FTM - confused about baby routines and fitting in medication

[DidYeAye22]

I’m a FTM, my baby is 3 months old and has a heart condition that they take 2 different types of medication for 3 times a day - at midnight and 1am, 8am / 9am, and 4pm / 5pm.

I was reading comments on the Peanut app
about routines and it’s made me feel like I’m doing a really bad job of being a mum. I’m really confused what people mean when they say they “put your baby to bed at X time”.

Do you mean you put them in their cot / Moses basket in a different room from you? How do you keep an eye on them? I thought they weren’t supposed to sleep in a different room from parents until they were a year due to SIDS risk?

Also - do you stop them having naps during the day so they sleep at night? I thought babies at this age were too young for a routine so I’m really confused.

My baby needs medication at midnight so generally needs to be awake for a feed at this time. Has anyone considered or factored this into their routine and can share what they did / what worked for them?

At the moment I’m just following their lead with sleep and feeding.

Sorry for all the questions!

As a ftm to an almost 1 year old you just have to do whatever works for you. Babies can't get into a routine before I think 4 months anyway? My DD has dropped to 1 nap a day and has wake windows lf like 6/7 hours which is a huge no no online. No baby is the same. Try not to get hung up on what others are doing you're doing great xx

My dd1 was on propranolol which has to be taken every 8 hours when she was a baby. Waking her up to medicate and feed her, didn’t improve her sleep! There was a slight leeway with the timings though, but she was on it to shrink her capillary haemangioma.

We never had a routine anyway, we just followed her lead.

You are absolutely right your baby is too young for a sleep routine as such.
You can start doing bedtime routine such as at night popping into sleeping bag or changing into comfy onesie or pjs. Reading a story and sleeping in a dark room. It helps get baby to understand the difference between night sleep and day naps.

As for putting baby to bed yes you are right baby shouldn't be left alone I tended to go to bed around 7 or 8 and brought the baby with me to the upstairs cot. But kept her in the moses basket and carried the whole thing upstairs with me.

You are doing the right thing follow baby's lead.
I use an app baby centre where you can speak to other mums with babies if similar ages and its is supportive highly recommend.

Some people are very strict with routines and others aren’t. There is no right or wrong, just what works for your family.

With DD2 she was in a routine in the morning from 6 weeks old, in the sense that we need to get up at this time for us to all get ready to leave the house and then I had to wake her at I think 10.15 in the morning to start feeding and changing before we left to pick up big sister from nursery at 11.45. But this was my routine given to her because we had to do the nursery run. The rest of the afternoon and night just happened when it did except bath time at 5.45 because she went in with her older sister. As they get older they eventually settle into a pattern and by 1 it’s much more predictable.

Follow baby's need. Ignore the apps. You're doing fine!

When I 'put my DC1 to bed at xyz time' and at a similar age, it meant I went through the bedtime routine: bath, clean nappy, sleeping bag, said good night, fed and stuck them in the basinet downstairs in the same room then sat in the sofa watching telly and took baby up to the next2me when I went to bed.

I think the sleeping in the same room advice only extends to 6 months. Until around 3 months we would just have DD in the living room with us (either in Moses basket on sleeping on me) until we were ready to go to bed. Around 3 months she became super interested in everything and the TV and lights made it impossible to get her down to sleep so we started putting her down in her Next to Me in the bedroom whenever she needs a feed or nap after ~8pm. If it’s close to 9pm by this time we tend to just go to bed straight after. If it’s earlier we watch TV for an hour and keep an eye on her with the monitor (the bedroom is next to the living room so we can also hear her). This doesn’t strictly fit with the guidance but I don’t consider the occasional hour sleeping alone to be a significant risk.

I don’t think you should reduce day time naps to get better night time sleep, in fact probably the opposite from what I’ve read. Babies that get enough sleep in the day sleep better at night. Although I don’t follow a strict routine 90 min wake windows do seem about right at 3-4 months for my DD. You can look for sleepy cues too but if you miss them trying to get baby down for a nap after ~90 min awake time works for me. Every baby is different though.

Unless the current situation is a problem for you in some way I don’t think there’s any need for a strict routine. They might develop a routine over time anyway. You can treat the midnight/1am medicine as a dream feed if there is no natural wake-up. You might even get lucky and have that as the only night wake up in time.

We were very big routine but still, at that age putting them to bed meant a quite dark corner of the living room in their pram or moses basket. Then a final feed, in your case medication too, and then up to bed with us. At about 4 months they started to get annoyed by any noise and needed a properly quiet dark room so that’s when they started going to bed upstairs with the monitor but they would still have a dreamfeed before we went to bed to get them through the night.