What's your schedule & routine?
Hello,
I have a 2.5 month old baby girl, and we are working slowly on improving our sleep routines so that we can all find a "schedule" (and I use that word loosely!) that we all like. So sorry, this will probably be a long post, but if you can stick with me and give me some pointers I'd really appreciate it! Until last week DD was only napping 30-45 minutes at a time, and with the help of No Cry Sleep Solutions, and a pacifier, I've extended her naps to 2-2.5 hours (yay!). Now that the length of her naps are good and consistent, I am eager to find a flexible schedule that we can follow every day. I was hoping that maybe someone in here would be able to see some things in our day that I can change or adjust to fix the rest of our day.
So here is what our day looks like right now:
0715 - wake, diaper change
0730-0800 - eat & burping
0830 - ready to start nap routine (swaddle, pacifier, swing/bouncy seat/rocking, then into crib while awake but drowsy).
1030 - awake and ready to start the same routine again. She follows this pattern until early evening, eating every 3 hours.
And here's a bit of background:
- She is always ready to start going back to sleep exactly 1 hour and 15 minutes from the time she woke up.
- We are using a pacifier right now, but I am hoping to eliminate it by 4 months, espcecially since she now seems to think she needs it to get to sleep
- She was napping a lot (possibly too long, 3 hours +), so I have started waking her after 2-2.5 hours to keep us on a 3-3.5 hour routine that is working really well until about dinnertime. I can't tell if things fall apart at that time because I have deprived her of sleep by waking her up, the house is too busy, or what. Throughout each evening she still shows signs of tiredness and we follow the exact same routine, but she will only catnap at most. When I allowed her to sleep longer during the day she wasn't eating enough, and then fussed all evening, trying to eat constantly, and she seemed to have more tummy upset and A LOT more spitting up.
- Bedtime is anywhere from 11pm to midnight, occasionally even a little later.
So here are my goals:
- learn how to encourage her to nap in the evening.
- find a consistent bed-time no later than 11pm. When should a 2.5 month old be going to bed? I've heard from a lot of people that their babies go to bed early, like 7-8pm, and then they do a dreamfeed. How and when could I expect to do this with my DD? Right now she's sleeping a consistent 8 hours at night with no waking to feed, so I'm a little hesitant to mess with bed-time, but I'd like to start working toward an earlier bed-time with a dreamfeed at 11pm, as long as she's not too young to do this.
Anyway, that's a long enough post for now! I'll leave it at that, and if anyone has any suggestions for things I might tweak or try I would love to hear from you. Thanks for reading all of this!
__________________
Selena
Happiness grows in direct proportion to your expectations.
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