Cosleepers - how do you get your baby to bed early enough?

[Caterpillar432]

To those that cosleep, how do you get baby to bed at an appropriate baby bedtime?

My LO is 6 months and I used to aim for 8-9pm bedtime and I’d just go to bed with him but as his naps are becoming further apart, bedtime is either going to end up even later (which I don’t feel is the right thing to do for him) or I’ll have to get him to bed earlier. However, he normally wakes 30 minutes after going to bed and then every hour after that. So if I got him to bed for 7/7.30pm, by the time I managed to roll away and leave (with bed guards and monitor on), I’d have to go back again to resettle him, by which point I might as well have just gone to bed at 7pm. I’m not sure I can do this without going insane.

So how do you get your babes to bed at an appropriate time and leave them??

This set-up would send most people insane. What have you tried so far?

We put our DS-es into their own rooms at 6 months for this exact reason - I had coslept til then but had got to the stage when I wanted some time in the evenings and they were getting into a better bedtime routine.

I got him to sleep on sofa and he stayed there until I went to sleep then when he was older I took him uo to bed asleep.

Why do you think he doesn’t need a later bed time? Mine did until they dropped naps. What time does he get up and what are his current nap times?

I think bedguards are only suitable from
18 months.

@Bobbybobbins how did you go about getting them into their own rooms? I’d love to do the same but can’t see it working right now.

@upfucked He currently still has 4 naps a day but probably only because his bedtime is on the later side. Last nap tends to end between 6-7pm but he’s starting to naturally stretch his wake windows so I think we’ll have to drop this nap very soon, which is why I think bedtime will either end up earlier or we still need to force a 4th nap but then bedtime will be too late. He normally wakes for the day between 7-8am.

Mine is 7 months - moved him into his own room around 6 months and he'll generally sleep in there from around 7/7.30ish. He might need someone to pop in and resettle him once in the evening and then usually wakes up between 10pm and midnight at which point I'll just bring him in with me and we cosleep for the rest of the night.

This works well for us at the moment!

@Caterpillar432

With our second it was really easy - put him down after bath and bfeed and kind of patted his back and he went off in about 10 mins. He did still wake up once or twice in the night for a feed til he was 18 months old but it was so much better.

With our eldest he was less keen so there were some tears the first two nights but we didn't leave him for more than a few mins, lots of patting and stroking and by the Thursday night he snuffled down to sleep.

• third not Thursday!