Our 17 month old sometimes wakes during the night, but often just needs comfort to get back to sleep again. Being the independent miss that she is, it isn't necessarily a cuddle she is after. She drinks a lot of water and drinks it from the bottle for comfort.

Recently, we moved her bedroom around and her cot is now next to her changing table. What we have done is put a couple of bottles of water on the changing table that she can reach. About 70% of the time she wakes up now, she knows the water is there, helps herself and quickly goes back to sleep. We don't even know she has woken up.

There are still times when she wakes up and cries and we need to comfort her but this water-on-demand habit has enabled my husband and I to have some uninterrupted 'us' time in an evening instead of running up and downstairs (we live in a NT village house) whenever the baby woke up. When she wakes up in the morning too, she helps herself to some water and talks to her toys for a bit before crying out for us to come and cuddle her which gives us more precious sleep time in the mornings.