Quote Originally Posted by GoktimusPrime View Post
My brother currently has a 1 year old and shared with me a technique that I wish I knew when my daughter was that age -- how to make your baby sleep without waking up during the night! Because my nephew goes to bed and doesn't wake up until morning!

Apparently here's the trick: routine. Everything that the child does every day should be on a strict timetable. Each meal, nap, bath time, bed time etc. should all be scheduled and happen at the same time on the dot every day. This in turn basically adjusts the baby's body clock, meaning that they will naturally get used to sleeping and not waking up until morning! When Yuki was younger, we did have a timetable that we mostly stuck to, but there were exceptions -- lunch might half an hour late one day, or bath time an hour early another day etc. In hindsight, this would've thrown her body clock off. We may have had better success if we stuck with our timetable more strictly.

So yeah, while this advice comes too late for me, hopefully it will come in handy for those of you who still have little babies who are keeping you up at night. Now to invent time travel and tell this to my past self...
That's not the case for me. Arty has just started sleeping through on most nights, occasionally he wakes up for a drink but for the most part, he sleeps from about 8:30pm to 5-6am 5-6 nights a week. The thing is that nothing has changed. His routine, while not super strict, is basically the same as it was when he was waking up at least once a night, every night.

Also, that strict a routine doesn't allow for much flexibility to live a normal life. If I had to feed Arty breakfast, lunch and dinner, bath him, put him down for a sleep at the same time every day, I doubt I'd ever get out of the house, let alone have any fun outings with him.

While strict routines can help and believe me, I know how important a good routine is to a toddler, there is nothing to say what works for one child will work for another. In fact, in my experience, the opposite is usually true, what works for one child, will most likely not work for another. Otherwise, parenting would be easy because we'd all have the instruction manual that they gave us in the hospital!