Hellobee Boards

Sorry it's been so tough on you. I'm by no means an expert but from what I've read in parenting books and from what worked for my LO, here is my advice.

In order to establish a good bedtime routine and a good sleep schedule, you need to have a very predictable routine for the day time. This means waking baby at a certain time in the morning, for example 6am, and that becomes the first feeding of the day. Then feeding baby every 2-3 hours (depending on how often he needs to eat). Keep the awake time relatively the same, for example 1 hr awake time at that age. So, baby eats at 6, awake for 1 hr, then put him down for a nap. When he wakes up, you start the cycle over. The cycle should be "eat, awake, sleep" (this means that you shouldn't nurse to sleep). If he is still sleeping during one of his naps and its time for him to eat again, then wake him up. You want him to eat as much as he can during the day, so that he needs less at night. Try to keep every cycle the same amount of time, roughly.

So if he eats every 2 hours and the morning wake up time is 6am, you should end up feeding him around 8pm like you wanted. (I'm assuming he eats every 2 hours because you said you feed him at 8 and then at 10)

Then at night (after his 10pm feeding), when he wakes up, keep the room dark, don't play or talk with him, just feed and put back to sleep. This will teach him the difference between night and day.

It might not work in the beginning because he is still very little, and you can tweak the wake up time to suit you, but the point is that you want his day and night to be very predictable so that gradually he learns what to expect. He will know that 6am is when the day starts and he'll start waking up at that time on his own. He will also start sleeping bigger stretches at night with the eventual hope is that he will sleep from 10pm to 6am straight. Once he gets a little older, you can push his last feeding to 8pm instead of 10pm

Hope this helps.