sleeping. should i try get a routine from birth?

[luluzulu]

how do i get my newborn to sleep at night instead of all day? advice on what you lot did would be gratefully appreciated thanks

I found the Baby Whisperer to be a good compromise between complete chaos and a rigid routine. With dd1 we tried to just go with feeding/sleeping on demand and it really didn't work. No one slept and we were all miserable. Dd2 has a reasonable rhythm of eat - play - sleep which means life is manageable.

Also, swaddling is GREAT for getting your newborn to sleep.

I don't agree with CoteDAzur - I have a 12 week old who's been on a routine for about the past month and its worked wonders she's sleeping through the night with two feeds and is by and large a happy little girl who handles what life throws at her. I think in particular it makes it much easier to get babies to sleep more easily. I think routines can be taken to extremes and they may not work for everyone but they do give the baby a lot of stability and security. I think one should think of it as a framework, rather than a hard schedule with the best will in the world you're never going to be able to schedule a baby. But having some vague guidelines about when things happen is helpful for everyone, IMHO. Whether you can actually do it from birth or not I don't know -- I only tried it from 2 months. From birth might be a tad over-ambitious.

Has anyone used 'Save our Sleep' as a guide? I've been having a wee read of it during my pregnancy to get some ideas, it seems quite good but it's always hard to tell til you have an actual baby!

Do you know what dawned on me about 3 months after I had my twins? That you have to do the same stuff a lot before you can really say it is a routine. So I did try to follow a routine from early on, but I don't think you can expect too much in the first two months. I found that bath, milk, bed, put down in own cots worked really well for us. I never breastfed them to sleep and they learnt fairly easily to self settle in their cots. But it was only about three months in that I thought we actually had a routine. Before that we were just trying to get into one. And it takes lots of practice!!