Schedule around baby with low sleep needs

[Nikamon]

Hey I need some planning ninjas here. How would you set up a schedule around a baby's sleep? He's 3 months and 3 weeks old.

The baby falls asleep at 7-8 am and if not woken up would continue to sleep till 3pm (with dream feedings) but I wake him up from 10-11am. I have some health issues due to the birth and twice a week I have an appointment in the morning. I should also walk the kid as early as possible so that he starts sleeping at night. During the day, if I manage to wake him up at 11 (earliest possible), he later has 2 naps - usually one 2 hours long during the walk, and one 1,5 hours in the afternoon - this is when I eat my main meal. At 8pm he gets bedtime routine and sleeps until 10pm. Then he's mostly awake until 8am in the morning. My partner can work from home 3 days a week, and has flexible working hours, but needs to do around 8h per day of focused work.

Our current schedule is like this: at 8 I breastfeed, from 9pm I try to sleep in a separate room, usually fall asleep at 10:30pm my partner does one feeding with a bottle. At 3am we switch and I try to sleep again from 7-8am once the baby sleeps and if I don't have any appointments and the neighbors are not too loud (they have small kids running in the apartment from 7am, yes we tried to talk to them). At 10-11am I'm trying to wake up the baby, feed him, and try to do the morning toilet and breakfast during his wake window. After that I take him for 1-2h walk outside, where he sleeps. In the afternoon I sometimes try to nap during baby's second nap, but often can't fall asleep, or I'm trying to get something done like exercise for my health issues (since it is tough to do it with interruptions).

This way my partner works from 9am till 7pm (as he also helps around the house during the day, and takes care of the kid during my appointments), and sleeps 6 hours. I get 4,5h-6,5h of broken sleep, but the consecutive nights of 4,5h are killing me.

My partner can't fall asleep before 11pm and I have great difficulty napping during the day, also it takes me ages to fall asleep. The baby can stay alone for 10-15 minutes at a time when awake but then demands attention. He also needs to be put to sleep for naps, doesn't fall asleep on his own.

You need to keep him awake as much as possible during the day because his nights and days are flipped. I wouldn’t stress about a schedule. It doesn’t need to be precise. You just need to focus on more awake time, maybe no more than 1.5 hours of sleep at a time.

If your partner is working flexibly to help with baby during the day, I would try to condense his working hours so that he can be available to keep baby awake at critical times (for example, maybe around dinner time when baby is currently sleeping and you are eating). Also, I would go to bed as soon as partner is done work, if he’s up til 11pm, he can do everything until then and you can get 3-4 extra hours of sleep. At the moment, it doesn’t sound like you are getting yourself to bed quick enough.

Dear OP,

I am exhausted reading this post! I am not sure if this is helpful or not, but I find scheduling around such a young baby impossible. They randomly change nap times if they are having growth spurt or just extra tiredness. It is such a shame to wake them when they just want to sleep.

My opinion is maybe stick to the things that are are complete necessity (like the exercise), and let the other things just fall where they must.

This is just my opinion, I am sure others have good ideas about schedules.

My dc at that age didn’t have a schedule as such but did naturally fall into a routine that included 3 naps a day, which could be anywhere from 30 mins to 1.5 hours. Also bedtime was later, around 9.30-10pm because the first stretch of sleep was often the longest and it meant that I could also sleep at the same time. It does sound like your baby has day and night mixed up rather than low sleep needs (as they do want to sleep but just from 7am-3pm instead of at night). I would probably focus on changing that by keeping the naps shorter during the day, going outside to play, lots of music and light and noise, and then keeping things dark and boring during the night. Ideally you want that 7am-3pm sleep to happen from 10pm-6am so that you can sleep too!

This is what I'm doing, and not even managing to do this essential stuff.
Since 3 weeks the baby schedule is quite fixed, I mean not down to the hour but more or less, I'm also not looking for a hour by hour schedule..

Yes this is what I'm doing since 3 weeks but nothing is changing. Today he's been outside from 9:30 am for 5 hours for example. We cut the naps at 1,5h, try to at least, as sometimes it takes some time to wake him up. I also try to play with him during the day and keep things interesting.

If I let him sleep as much as he wants it is also 10h in total, so I think it's still low sleep needs baby. That's what making it extra challenging, if you have only 10 hours to distribute, it's very easy to let them slip.

I'm not looking for a baby schedule, I'm looking for my and my partner's schedule, maybe this was not clear.

At first I thought you had the AM & PM muddled up but maybe not - it sounds like he needs some help with working out day and night. I would be waking him in the morning 7/8am and building a routine from there. Lots of light, noise, sounds and stimulation and then the opposite at night.