How would you approach a bedtime routine?

[Celiasausage]

I have a 4 year old and a baby. I need to now get the baby into a bedtime routine. I want to get th baby to bed for 6.45 and my 4 year old isnt ready for bed until 7.30pm. How do I do this on my own?

My issues are:
Creating calm for baby in the first place at bedtime because 4 year old is quite frankly, bonkers.

If baby won't go down earlier, how to calmly get my 4 yr old into bed whilst still feeding/rocking the baby to sleep?

What do other people do?

I wanted to do a joint bedtime story whilst feeding baby to sleep around 6.30pm but my 4 yr old started jumping on the bed. I completely lost it with her and started shouting. I feel like an ogre. I remember the importance of calm and quiet in the lead up to DC1s routine as a baby, but it seems theres no chance when I'm flying solo. Unless someone has any ideas.

You just have to give the older one a book in their own room. Or an ipad or whatever.

I've done it and it's incredibly stressful the first few times. Once I was in floods of tears. But it gets easier as you keep doing it. The older one starts to get it.

There were many times I was stuck in the room with the baby and I always had the door slightly ajar to hear the older one and often I would just have to leave to go see to the older one. And sometimes the baby would kick off and you just have to let them cry until you could get back. And then start all over again.

Needs must!

I used to just feed the baby while reading books/putting the older one to bed.

When the baby got older, I would get them both ready for bed then leave the older one watching telly/iPad while I put baby down, then put older one to bed. I used to try to make sure baby was tired and I knew they would go to sleep quickly so older one wasn’t left too long.

Or I would do both at the same time, feed baby while laying with older one, then move baby when I came to bed.

I did a mixture on different nights depending on how tired they both were,baby’s naps that day,etc. You don’t have to have a set fixed routine, especially with more than one DC sometimes it helps to be a bit more flexible.

We get ready for bed altogether - bath, PJs, story etc - then older one gets the IPad while I settle younger one. Once youngest one is settled go back to older and have some quality time together before bedtime. We often play some board games while there's no baby to crawl on the board and try and eat little pieces!

Some good ideas :)
Where do your older ones watch tV whilst you put the younger one to bed? Do they have a TV in their rooms?
There is a TV in my room, but the baby sleeps in there so it wouldnt work.

Maybe do a reward chart for the older one, she gets a sticker for every time she goes to bed calmly and on time. When she has so many stickers but her a new bed time book you can read to her? Just an idea xoxox

Either watch tv downstairs or phone/tablet in their room. Mine are quite sensible though, I know not all DC can be trusted downstairs at that age. I don’t really like screens before bed so did try to avoid when possible but sometimes you’ve just got to do whatever works.

My son would watch something on the iPad in bed whilst I settled the baby. Now he's older he can amuse himself in his room for 10 minutes and occasionally gets the iPad for a treat,