediatricians, the respiratory team, or the gastroenterologist.

It was me. A mother who had trained herself to understand these things because nobody else was joining the dots.

We stopped the bottle. The aspiration stopped. We continued myofunctional therapy. Eighteen months ago Henry had his tongue tie divided. He has not been admitted to hospital in two and a half years.

This Is Why Fox and the Moon Sleep Exists

The effects of years of omeprazole, repeated courses of antibiotics, and the trauma his little body has been through are still present. This is not a neat ending. Henry’s journey is ongoing, and so is mine. But he is here. He is thriving.

And I understand now, in a way I could only have learned by living it, what it means when the root cause is missed. And what it means when it is finally found.

This is why I cannot look at a baby’s sleep in isolation. This is why I always ask about feeding, about birth, about what is happening in the body. This is why Fox and the Moon Sleep is built the way it is built, not around schedules and methods and behavioural techniques, but around investigation, around listening, around asking why until we find an answer that actually holds.

Every family that comes to me deserves someone who will keep asking why.

Henry taught me that. And I will never stop.

What Holistic Sleep Coaching Actually Means

At Fox and the Moon Sleep, we don’t start with a sleep method. We start with your baby.

We look at feeding history, birth story, oral function, gut health, nervous system regulation, and the full picture of what might be contributing to unsettled sleep, because in our experience, the thing keeping your baby awake at night is rarely just a sleep problem.

This root-cause approach is what separates holistic infant sleep support from conventional sleep training, and it is what we bring to every family we work with.

If you have a baby or child who is frequently waking, unsettled, difficult to feed, or showing signs that something feels off, we would love to hear from you.

[Explore Emily’s support packages →]

Fox and the Moon Sleep is a holistic infant and child sleep coaching practice based in the UK. We work without behavioural sleep training methods, specialising in unsettled and frequently waking babies, reflux, oral dysfunction, and root-cause investigation. Our team includes infant feeding trained practitioners with specialisms in oral function, nervous system regulation, and attachment.