Today's post is courtesy of SnoozeShade blogger, Julie, who writes at AtHomeWithJules and is a mum of two.

Julie's New Year's Resolution when she was a new mum, was - like many of us - to get more sleep! Here’s how she got on… 

“To be fair to Little M, we were very lucky. She was always a pretty good sleeper, more or less sleeping through from around three months. We really shouldn't have complained. But we did want to get a little more sleep.

“We had a nice little bath-story-milk-bed routine going that was starting to give us a bit of our evenings back. You see, Little M would sleep through but wasn’t falling asleep until around 10/11pm. However, shifting the bath forward to 5:30pm changed that and we finally had her going down by about 8ish, sleeping until 9:30pm give or take half an hour, then going back down for the night after some milk and not waking up again until 6:30am. Amazing, right?!

“Then weaning happened. When we started weaning Little M, dinner was at 5:30, pushing her bath back to around 7pm. She then quickly fell asleep but woke as soon as we tried to put her down in the cot, falling straight back to sleep when we picked her up again. So annoying! She then became wide awake until sometimes as late as 1am. Painful.

“She also seemed to be guzzling milk like there was no tomorrow! I expressed all of her feeds and was struggling to keep up, despite making no change to my pumping schedule.

“At this time, we also needed to move Little M into her own room. I was not ready for this! She was in a bedside crib and fortunately was still small enough fit but we knew this wouldn't be the case for much longer. We were still able to lie in our bed while trying to get her off to sleep and we knew it wouldn't be so comfortable in the armchair in her nursery.

“So we needed to do something about it with no idea how. We decided to experiment with different routines until we found something that worked for us and for Little M. 

“My hubby and I wanted a bit of our evenings back, as well as a good night's sleep. Was that being greedy? I don’t think so!