Got to admit it's getting better...

So over the last two weeks sleep has started featuring in our lives again. Thank God. We missed you sleep!!!

Yes it would appear that Catherine Anne has finally learnt to self settle (to an extent) and the horrific all night tossing / turning / crying / shhhhing / patting marathons have fortunately become a thing of the past (I dread writing this. It will be just my luck that as soon as I crow about it, she'll regress. God help me).

During the bad patch I tried lots of different ways to get Cate to sleep. Top three favourites were 1) Giving her a bottle 2) Giving her a dummy and 3) Putting her in bed with us. The problem was that slowly each method stopped working. Plus, the books said those things were bad, bad, bad.

I read a few different books, talked to lots of different mums and researched on the net. All about sleep. Yup, I was obsessed. In the end, the book that started making the most sense to me was 'Save Our Sleep' by Tizzie Hall. I'd held out for a long time when it came to this book - it just didn't sound like it was for me. Three weeks of next to no sleep and I'm desperate enough to try anything.

So this is how bedtime works for us now. Cate goes down to sleep for the night at 7pm. She has the same story in her cot every night and we use the same sleep cue sentences every night too. We still give her a bottle in her cot - against the advice of...well...just about every book I've ever come across - and nine times out of ten, she goes to sleep without a peep. Most nights she wakes at least once, if not twice at some stage. Now I let her cry it out. Again, most night this takes her under five minutes before she is sound asleep again. Progress.

Most mornings she wakes at 5am-ish and I give her another bottle in bed. This usually means she sleeps til 7, 7.30, 8 or even 9am. SWEEEET. This morning she slept right through the 5am wake up call and din't call out for a bottle until 7am. So she slept right through from 10pm - 7am no wake ups at all. This is one happy mummy.

I'm not so good at sticking to the routines suggest by Tizzie Hall - my times get thrown out every day. But I am sticking to the 7pm bedtime as much as possible and I am sticking to the 'cry it out at night' theory and both are working for us right now. And that, my friends, is a little piece of heaven right there!