When did you put baby to bed before you?

[countdowntobaby2020]

Baby is only three weeks old but thinking ahead a bit here and looking for some advice/experiences/opinions...

I know the guidance is baby sleeps in our room until six months and we've got him in a next to me crib in the bedroom.
The evening goes one of two ways at the minute. We bath, change and feed at around 6.30 and then try to settle him downstairs (we have a rocker/crib that he sleeps in during the day) Either he settles quickly and then we eat and relax a bit downstairs before moving him up when we go to bed. Or other times he just won't settle and we take it in turns to eat and then I admit defeat and go upstairs with him about 8 and lay on the bed as he sleeps (quite often falling asleep myself haha) The thing I've noticed is that he always settles really quickly in the bedroom compared to the living room. So ideally it would be good to do the bath, bottle and settle straight in to the crib but at the moment this means me going up to bed for 7pm (which although I'd happily sleep from 7 at this point it would be nice to eat and see my husband too!) We have got a video monitor with breathing sensor etc and I thought about working towards settling him upstairs and having that on whilst we sat downstairs. Being a first time mum and not wanting to do the wrong thing or break any rules haha I've frantically googled this and couldn't find a definitive answer so I asked the health visitor at our appointment this morning and her response was "official guidance is that they are in the same room as you at all times until six months but it's up to you what you do with that." So now I'm even more confused! Do I go up to bed at 7 with baby for next 6 months? Do I use a video monitor? Do we persevere with attempting to settle downstairs and then move up? Interested to hear what others did from a confused first time mum!

Both my children had evening witching hours which is very common and normal. They'd basically both be grumpy and cluster feed between 7 and 9pm every night. Until that past at around 3/4 months they were down stairs with us in the evening. TV and lights low.

Once they'd grown out of the witching hour we started doing bed time around 6 with a bath, story and feed to sleep. They'd then sleep in their cot in their room until we went to bed at 10 and brought them in with us for the rest of the night.

We did at least one day time nap in their cot as well from 4 months

We moved our first to his room full time from 6 months and our second from 4 months

@glasgowgal6 - I'm not sure tbh. I think we will probably just keep to a similar routine until he is 6+ months of him staying down with us and bedtime 9-10pm. After that I guess we will see.

From 6+ months maybe we will aim for him to be in bed 8.30-9pm, and then we will start coming back down for a while. I would much prefer he sleeps 9pm-8am eventually, rather than 7pm-6am, so probably won't bring it forward much.

6m old each. DS1 used to sleep in the lounge on the sleepyhead despite lights and tv being on. DS2 used to be permanently attached to my chest whether he was awake or asleep.

I didn't want to take the SIDS risk. In fact both boys slept in our room for longer than the 6m guidance.

At 3 weeks your baby hardly knows they're alive. Don't tie yourself to too many plans - you'll end up being led by the baby.

DS didn’t sleep alone until 6 months. I wanted to stick to the guidelines.

We put eldest into his own room at three months. He was going down for the night about 9/10 and I just went to bed the same time as him then. It was nearer five months he'd go to bed at 7 for the night and we stayed downstairs.

Youngest stayed in our room until ten months. We used to put him up to bed upstairs and then join him later. He napped upstairs in the his cot from six weeks as well. He kept getting woken up by his two-way year old brother downstairs.

Ds is 6.5 months and we only started leaving him alone to sleep at 6 months. We're trying to do the transition to his own room now too.

We got into a rhythm where we'd have tea with him downstairs, then get him ready for bed. Once he was settled I'd stay with him, either watching telly on ipdad with headphones, reading a kindle book or even going to sleep myself! I missed having evenings but it's a short period of time overall and I wanted to stick to the guidance; ds was prem and there was a case of sids in my immediate family so the sleep stuff was the only element I wasn't prepared to budge on, even when in laws basically told me I was nuts.

The guidance is based on that if you're in the room, it helps their breathing /prevents them going into too deep a sleep, which is when sids is a big risk. Monitors can alert you to an issue, but not prevent it. Sorry, I'm not saying that to be preachy, I know being in the same room can't work for everyone (god knows what I'd do if I had more than one or was on my own etc!) but I always see the comments about monitors and it's just that they are for peace of mind from what I can tell, not able to prevent anything. I'll stop rambling now!

Yeah I don’t get why people rely on monitors. Babies die of SIDs in complete silence. If you’re listening to every breath on the monitor anyway than why not just have them in the room with you?!

DH and I would always do bedtime and put them to bed upstairs and one of us would stay up. Sometimes DH would bring me a cup of tea and we would have a chat in the dark and then he would send me downstairs for dinner while he watched crap on the iPad for a bit. We did this for roughly 6-8 months for both kids. And it’s such a short time in their lives that we have zero bad memories or regrets about doing it. Usually DH would do bath, I would feed, DH would put to sleep while I went downstairs and I would veg out a bit and have dinner and some alone child free time. Then post dinner I would go upstairs and DH would come down and eat and do all the chores still to be done and then come upstairs to bed. We are not late sleepers and all this would take maybe 2-2.5 hours. Sometimes DH would work after this but not always.

We used to stay upstairs with her until she was 6 months. we like chilling and watching tv in bed so made no difference to us!

I have a 12 week old and have put him to bed in our room at 7.30/8pm from the day we came home from the hospital. We do stories for him and my older children in my bed, then everybody goes to their own beds, leaving me to settle baby if he's not already asleep.

Once he's in bed I tend to do upstairs jobs like folding/putting away laundry, have a bath in the en-suite, watch TV etc. So I'm not necessarily going to bed with him, but I am in/out of the same room and making noise.

I think the guidance about them sleeping in the same room as you until 6 months (when SIDS risk decreases) is about you making noise so they don't fall into such deep sleep. A monitor/breathing sensor won't do that for you; it will only tell you when there's already a problem rather than preventing one.

I have been luck enough to have 4 babies who weren't particularly noisy sleepers, so they have stayed in my room somewhere between 2.5 years and 3.5 years depending on all sorts of things.

We've stuck to the 6 months (and even beyond) for sleeping in a separate room. If I'm honest at 3 weeks old mine were cluster feeding so no real opportunity to actually put them down in an evening before we'd go to bed anyway. Obviously there were times baby would be asleep and I'd leave them to use the toilet, get something to eat etc but not for any prolonged length of time. Youngest is still a baby, just transitioning out of our room. The older ones are fantastic sleepers in their own rooms so holding them in those early months didn't have any negative effect.

Somethign I find really weird is that fans are proven to reduce SIDS but they are not mentioned in official guidelines. Whereas the room sharing thing is not really understood, there are hypotheses about breathing regulation and light sleep but no one knows.

From about a month with both of mine I put them in the Moses or cosleeper in my bedroom at 7pm and then went to have my evening and dinner. I then woke them when I went to bed at 10/11pm and gave them a dreamfeed before sleeping next to them myself.
Both of them were put in their own bedroom when the sleep regression started at 15/16 weeks.

From about 8 weeks I think. In the early weeks I would go to bed at the same time, 7 or 8pm, but when he was about 8 weeks it coincided with the clocks going forward and I was less tired, less keen to sit in the bedroom with the curtains drawn and DS was quite receptive to the idea of a ‘bedtime’ and was less able to nap in the living room even if the tv and lights were down low. We started using the video monitor then (in a flat so the bedroom is only a few steps away, but it’s still useful) and although I was worried about ‘breaking the rules’ re naps in the same room, I am a lot less anxious now.

We bought a baby camera at about five/six months, before then we just stayed in the bedroom all evening (was winter and we were tired anyway!). Moved the baby into his own room at nine months.

We started a bedtime routine at about 7 weeks and would put baby to bed upstairs alone, but still in our room. She is 3 months and still in our room. Most people I know moved them into their own room at about 5 months.

From a couple of months old when they started getting cranky and stressed in the evenings. I would pop in and feed them if they cried.

This is because the guidance has changed fairly recently and she probably knows it's impractical but doesn't want to outright say so.

It used to just be stated that they should be in your room until 6 months. Nothing about where you had to be. The general understanding was that it was up to your own interpretation, but of course that the longest period of sleep ie when you're asleep as well was the important one.

Now over the past few years, I'm not sure exactly when, but somebody at the lullaby Trust has said hang on, people tend to adhere to the guidance for the main bit of overnight sleep but they do riskier things during the evening or daytime naps. So we need to make this clearer.

That's fair. I can totally understand why they've done that. And explicitly stating that SIDS guidance applies whether it's overnight sleep, evening sleep or daytime sleep is fair, but I do also think it's important to balance this with practicality.

Which is a long winded way of saying we put DS2 to bed on his own in the evening from about 3 months old, I weighed up the risk/benefit of those few hours and decided I was OK with it.

Oh and sorry, yes it was still in our bedroom. They went in their own rooms at 6mo for first baby and 9mo for second (as we didn't have a room for him at 6mo).

The riskiest thing you can do is fall asleep sitting on a sofa with your baby in your arms. Sleep deprivation will do that to you. That’s why I prioritised sleep for everyone including me.

I think we put DD in her own at about 8pm from when she was about 6/8 weeks old, she was sleeping through at this point and none of us slept when we were all in the same room.