Gina Ford routines

[tanmu82]

Hi, I am looking for any advice/experiences from mums who have tried Gina Ford's 7am-7pm routine. my DCs are both at school full time, so when DD2 comes along, I need her to fit in with us, not us be led by her. I am thinking the 7am-7pm routine sounds like one that would work well around school hours, as well as leaving time with the DCs alone after baby has gone to bed.
Also, how easy was it to establish right from the beginning?

Any thoughts?!?

you will have a job getting a new born doing 7 - 7 especially if you are breastfeeding

i am not a huge believer in routine, most babies find their own way, and sometimes that fits in with the book !

you should not IMO ever expect or try to get a newborn sleeping 12 hours . or force the issue with a baby under 6- 12 months really, depending on the baby

far better, IME, to find someone who can help you get the DCs to school or pick them up so if you are waylaid with the baby , you are not too stressed

I think Gina Ford only works if you have a "Gina" baby - and not many newborns are becuase they usually need feeding more often than she recommends for one thing! Their tummies are so small and babies are not designed to sleep for long stretches!
Some babies probably do naturally "fit" though, but ime more won't than will.

As with any book though - take what works for you! However please bear in mind the feeding issue - they often need to feed very frequently in the early weeks.

Wow! That's going to be lovely. A 7am-7pm routine sounds good. And with time with the DCs after the baby's gone to bed too.
Good luck with that.

paisleyleaf surely it's not impossible? I am keen to not have the older two left out or sidelined, so want to make sure that they still get some quality time... having had them both within 15months of eachother, I know how hard it is in the early days of a new baby, and trying to juggle more than one child's needs, but that's why I want a bit of a structure.

Tanmu I found Gina very easy and I'm with you re older children.

It gets me when newborns arrive the amount of people who think it's ok to just focus on the baby and sod the other kids-it isn't ok. We'd all love to spend hours snuggling newborns but you don't cease to be a mother to older children. All children need and are entitled to their mothers just as much.

I had twins then another 15 months later. They all needed me equally and Gina enabled me to spread myself fairly between all 3.

Gina seemed to have my 3's natural pattern down to a tee as they loved it,we loved it and it really worked well for us all. Have soooo many friends who also loved it and used it.

Apologies for the no of "loved" used,in a rush.

Think it's safe to say we're big Gina fans here-total sanity saver!!!

tanmu - I did GF starting from when my ds was 4 weeks old. It took a LOT of effort to make him do what he was supposed to. It took 9 months to get him to do the 2 hour lunch time nap in his cot (he would happily do it in the buggy out and about). And the feeding times were difficult to manage if he was either hungry before or didnt take much at the right time.

It did work in the end (daytime only) but he is a human baby and would throw spanners in the works constantly. He never slept til 7 and was always awake by 6 (still is at 2.2) so entertaining him for an hour before his first feed of the day was hard work.

Cant say he was a "Gina" baby though as he didnt actually sleep through the night until he was 23 months old!

HTH

I am a routine freak and because of that is the reason why I perservered but believe me, it is not easy to let your baby cry for half an hour because it isnt the right time to give him milk yet.

I suggest have a routine but not as strict as being Gina Ford. Just make it one that fits with you, your family and your baby. If you want to keep baby awake for a bit so he will sleep when you need to do the school run etc then do it. Eventually baby will adapt. But as I say over and over again it will not come without bouts of crying (probably from you as well as baby!!!)

none of my kids have remotely believed in any sort of set routine though i do have friends who think GF is brilliant (it's not for me at all i must say).

HOWEVER my 3rd, dd, is now 7 months old, and my experience is that 3rd kids just HAVE to fit around your existing routine/other kids, so i wouldn't worry too much about you being led by her, you won't have the opportunity. i tend to try to feed dd before we go on the school run, and often have to wake up her and ds2 from their lunchtime sleeps to do the afternoon school run.

I agree to a point about them all needing their mum, but I would argue that when they are tiny not meeting their immediate needs could have a greater effect than not meeting an older child's immediate needs. Obviously you are not superwoman and there will be times the baby will cry, but I would enlist in as much help as you can with the older kids so you can concentrate on the baby as much as poss. That's not to say all the time, but I do think it is important. Or you could just carry the baby in a sling while continuing to deal with the older kids! And just feed when you can, they will often sleep or settle for longer in a sling because they want/need that contact!

Hi Tammu,

I agree that you need some sort of routine and if your baby is a Gina baby then it would be super. My sister has no routine in her life at all so did Gina with her ds1 and although she didn't stick to it entirely it got them in to at least some sort of routine.

I tried it with my ds1 and it just didn't work, he was a sleepy baby who couldn't manage to stay awake as long as Gina said he needed to. I discovered the baby whisperer with him and it was possibly the most amazing thing I ever did!

Along came ds2 and the bugger had no intentions of doing anything I told him to. No amount of baby whispering would work.

So now I've finished going on what I'm trying to say(!) is that I definately agree a routine is good so you can give other dc's attention but be aware your baby might have other ideas!!!

I disagree Zooropa not feeding on time and neglecting an 18 month old/2 year old is no different to doing the same with a newborn.

Pushing older kids out so you can spend more time with a newborn is wrong and likely to result in some serious self esteem issues later.

Far beter to spread yourself fairly between all children.

Older children don't choose to have younger siblings,pushing them to one side so you can have a newborn lovein and be at it's constant beck and call is wrong and very selfish imho.

"It gets me when newborns arrive the amount of people who think it's ok to just focus on the baby and sod the other kids-it isn't ok. We'd all love to spend hours snuggling newborns but you don't cease to be a mother to older children. All children need and are entitled to their mothers just as much."

It's not impossible to give time to your children and your newborn at the same time, you know!

OP - you can try to get your baby to fit a GF routine, but if he/she doesn't want to, then you will have a choice about whether you abandon it, or you put up with a crying baby (which is not good for you or the baby).

Also, if you want to bfeed, then you'll be lucky if you succeed if you're following GF.

I would recommend feeding your baby as often as you are able to, which will hopefully be at least as often as your baby needs, if not more often. Do it whenever you can, then stick the baby in a sling and get on with your other things - housework, playing with children, school runs.

Somehow I've managed without Gina and I've had four children without neglecting any of them.

Sad that people who do use her book to the letter thank Gina for sorting it out for them. You know when it doesn't work, mothers blame themselves, rather than Gina. That's what's wrong with prescriptive rubbish like her books; leave aside the fact she hasn't even had children herself!

Please throw the GF book in the bin and go with the flow.

If you are breastfeeding, a newborn needs to feed between 8 and 12 times per 24 hours. Do not understand how this is possible if they are asleep for a 12 hr stretch.

Some babies are predictable and routine-led and some aren't. If the one you gets fits with what you like to do, great. If not, you can spend a lot more time and stress trying to force it than if you just went with the flow.

Fluteyboots - GF doesn't have them not feeding at all from 7pm-7am - IIRC, there's a feed around 10:30pm ish and another one 2:30am ish and possibly a third in the night, can't remember.

It might work for you, might be worth reading it now, going through the routine you have with your other 2 DCs and working out if it will fit in. If nothing else, you need to get your morning routine sorted, as you can't just feed your DD on demand if she demands a feed at the point you have to leave the house to get the other 2 to school.

Milamae- i'm not saying you should neglect your other kids. See my sling suggestion? I'm just saying I think a two year old would be more capable, physically and mentally, of understaning that they have to wait a few minutes than a tiny baby who still doesn't realise they are no longer a part of their mother.

I did the Gina timetable around feed times and naps from about 6 weeks. DD is 8 months now and it still works great. I didn't do all the super militant only sleep in the cot with blinds woven from cobwebs etc. I just timed my trips out so DD could nap in the car, pram whatever and I was somewhere I could feed her at the right times.
Obviously when BF , I was doing night feeds but always woke DD for a 10pm dream feed. It also helped my DH a lot.

"it is not easy to let your baby cry for half an hour because it isnt the right time to give him milk yet."

That's .

I believe that it's more important to be responsive to you baby's needs rather than shoe horn them in to a routine.

Secondly, I think GF's routine can be responsible for some women's bf supply problems. How can you expect a baby with the stomach the size of a walnut not to eat or drink anything for a four hour period?

Just gonna finish with something which the most wonderful tiktok said recently on a nother thread about routines.

Kittie Frantz is a US author and breastfeeding advocate and (I think) an adviser to LLL. One of her quotes is 'you're not managing an inconvenience, you're raising a human being'

Babies, especially young babies, have untimetable-able needs. That's the biology of it.

Enough of the "you're not raising an inconvienience" clap trap please.

The baby stage is one of the most difficult stages to manage when raising a child.There are many other stages and not all parents find babyhood easy as it's very trying at times.

Just because mums that find this stage hard and rely on a routine to benefit their whole family it doesn't mean they regard their baby as an inconvenience-how ridiculous and insulting.

I didn't say I let my baby cry anywhere in my post did I ? Just that the timetable worked ok for me especially around naptimes.

I followed GF X 3, not one of my babies ever cried for half an hour.

It also helped my PND to have a timetable to get through the day. I had a compulsion to keep a diary and lists of what I had to do so it helped in that respect. Some of her comments need to be regarded with a hefty pinch of salt though.

Hi
we used GF after my SIL gave it to me - she had 2 friends who had both bought the book - 1 who thought it was the best thing since sliced bread and 1 who thought it was a load of tosh and threw it in the bin

I was/am a failed bf so ff feed DS from 4 days old - after spending a week in hospital having been advised to bottle feed 3 hourly. At that time all my friends who had small babies or who had experience of small babies had all bf on demand.

We used GF because after DH went back to work i was totally all over the place - making up bottles and throwing them away because i was too early making it up for DS or stood with a screaming baby wishing the steriliser would work faster (and whilst trying to recover from emergency CS and subsequent infection)

In the early days it was exactly what i needed - someone to tell me what to do and when to do it and it worked a treat. It gave me a routine and some knowledge of what to do when - stuff that probably other mums get from their mums but unfortunately my mum is no longer with us and although i get on with my MIL I was desperate to show her that I could cope (that sounds really daft i know)

I was lucky in that DS fitted in well with the routine although i never forced the routine on him (so once i was using it we kinda used it as guidelines rather than following it to the letter). tbh once DS was 6 months i had found my stride and now dont refer to the book at all.

I think it really depends on the type of baby you have and bring some sense of reality to the book - i had one friend who really did follow it to the letter and it totally took over their lives.

DS did sleep from 11pm to 6pm from 8 weeks old (which i consider a full nights sleep for me!) but didnt sleep 7 - 7 til much older.

My advice is read it, try it but dont be disheartened if it doesnt work

epic post but hth