Routine for 11 week old

[AshGirl]

PFB DS is 11 weeks. He was in hospital for his first 8 weeks, so we are still finding our feet at home and trying to work out what the hell we're doing!

I feel like we should be working towards a routine of some kind, but I am pretty clueless as to what that should be. In particular, should we be aiming for naps at particular times?

For context, he is bottle fed with a mix of formula and EBM, and goes 3-4 hours between feeds. He will sleep in the pram (a bit), on his play mat (a bit better), in his cot in our bedroom (OK, but not brilliantly) and on my lap (best of all!). We do have sling, which I am getting more confident with slowly.

All suggestions for a structure for our day would be much appreciated!

TIA

At this age mostly your routine in the day wants to be based on awake time, rather than the time.

So a reasonable approximation would be maximum 90 minutes awake time in one go. It could be in the range of 60-90 minutes depending on how short preceding naps were.

Also remember that awake time includes the time it takes you to get baby to sleep. So for example, it might be worth looking at the time when baby wakes up. At approx 1h after waking, start the process of getting baby to sleep. This allows for 30 mins to get baby to sleep. Then repeat all day until bedtime.

Aside from that, if your aim is independant sleeping then working on methods of getting baby to sleep that don't involve being help is great. So try to avoid feeding to sleep (dummy instead), avoid rocking in arms (bouncer or pushchair instead).

That's really helpful, thanks. We will just work on getting good amounts of sleep and see how we go.