Feeling a bit unsure about sleep

[housekermit]

Hi all, my nearly 8 week old seems happy and well-rested, often sleeping 3-5 hour stretches at night, but I worry (mainly due to TikTok) that I’m not starting her good sleep habits early enough. For context…

• In the daytime, she sleeps whenever she sleeps. I track all her sleeps to make sure she’s not going hugely over 3/4 hours of daytime napping in total, which she doesn’t tend to do, but it’s by no means a routined set of naps and we have different courses and classes on different days so I haven’t even attempted any sort of pattern. If I take her out in the pram she falls asleep, and if we’re at home and she seems over tired I’ll rock her to sleep (if she’s having it!). I would love her to sleep for longer stretches in the day, but I also wouldn’t feel massively happy leaving her to go into a different room and do jobs (which is what these TikTok videos seem to suggest). I keep lights on and noise normal during the day.
• In the night, she has a bath 2/3 times a week and we start these at 7pm. Regardless of baths, we have all lights and sounds dimmed and down by 8pm and, depending on her temperament, we have her in her Moses basket in the living room or on us and she generally sleeps whilst we watch TV quietly, we then transfer her to a Snuzpod in the bedroom when we go to bed at 11pm ish.
• In the mornings, she can sleep quite late - up to 9/10am - until I get properly out of bed and take her downstairs, and whilst I always welcome the chance for extra sleep, I do feel like the norm with babies and infants is an early start to the day.

My questions are… should I be more rigid right now or keep doing what I’m doing? I’m aiming to get her into more of a routine and move to an earlier bedtime and wake time, with a more regimented daytime nap schedule, from 3 months, but I’m worried I’m not doing enough right now. And when she hits three months I’m worried about the practicalities of creating a routine given all our different daytime plans, plus concerned about leaving her unsupervised during long daytime nap windows (if and when we get there) to do what I need to do around the house. Thank you for reading this far and in advance for any advice!

If it works for you it works.
some baby babies thrive on routine and need set naps, others are happy to sleep as and when tired, (and some don’t sleep at all) but I firmly believe you can’t change one sort of baby into another

@housekermit until they're 6 months they should be having all naps/sleep in the same room as an adult, so that affects your plan a little.

At this stage I wouldn't be worrying about routines anyway, just checking they're not overdoing their wake windows during the day.

Everything sounds great and like it's working well.

Only thing I would change is to get them in bed at 8 or so and move towards stopping having her in the living room on evenings.... by 6 months, that's a difficult thing to change! So might be an idea to start earlier

Thanks so much! You mean only put her to bed upstairs at 8 and be with her from then on? Curious as to how you mean it will be difficult to change - do you mean she’ll get used to falling asleep downstairs and not upstairs?