Babies: 0 - 3 Months

Bedtime Confusion

How did you folks go about setting up a bedtime routine?

 My little one is about one month old. We plan on sleep training around four months, but we are thinking we should set up some sort of routine soon. Right now, she has pretty peaceful days until about 6pm. Then she cluster feeds and fusses until about 11pm. She then goes down, has one feeds between 3am to 4am, and then sleeps until 7am.

 We'd like a reasonable bedtime, but now, it seems silly to do a bedtime routine during the evening, if we are just going to keep feeding and soothing her until 11pm. Should we just wait on the routine until we are ready to sleep train?

 (I hope no one suggests doing it at 11pm. We are both shredded by 11pm each evening.)

Re: Bedtime Confusion

  • It's almost impossible to get a baby into a routine that young.  I would let DD go to sleep when she wanted, there was no other way at the time.  You can start doing something like bath, eat, cuddle time or book each night but she may not fall into a consistent bed time for awhile.  FWIW DD started her own routine at about 3 months and has a pretty consistent bedtime each night.  She always goes to bed at around 8:30 to 9:00.
    DD#1 4/3/2008 TTC in 2012
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  • I guess that's the question. Does it make sense to do bath (which she hates, btw), cuddle, book at this age? I thought the point of that was to create a transition to "bed-time". However, it won't be at bedtime for a while.
  • We started our bedtime routine around that age.  We ended up having to move the time around a bit because he wanted to go to bed earlier.

    We just made a bath one of his activities.  I don't bother with the book at this point, he doesn't have the attention span for that, but we will incorporate it as he gets older.

  • First I would suggest moving up the bedtime. We found DS slept more if we put him down at 9 instead of 11 and he sleeps until the same time regardless. We started his bedtine routine 2 weeks ago, and he's 9 weeks tomorrow. We change his diaper, do a little baby massage with lotion (burt's bees or another calming lotion would work), pajamas, swaddle then bottle or boob and finally bed. We start the routine about 30 min before bed. I think he is really responding well to it and has been sleeping well. I would suggest starting it. it can't hurt.
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