Hellobee Boards

Routine is good. Put him in pj's for the night, do bath and night time rituals. Sure, he'll wake up, but doing the routine things will help get him accustomed to nighttime activities and maybe even help him sleep better.

@Muggle Born: we just picked a time arbitrarily and adjusted as he got older and slept longer stretches! Sounds totally normal to me, tell people to buzz off

My daughter is 12 weeks old and we've been setting a bedtime routine from the very beginning. Unfortunately, I haven't seen much a difference in her sleep but feels beneficial to me to wind down the day.

Another downside is that her falling-asleep-for-the-"night" time is still around 10pm. That means even if I try to give her a bath and nursing session at 7:30pm, she will fuss or be wide away for a few hours before she even thinks about sleeping.

Just checking in as we're in the same boat. LO is 8 weeks today and we're doing the same, "feed when hungry, put down when tired" shtick. I feel like we should have a routine, but I'm not quite sure where to start! Let me know if you implement anything and how it goes! I know for a fact bathtime won't be a part of it anytime soon, she allllways gets way too worked up during the getting out part!

We picked bedtime based on when we wanted to go to bed. So when she was a few weeks old, we started our routine before her 10pm feeding, even though she would still be up at 1 to eat again. She started giving us longer stretches after a while and we have inched her bedtime up. I think nighttime rituals help them learn to STTN.

I wouldn't say that we have a bedtime "routine," but we try to do things to differentiate daytime from night time, and I think that helps. For example, we only swaddle at night, only use white noise at night, only try to enforce general quiet at night, and only have darkness at night. During the day, LO will nap in the carseat if we go somewhere (like pickup and dropoff for daycare for my older son), and he'll take short naps here and there at other times, but it's always in the context of light and noise and a generally sleep-unfriendly environment. Then, when it's time for bed at night, we try to make the environment as sleep-friendly as possible. Our nurse practitioner/lactation consultant is big on this, and urged us to start making the distinction between daytime sleep conditions and nighttime sleep conditions as early as possible. I think that has helped.
On the other hand, we did the same thing with my older son, and he never slept more than 3 hours at a time till he was 7 months old, so a lot of it depends on the kid.
I will say that we've seen a big change in LO's sleep in the last week or so- my LO is almost 12 weeks, and up until last week I was pretty happy if we got a 4 hour chunk of sleep from him at night, and he's been consistently sleeping 5-6 hours before his first waking the last few nights, so part of it may also be age!