Parents of 4-6 month olds

[justanothermanicmonday1]

What's your routine looking like from morning to night ....

Intrigued to see if anyone else is still stuck in the leap 4 regression🤣

Thanks x

Bump!!!

I have a 4, nearly 5 month old. We wake him at 7am every morning if he isn’t already awake. He has his first nap on the school run between 8:30 and 9am. This usually lasts until about 9:30am.

After this it’s a total lottery and every day is different. Some days is 3 naps, some days it’s 4, some days it’s 5 depending on their length, what time he woke up and what we are doing. Bedtime can be anywhere between 7 and 9pm.

Routine fell into place with DC1 at about 7-8 months. Basically when he was having 3 meals and consistently having 2 naps. Before then it was pretty random as well. Main difference this time round is i’m not at all stressing about it.

I should also add he wakes precisely 73628493 times overnight, so firm regression territory here too. He doesn’t nap in the cot. They are all either in the pram, car, sling, bouncy chair or in my arms.

If you'd asked me a few days ago I would have said: up at seven every morning, 1.5-2hr cot nap around 8:30, nap again around 11:30-12:00, nap again around 3:30-4:00 and then bedtime routine starts at six and she's asleep by seven.
However this weekend she seems to have begun the four month regression and thirty minute contact naps are the order of the day 🤦. I'm praying that she works her way through it quickly!

My LO turned 5 months a week ago and we’ve just snapped out of the regression finally!

At 4 months we were up to 5 micronaps a day and 2 hourly wakes at night, not needing intervention for those wakes usually he would fuss and fall back to sleep. He had also started to get a bit upset when doing nap time routine which he had never done! Naps were 28 mins exactly and despite leaving him for a short period of time to fall back to sleep he never did. Just woke up happy but throughout the day you could tell he was getting more and more tired.

2 weeks ago I thought I’d try and extend wake windows a few mins a day, we were on about 75 mins for the first one and 1hr 45 before bed. It made no difference so I thought I’d be a bit more drastic and add 15/20 mins to each wake window and almost instantly saw a difference. He dropped to 3 naps that day. First one about 1hr 45 mins, second one about 90 mins and then a 30 minute cat nap. He still woke at the 30 minute mark but fell back to sleep within 10 minutes. The nap protests stopped too I think he was still in party mood and just wasn’t ready to nap.

Average day this last week or so….

7.30am - Awake (wake him up if not already)
7.45am - 7/8oz bottle
0915am - Nap 1hr 45
11am - Wake
11am ish - 7oz bottle
1pm - 5 oz bottle before nap
1.15pm - Nap 90 mins
2.45pm - Wake
3.45pm - 7oz bottle
4.45pm - Nap 30 mins
5.15pm - Wake
6.30pm - 7oz bottle
7pm - Bath, pyjamas, cuddles and story
7.30pm - Asleep

Still get the off night wake up but they are becoming less often and smoother. It’s more of a stirring now…..unless he’s practicing blowing raspberries at 3am!

His feeds seem quite close together in the day I know, a lot of the guides say to go 4 hours between bottles but he doesn’t have any milk overnight so I’ve stuck to feeding more often in the day.

The regression was relentless! The crap naps were awful. Maybe try having a bit of a shakeup of wake windows? I figured he was sleeping awful anyway so may as well give it a go with nothing to lose.

Well these make me feel so much better.

My LO has been going through the regression since was 12-13 weeks, and will be 5 months on Friday. So you can imagine how difficult it has been.

She was going from napping from hours at a time to now having 3 or 4 30-45 minute naps a day.

So the past 3 days we have been doing every single nap in her cot, followed by bath bottle and bed by 6:30-7pm. She then will be put down even if awake and she's great at self soothing. No tears. Just drifts off.

She's also been waking up through the night every 3 hours. But the past 3 nights it's going to 4 which is amazing as we've upped her feed to 7oz.

However she will not settle in her cot after midnight and we need to co sleep and my DP sleeps on the sofa.

I have a feeling we're going to be coming through the other side of this regression as she's nearing 5 months. I'm also going to persist tonight with putting her back into cot even if it takes 10 attempts. I need to break this cycle. I'm determined😂

This is our second DD and they're 16 months apart. First DD didn't have any of this. Was such a straightforward baby/transition 🤣

I think your first DD was the anomaly to be honest! Having said that I think self settling without protest and going 3-4h stints at 4 months old is also bloody good. You probably don’t feel that way currently I know!

DS is 4 months, sleeps great at night but his naps have also gone to shit 😂

he’s also my second so am just taking it as it comes, assume the naps will sort themselves out eventually

The only thing that bothers me is the co sleeping. I am so paranoid. I just want her to settle in her cot after midnight. I know she will. Just need to give it time.

We have a 'pattern' more than a routine as baby likes to have occasional lie ins with me and I'm more than happy to go with that, so on lie in days we shift the pattern a bit. I prefer to follow sleepy cues rather than wake windows and a set pattern.

But, roughly:
7.30-8 wake up (although today it was 6!)
Nap two hours after wake up (roughly 40-45 min nap)
10.45 wake up
Nap roughly 1-1.30pm, usually just half an hour
Then another nap usually half an hour around 3pm
Then bath around 6 and bedtime around 7.

Then usually wakes up around 10 for night feed then a couple more wake ups at 1 or 2am and 5am maybe. I cosleep and feed lying down and drifting off to sleep myself so I'm not bothered by wake ups. She's 4.5 months and has been sometimes waking up much more but then the next night she might do a 10-4am stretch so it really varies.

As you can see baby barely naps but makes up for it overnight. She's always been this way so I just go with it, I believe in going with the flow and she's a very happy baby so it works for her and me.

I try not to overthink it and just follow her lead really. When she was younger I used to get worried she didn't nap enough in the daytime but now I realise she just has her own pattern and it's fine! If she was upset and overtired etc I'd rethink it, I think she's just an unusually wakeful baby in the daytime.

I love cosleeping and I'm not bothered about self settling, which helps us both sleep well at night. I love that my boob and closeness settles her! It's natural and lovely.

Sorry that last comment wasn't meant as a dig at your self settling comment, that's wonderful for you guys, I just meant that I'm personally happy with our little routine even though I have to shove a boob in her
mouth when she wakes.

God these replies make me feel so much better! My boy is 4 months and a week and we’re in the midst of regression…

• Wake up at 6am (sometimes earlier but I leave him babbling away till 6)
• 1hr wake window (he seems so snoozy still)
• 1hr30 contact nap. If i put him back down in the cot the nap only last 30/40mins, so I try and contact nao
• so he gets at least one good nap.
• Rest of the day is a total gamble consisting of 3/5 naps which are either 28min cat naps or 2.5hr naps.
• Bed time 7:30pm. Roughly up at 11pm, 2am, 4am, 6am.

As you can see it’s a bit of a shambles. I think the best days we’ve had are 4 naps (3 1hr naps and the last one of the day a shorter 30min nap). The wakes up are usually quick feeds and then straight back down, but recently he has been doing a full hour wake up at about 2am, which is rubbish. In addition he’s not the best at sleeping in the cot, so day naps are almost exclusively contact/sling/buggy. Feeling a bit rubbish that we have cracked cot naps very well and generally feeling pretty tired these days!

My DD is 4 months this week. We've never experienced a nap longer than 40 minutes, no idea what it must be like to have one that naps for 1.5-2 hours, my eldest was the same until she went to one nap! Thankfully though both have been very good night sleepers.

I think she's in the regression now, we've gone from sleeping 730pm to 6am straight through, to waking around 330 for a bottle, so I've added a dream feed in at 1030pm. That's what I did with her sister from much earlier. She's now more or less making it to 6am again but still stirring a lot in the early hours. After 6am bottle she'll usually go back to sleep till 8, then a late morning nap, an early afternoon and a late afternoon but usually only 30 minutes each. Bed time usually 730-8. I really hope this is the regression as we're getting off quite lightly..!

Well done on the fab routine!

Just to temper this, average sleep needs for a 4 month old are 12-15 hours per day as per the national sleep foundation. This routine includes 15h45 mins of sleep, so is above average and would only fit a high sleep needs child .

That’s not having a go at you at all I’m jealous. it’s just pointing out to any FTM reading this that this isn’t something every child will need or be able to do, as this sort of thing made me tie myself in knots with DC1 (who was towards the lower end of that range).

Routine? What routine?

DD is 18 weeks and her day depends entirely on what we're doing - she'll only nap if I'm on the sofa feeding her. If we're out and about, she's generally wide awake and looking round her for the duration. Sometimes it doesn't feel as if she naps at all, which is worrying, and other (lazy) days she'll sleep most of the day if we're cuddled on the sofa.

Nights are okay - we're bedsharing following Lullaby Trust safer sleep advice, as it's the only thing that allows me to get any sleep at all. DD categorically does not sleep in the Next2Me and I tortured myself for weeks before finally accepting that she wanted to be close to me. Now she pretty much sleeps through from 8pm to 7am bar a couple of sleepy feeds during the night.

I will try to get her into a routine but for now I'm going with the flow.

@VivaVivaa no absolutely I get it. I’m a FTM and have spent hours trawling for solutions and looking at other routines etc. probably far too much. I’ve been incredibly consistent with bedtime routine and mini nap routines and it’s now only really slotting into place.

If anybody is reading, that is just a representation of one good day. We’re probably on day 7 of 3 naps now. Sometimes they are an hour, sometimes two, sometimes he doesn’t wake at all or today he took 20 mins to chat himself back to sleep. I find if he has a low sleep day he tends to add those hours onto the next day. He averages between 13-15 hours typically.

The naps were all over the place for weeks with night wakings every two hours at least. We were in a cycle of short wakings and short naps and literally the only thing that snapped us out of it was to extend the wake times quite significantly. I was putting him down to nap far to early I learned.

Hes an awful napper out and about still. 30 mins is your lot. This last week all naps apart from the catnap (been in the car or contact nap-which he resists for ages) has been in his cot so whilst the extra time to do bits around the house is nice it is quite restrictive……

Im sure this phase will be short lived. They do definitely like to wait until you think you’ve
Cracked it before they throw in another curveball!

It's nice knowing that we're not the only ones stuck on short naps and night waking constantly! I'm really hoping my DS (almost 5 months) grows out of it soon!!!