How I Made A Balls Of My Baby’s Sleep Routine

We've done it again. We were lazy, non-committed-to-the-sleep-routine on Child The First (and look how well that turned out, what with him essentially living in our bed and all) - and guess what, we have been just as useless with Child The Second. What is wrong with us?! Little Eva's night time routine started out well. Once we got passed the tiny baby phase and she no longer needed to be fed during the night, she basically slept right through from the time we put her to bed, to the time that her older brother got up and started clattering around to wake everyone else too. I relayed this updated family information to anyone who would listen. 'She's a dreamboat!' I declared. 'After three years of not sleeping at all, we deserve this!' I rejoiced. So how the actual HELL did we recently find ourselves staring gloomily at our one-and-a-half-year-old daughter as she danced in circles and laughed at us in the living room at midnight, refusing to go to bed? I'll tell you how: we got lazy. Somewhere over the last few months, she woke up at 8pm and needed something. I can't remember the precise details but let's just say she got sick in her cot so we brought her downstairs for a little while, just to make sure she was ok. Then maybe the next night, she woke up again and we remembered that bringing her downstairs yesterday for ten minutes helped settle her down before going back up. So we did that again. Except that time, she stayed downstairs for twenty minutes. Then perhaps the night after that she woke up crying and we automatically grabbed her from the cot and brought her down to hang out with us because we had started a new series on Netflix and didn't want to miss a minute. And that time, she stayed down for an hour. The night I realised that things had gone on too long and too far was when I actually woke up to our beautiful baby girl slapping me on the arm because I had dropped off while she was still up partying hard with her new Hug Me Elmo and Hello Kitty handbag. It was midnight. Over the course of just a few weeks, our really good sleeper had become the complete opposite of that because we had dropped the ball on the situation entirely. My partner and I had lost all alone time in the evenings; we didn't even get through dinner together before we'd hear her wailing through the monitor and as much as it was really annoying; we had nobody to blame but ourselves. As of this week, we have rolled up our sleeves and are doing our best to get the situation back under control. The new rules are simple: once Eva goes to bed, she isn't allowed back downstairs. And if she cries, we have to deal with it by sitting outside her door and sporadically reassuring her until she falls asleep. Tiredness, laziness and FOMO on Netflix are no longer acceptable excuses for not getting our girl back into a routine. We are taking back the night. Or at the very least for now, our evening. Wish us luck! Have you dropped the ball with your kid's routines for any of the reasons mentioned above? Let us know in the comments.