Routine for 6.5 month old?

[snowscreamer]

I'm still in the "wing it" phase of parenthood since my little girl arrived last June but her nighttime sleep is poor (and consequently mine), and since we've started weaning I am struggling to fit in meals and now craving some sort of routine!

Hoping it will allow me to fit in shared breakfast and lunch every day initially (dinner is a whole other ball game as DH returns 7-7:45pm ish) plus have a fighting chance of improving her nighttime sleep? Aware the latter could be a losing battle but I'd at least like to feel more human again myself and feel that I'm "doing something" even if it turns out not to help!

We currently have a vague pattern of:

7:30-8:30 depending on what time DD wakes, get up, if it's on the early end of that and/or been a particularly bad night I'll go back to sleep for an hour whilst DH entertains DD
9-9:30ish breakfast
9:30-10:30ish morning nap
11ish wakeup
Try to shoehorn in some lunch if DD is in the mood, possibly go out!
1ish lunchtime nap
2-3:30 (depending on tiredness) wake up
4-5:30 (depending on wake time) afternoon nap
4:45-6:15 wake up
6-7 (depending on wake time) start bedtime routine
6:30-7:30 asleep

Anything between 4 and 7 night wakes at the moment...! She does resettle easily after a feed but I am starting to lose patience with this number of night wakes

Any tips? Should I be waking her from naps at set times to establish a routine? I currently put her down when she starts to get a bit grizzly and then get her up whenever she wakes.

At the same age my ds was doing;

7.30 wake up bottle and porridge
9.30 in cot - maximum nap time 40 mins from time he went to sleep
11:00 half bottle , veg purée, remainder bottle
1-1.30 in cot - maximum nap time 2 hours from time he went to sleep
Bottle upon wake up
5 - veg purée
6 - bottle
6:45 in cot

He was mostly sleeping through

I think there is too much daytime sleep. It should be around 3 hours at this age. Daytime being between 7-7

If she is feeding during the night then slowly reduce that and increase daytime bottles at the same time
OR offer water for night time waking
OR offer dream feed around 11pm

My dd is 6 months in a few days. She sleeps through at night and has 3 naps during the day. She doesn’t stay awake for more than 2hrs at a time usually.

So:
7am - wakes up and has milk
9am - put down for a nap
10am - usually wakes after an hour ish
11am - milk
12pm - nap
2-3pm - wake up
3pm - milk
5pm - nap for about 45 mins
7pm - milk and bed

I never wake her up from her naps so let her sleep as long as she wants but she has settled herself into the above routine. It is pretty much the same as my older dd when she was that age.
As for meal times when we start weaning we will just give her food if she is awake at our current meal times which are quite set times for the older dd. So breakfast about 8, lunch at 12 and dinner at 5-5.30

I have a 20 month old and I remember 6.5 months being so difficult. It felt like she was constantly eating or having a bottle of milk. Her slept was awful and at that point I started to cosleep and it works for us.

Anyway my point is every parent is winging it and it gets better.

See my current routine sounds pretty similar to yours Floridasunset... bar the sleeping through!! And the fact that my mealtimes are all over the shop being just me for lunch and my DH working for himself so breakfast is flexible too! Flexibility is good for me (I think) but not sure how it’s working out for DD. Baby groups which are all restarting next week is another matter entirely as they often coincide with when she should be sleeping and she goes down much better in a cot in a dark room than in a pushchair during a group.

I’m not sure my DD could manage purpleviolet1’s routine suggestion as she gets extremely cranky if any awake period exceeds 2-2.5 hours and it feels cruel to keep her up when she’s tired?

Is it OK to refuse milk feeds at night in favour of feeding more in the day? Does it work? I tend to feed on wake ups and before naps until she comes off on her own so I don’t know how I can realistically feed much more than that; it’s every 2 hours. I could refuse feeds at night but it is an easy way to get her back to sleep...
She might cry harder and I couldn’t bare that.

My suggestion would be to try reining in the afternoon nap a little, just to see if it helps. DS2 was very hard to settle and if I let him sleep past about 3pm (even a 5 minute doze in the buggy) he was up half the night. If not he'd mostly sleep through. His bedtime was 6.30pm so he was usually pretty shredded by then but he benefited so much from the better nights that it seemed well worth it.

Re the night feeds: yes. If you feed less at night they'll eat more in the day. You'll need to find some other resettling technique though (what I did was figure one out and get dc used to it for daytime naps initially: I didn't introduce it at night until it was working during the day)

They're all different though, and things will get better at some point soonish whatever you do

Yes my routine suggestion may be a bit 'hardcore'

WhatWouldGenghisDo, so actually last night was better, even though I did do an afternoon nap from 5-5:45. I just feel so mean keeping her up when she's knackered, I really struggle! I can try to slowly push that nap later until it "becomes" bedtime I suppose, maybe by 15 minutes each day.

Anyway last night for some reason was significantly better (she's working on a heck of a lot developmentally right now - crawling, solid food, talking/babbling). We had 7:45 asleep (after a tricky settling down actually, starting at 7:15) then she was awake at 8:30 grizzling. I was actually nearly finished with dinner so was just shovelling in the last few mouthfuls before going up to her and then she went silent again after about 4 minutes. So I didn't interfere; then we heard nothing until 11pm when we had just got into bed. I fed her and she settled back down. Then I fed her upon wake ups at 2:30 and 6:15; she woke for the day at 7:30ish. So that was a significant improvement. But I have occasionally had better nights before however it's so random!

Re settling methods, at naps, especially morning and afternoon, we cuddle to sleep and she will settle for either me or my husband. At lunchtime I'm guilty of feeding to sleep but that's to ensure she goes down for the extra sleep cycle giving us 1.5 hours rather than the 45 min.

She will settle with cuddles for naps happily but if my husband goes to her at night she'll scream until I take over... then if I try to cuddle her sometimes it works but often she'll scream until I feed. I tend to default to feeding especially in the dead of night as it's a quick fix. She always goes into the cot drowsy, never asleep.

chaosofcalm, thanks for that, that's helpful. However I find every age so far has been tricky just differently tricky!!
I'm not sure cosleeping would work for us. I see the attraction for the difficult nights but then we have nights like last night and I see the light at the end of the tunnel and am glad we haven't resorted to cosleeping...

From what you say it sounds more like she's just used to the comfort of feeding when she wakes in the night than that there's anything wrong with your routine.

If you stick with what you're doing she'll start sleeping through eventually anyway. If you decide to shift from feeding to cuddling at night then I would predict you'll have 2-3 nights of hell and then she'll start self-settling / sleeping through. But if that doesn't sound right to you then you should trust your instinct. You know her best

Also, leaving them for a couple of minutes to see if they can settle themselves can be a really good strategy. I found out mostly by accident that 9 times out of 10 both mine would self-settle in 2-3 minutes if I left them to it that long (once night-weaned at any rate)