I'd be lying if I said this happened after carefully picking out the best sleep strategy and implementing it perfectly after endless hours of research. Nope. This happened entirely on accident.

So how did I manage to get my 10 month old to sleep through the night without actually trying?

So one Friday morning, he woke up around 5am and started whining but not crying. I was just so tired that I accidentally fell back to sleep! Next thing I know, he's waking me up at 9am! So not only did I realise that he was capable of sleeping for much longer than I thought he was, I realised that his wake ups were out of habit and not necessity.

Our "acceptable" wake up time is now 6:30am. My daughters was always 7am but Samuel definitely has an earlier body clock alarm than Sophie. If he wakes up in the night, I now leave him for 5 minutes before going in to him. About 80% of the time, he settles himself back down and goes back to sleep on his own.

Due to realising that his waking was out of habit, I also stopped giving him milk when he woke up in the night unless he's ill. To help him out of this habit, we now give him a meal right before bedtime s that a rumbly tummy won't be the cause of any wake ups.

We've always had a noise machine in Samuel's room which just helps to drown out the house sounds and stops him from being woken up by creaks etc. It's honestly the best thing we've ever bought for him and really helps him settle when he does wake up in the night. It has a timer so you can set it to turn off after 30, 60 or 90 minutes or you can turn the timer off and have it on the whole night, which is what we do.

Because of our new found success, I also implemented a rule I had with Sophie which was that he now isn't allowed out of his room until 6:30am. I'd got into the bad habit of taking him downstairs when he woke up at 5am because I didn't want him to wake up anyone else. But this was teaching him that whatever time he woke up was the right time to start the day.

So now if he wakes up early, if he's content, I'll leave him talking to himself in his cot until 6:30am and if he's not, I'll go and sit with him in our nursing chair.

Our night wakings have greatly reduced and now, 90% of the time he sleeps through. We're still working on trying to get him to sleep a bit later. It doesn't seem to make a difference what time he goes to bed, it doesn't make him sleep any later.