In an ideal world, you'd take your baby to his cot, lie him down lovingly, and then leave the room as he gently drifts off.
But reality doesn't always work like that. Sometimes, you might feel the need to stay in your baby's room until he's quiet - but once that happens, the problem lies in how to leave the room without waking him up.
Because here's the thing: Babies have a finely tuned sense for when someone is trying to leave them.
As soon as they pick up a whiff of movement, or hear the slightest noise, they can spring awake faster than a Jack-in-a-box. So when you're trying to slip out silently, you need to get creative.
Friends have told me stories about how they've manouevred out of their baby's room, Entrapment-style. (You know - that movie with Catherine Zeta Jones, where she has to go over and under all those red laser beams without activating any.)
But even doing that has its issues. After all, it's amazing how much your bones creak (or your floorboards heave) when you're trying to be super quiet.
Then there are the mums who gently bum-shuffle their way out of their baby's room, going from sitting position to out the door, without getting up.
Now a new manouevre can be added to parents' list of Ways To Escape a Baby's Room Unnoticed.
The founder of this move, 32-year-old Caryn Morris from South Africa, had no idea that when she performed this exercise she'd find a video of herself doing it going viral.
When Caryn recently had friends over for dinner, she struggled to get her 15-month-old baby, Brody, to sleep.
After hours of trying to settle him, she came up with a plan.
"We had guests at home for dinner and because he sensed people were around he was moaning and wanted to get out the cot. Every time I walked out the room he would stand up and moan," she said in a recent interview.
So Caryn plonked herself on the floor next to her baby's cot. When she lay down, Brody didn't seem to flinch.
"I slithered a little bit and he still remained on his side. Before I knew I had made it out the door and he hadn't moved."
When she rejoined her guests, Caryn showed them the footage from the baby camera set up in Brody's room.
Her husband Tyrone found the video so funny that he uploaded it on Facebook on January 14.
Since then it has garnered over 58,000 views and hundreds more likes, shares and comments - and those numbers keep growing.
Tyrone's caption says it all: "The best thing about having cameras in your house is watching your wife trying to exit the room after putting your son down!! Sometimes you have to use your initiative for your exit!! PS The SA Army are calling me for you to do training on the reverse leopard crawl!!"
Since the story has gone viral, there are people rolling their eyes at the "ridiculous" things parents do to appease their children, along with those that note that doing these kinds of things isn't great in the long-term.
But it doesn't look like Caryn was coming up with a plan she intends to implement every night.
Besides, it's hard not to at least applaud her for her creativity.
As one commenter on Facebook so aptly put it, "Oh my gosh, the things we do as parents."
Essential Baby