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Thankfully most of our friends have small babies at this time, so we do early dinners, or my parents keep baby so we can go out.

Honestly, we rarely go out for dinner anymore. By the time 7 p.m. rolls around, we are ready to climb into some comfy pajamas and collapse and go to bed at 9 a.m....

We had to switch to doing things during the day. Our problem isn't so much the bedtime, it's the fact that my son wakes up at the a**crack of dawn, so who wants to stay out late and deal with that in the morning?

We were lucky in that in the beginning she could sleep anywhere, so eve though she was ready to go down at 7, I could find a quiet corner, get her to sleep and she would sleep in her car seat. As she got older, we just made earlier plans or had people over, eventually it got easier to keep her up occasionally past her bedtime.

We don't.
T has a great bedtime right now. He goes down between 6:30 - 7:00pm and usually sleeps until 6:30 - 7:00am. We try and do anything we want to do early in the day. If we want to do something late we do it on the weekend and just roll with a late bedtime.

His good sleep outweighs not going out late right now. Haha. We just go to bed early too.

Uhhh....you don't? You could always do an early dinner at around 5:30. 9 or 10 seems late to be out at dinner anyways (but maybe that's cause I'm just used to eating earlier now). Having a well-rested LO makes our lives a lot easier, so it's worth the trade-off for us. Plus I love having a few hours every night to ourselves (LO goes to bed at 7).

We don't - and your bedtime is late for us. We would have people over early and do a 4pm cookout or have people over for football or something. Bedtime was 6pm until she turned 2, now it's 7pm. We don't go out after dark. We get a sitter once a year and otherwise go on couple dates without her when my family is in town.

dd goes to bed SUPER early--between 5 and 6:30 usually. we either have people over, go out one at a time, or have my parents babysit (but that's rare). we usually socialize during the day now!

At that point, LO didn't really have a bedtime, and he would still sleep anywhere and everywhere. He would actually sleep the best at noisy restaurants, so we went out to dinner A LOT while I was on mat leave. He was fussy during the evening if we were home, but he would conk out if we went out. I would then feed him when we got home and put him to bed for the night. For us it worked, but I guess it would definitely depend if you LO sleeps in their car seat while you're out and still go to bed immediately when you get home.

We started a solid bed time of 7:30/8pm when we sleep trained at 5.5mo. Now we either:
- get a babysitter
- go out to eat before 6pm and bring LO with
- have people come over to our house

I second the not wanting to stay up late anymore now that LO gets up early anyway. I'm done and ready to hit the hay by 10pm, so even on "social" evenings we're home pretty early.

Our son goes to bed between 7-730pm but has one more feeding around 830pm. We have people over at our house for dinner by prepping everything in advance and have DH do bath and prep around 630 while I greet guests and mingle. Then we bring the baby out for people to say goodnight to and then I put him down as we are getting ready to eat. Then I will go do the 830 feed while DH entertains.

Or we go out for dinner after LO is in bed and my mom is watching him. But LO usually doesn't fight bedtime and the 830pm feed is a sleepy feeding so it's not that hard.

I just went with the flow. 1-2 late bedtimes during the week on my maternity leave didn't ruin our schedule long term.

We stay in most of the time. We've had my parents and DH's parents babysit a few times to go see a movie, but LO is up so early (6-615 is typical, but can be earlier), that we don't want to be out late anyways! For dinners, we try to do 5-530 or do morning or late afternoon things on the weekends. We're homebodies in any case, so we generally weren't out late before LO either!

Honestly, I guess we don't have a "life" anymore. We work full time and it's tiring taking care of 2 babies. So we rarely go out with friends. We'll have date night every so often and my mom will watch the kids. Most of our free time is family time.

Shit, our DD had a 6pm bedtime when she was that age. Lol. We just didn't go out or people came over.

I wish we had an earlier bedtime so that DH and I could have more time alone together.

Brunch, weekends, lunches. That's life with a kid.

At that age, DD would sleep anywhere so it was really easy to just put her in her infant car seat when she got tired. It was almost as if the louder it was, the better she slept. And we weren't too rigid about the bedtime routine so when we got home we would just put her in her crib or bassinet.

Before the 4 month sleep regression we would throw caution to the wind and put them down late or let them fall asleep on us at friends' houses. At 8 months old I think we are finally past the 4 month regression (yeah, I'm not even kidding) so we are religious about bedtime now. The routine starts at 6:45 or else! We went out for date night at 4:45 this weekend, haha. Generally we do things during the day now. Most of our friends have kids so we all understand.

I know this is not what you want to hear right now, but we kind of just didn't go out or did things separately for a while, unless we were able to get a sitter. I can't lie- it was a big adjustment and even now with a 2.5 year old the bedtime is still fairly early (like 7:30/8:00) and we try and stick with it. Although, at this age it's easier to move bedtime back if necessary, though we tend to just do that for special occasions. Child sleep pretty much rules our lives, lol.

ETA: I agree with those who say that the silver-lining w/ an early bedtime is more alone time with your SO. With baby asleep you can relax, eat a late dinner, have a glass of wine, watch your shows. Not exciting, but pretty appealing for an overtired parent.

We don't go out. DD goes to be around 615 and always has. Everyone said she'd start staying up later as she got older but we are at 14 months and still same bedtime. It's ok most nights though. Sometimes I'll go out with friends after she's down for a late dinner at 7 (hard to believe that is "late" for me now!) and DH goes out on certain nights. If we want to go together we get a sitter who just sits in our living room and watches tv.

@Meridian: You don't, lol. My son used to be asleep at 6 pm!! Talk about early. Now that he's 17 months his bedtime is 7:30 but it doesn't bother me - we don't go out that much anyway. People used to make fun of me for being super anal about his bedtime but he's an amazing sleeper, soo I don't care!