Eyes on my 3 month old's routine please!

[eleanorsos]

Hi mums (and dads)

Had so much good advice here during conception & pregnancy so hoping you can help. Looking for opinions/ideas on my 3mo DD's routine. We seem to be in a good swing during the days and long stretches of sleep at night but have a recurring period of fussiness during the evenings (roughly 7-10pm) which I think may be down to overtiredness... but could be something else!

Obviously she's 3 months old so varies a fair bit but a typical day would be:

8am - wake up/dressed
8.30am - feed
10-11am - nap
11.30am - feed
12.30-1.30pm - nap
2pm - feed
3.30-4.30pm - nap
5pm - feed
6pm - bath time/story with lights low, white noise up, sometimes a bit more milk
7pm - fuss o'clock!!!!
9/10pm - down for the night

Any suggestions? Maybe an extra nap and later bath time? She tends to manage 12-14 hours sleep a day but from what I hear she could do with a bit more.

Thanks so much in advance!

What does she do between 7pm to 9/10pm? are you trying to settle her for bed at this point?

I would move the 12:30 nap to 1oclock till 2.
Then move the 3:30 nap to 4 till 5

My baby is 14 weeks and her sleep is a bit all over the place so don’t take my advice as professional! But she usually has 4 naps per day, sometimes 5 depending on how well they’ve gone/if she’s settling down for the night well. Is it that your first nap is a little too late having a knock on effect for the rest of the day? My baby doesn’t stay up long before her first nap, sometimes only an hour but that’s usually her best nap of the day. Then she has another nap every 90mins to 2 hours from waking for the rest of her naps.
Her naps are ridiculously short at the moment though (I’m hoping it’s short term!) so that does also contribute to having so many naps per day

I thought it was normal for babies to be fussy of an evening? The witching hour?
For comparison my DD is 16w and is on and off my boobs all evening. I just go with it, babe will figure out their own routine in their own time.

Mine usually has bottles at 7,10,1, 4,7 and 9ish and then goes to sleep straight after that. Naps are all over the place as I've got a 3yo as well - normally a quick nap about 9am and then a longer one either side of lunch with another quick one about 4.30ish but completely dependent on whether I can get her to sleep with a rampaging toddler in the background! Witching hour from about 6-9pm here. We don't have any bedtime routine because it seems pointless and makes no difference to nighttime sleep at this stage I find.

Fussing and cluster feeding in the evenings is so typical of that age. Yes it's evening so by all means do your bedtime routine but for your sanity it would be better to pace the room and feed and cuddle with a boxset until she finally falls asleep for the night after 9/10pm. That's what we did and our kids sleep fine now. It's just a phase.

Hi OP, I joined MN especially to share two tips I learnt from others on here as they have been such a revelation - I hope they are helpful for you too. I had a very similar routine around that age and also had crying/fussing for one to two hours each night. I had put it down to ‘purple crying’ or whatever, but as it turns out he was just overtired.

The first tip is that the first nap is fairly soon after waking up for the day (as PP has said) - so the first awake window is shorter than all the others. At three months this would prob be around one hour max, but you might want to look that up.

The second tip is that babies should only be awake for 1.5 hours at a time at that age (this ends up being around 4 or 5 naps per day). I was keeping mine up for 2 hour windows and it was having a cumulative effect by bedtime. You may know this already, but I didn’t realise that more sleep makes it easier for babies to get themselves to sleep (and stay asleep for more than 45 mins). So I started basing my routine on the last wake up time, which I think you’re already doing, and made sure he was only up for 1.5 hrs max for subsequent awake times, including settling time. The last awake time before bed can be slightly longer, eg around 1.75 hrs. I really recommend the Huckleberry app, which works this all out for you based on the baby’s current age and the last wake up time (and nap length I think?). But their tip was that you should include any nap time routine and baby settling time in the awake time. So if my baby generally takes ten mins in the cot to fall asleep, then I’d try to include that. Now I start getting baby ready for nap 15-20 mins before he’s due, but that’s because we have a feed and a mini nap routine.

I hope that makes sense and is helpful! It might not work for all babies - mine likes his sleep as it turns out - but might be worth a go.

Thanks so much all for taking the time, yes we'll definitely have a play about with that first nap time! Maybe that will help!

But to posters reassuring me this is all normal, thanks for that too - we really don't mind just waiting it out if that's all it is but was just worried it-s something I'm doing and she's not sleeping enough!

Will check out Huckleberry too, have had that mentioned before!

@Poppet12345 yes we're trying to settle her for bed. She's not usually screaming but does require a lot of bouncing around the living room from myself and DH! 😂

[quote eleanorsos]@Poppet12345 yes we're trying to settle her for bed. She's not usually screaming but does require a lot of bouncing around the living room from myself and DH! 😂[/quote]
It does get easier it will gradually become shorter and shorter. It used to be 11pm for my 5 month old but gradually kept getting shorter and now it's 7:30

@Poppet12345 That's reassuring.... fingers crossed! Thank you 🙂