Routine for a 6 month old.

[CJ98]

Need help with moving my 6 month old daughter into her own cot & creating a better routine for her on a night.
Shes always been a difficult baby and we really struggled with her sleep when she was a newborn & seem to be struggling even more now. Although she’s sleeping throughout the night she’s not properly falling asleep and staying asleep until after 2am and then she’s awake from 9am.
my partner works until midnight so I hardly get the support of him on an evening so feel like if i can get into a better routine with her it will make things easier when I go back to work in April.
I know I should have done this earlier but with the lack of sleep and fighting with her sleep daily we are all exhausted.
She has a bottle every 3 hours (drinks 7oz) and naps for 30 minutes throughout the day.
what have I been doing wrong ? What do I need to change ? What can I do to help her ?

I think you have two things going on.

One is you want her to have most of her calories during the day and the other is that you want her to settle earlier.

If she's drinking a bottle of 7 floz, are you offering 8 Floz? And has she started solids yet?

If she's sleeping until 9 am I would start to wake her at 8.45 am. I'd do this for 4 or 5 days then start to wake her at 8.30 am. Keep moving the wake up time in increments of 15 minutes every 4 or 5 days until you've got her waking up at the time she needs to be waking when you go back to work. For us that was 7 am.

Getting her outside each day should help too. I know there not much daylight right now but it has been proven that if you can get them outside once, hopefully twice a day then it does help nighttime sleep

Have you tried the No Cry Sleep Solution too? We found it useful as it helps to establish some good sleep associations.

We give her 7oz she mostly drinks it but sometimes can leave an ounce. We’ve started her on solids but again trying to find the energy to fight with her is too exhausting so we’re slowly introducing it. Ideally I’d like to give her atleast one solid meal a day (we’ve started her on the puree sachets you can buy in the supermaket). The wake up time isn’t an issue it’s the sleeping time that’s the biggest problem. We seem to be fighting with her to actually get her to sleep sometimes we can still be at it at 2am. If we push her wake up time back it causes more of an issue because she’s not sleeping until 2am, she also is the one who wakes us up at 9am as she wants her morning bottle.

Ok so when do you go. Abi to work and what time are you going to have to get her up then?

If she's always been a bit difficult, which formula is she on abc gave you tried a comfort style formula?

I’ll be going back to work in April & hopefully I won’t be starting work until 9/10am so she’d have to be awake for around 7 or 8. But it’s fighting with getting her to sleep, if I get her up at 7 she’ll have only slept for 5 hours and she’ll just sleep throughout the day and it just causes more hassle on a night.
We are on cow and gate formula, we tried her with the hungry baby formula and it wasn’t doing anything for her. Our health visitor recommended we tried her with it and it didn’t make a difference so they told us to go back to the normal formula.

Hungry formula is different than comfort formula. If you can, I would give Cow & Gare Comfort a try.

When you woke her earlier, did you do it in 10 or 15 minute increments leaving several days between each one?

What's her current nighttime rountine?

If you get her up at 7am she will actually be tired enough to go to sleep earlier.
How many 30 min naps in the day?

And what is your evening / bedtime routine like?

How are you getting her down for the day time nap and what time does she usually have this?

How much pressure are you putting on feeling like she has to go to bed at a certain time? You say you are fighting with her. I cba to do that with mine as it stresses me out and makes me feel super frustrated so if they are really fighting a nap or sleep I play with them for 10/15 mins to try and tire them out and then try again when I see signs of sleepiness.

I was told by my health visitor not to bother with the comfort as it’s mainly used for babies that have colic or constipation which she doesn’t have neither. She said it would only make her worse and to just continue with the normal cow and gate.
We did but found that it didn’t affect the time she was falling asleep on a night & infact made her worse because she was getting less sleep.
Her nighttime routine changes daily but most of the time she has a bottle around 6pm (or 7pm depending on when she’s had her previous bottle) and then every other day we then bath her (I like to bath her an hour before she’s due her next feed). Once she’s had a bath & then had her last bottle, I will then sit with her on the sofa - usually with no lights on & the TV on low allowing her to fully relax. She might fall asleep around 8/8:30 so I’ll take her upstairs to her cot. She then will wake up 30 minutes later & it’s then when we can have a fight with her for the rest of the night as she then doesn’t want to go back to sleep.

It’s not that we are putting pressure on her going to sleep for a certain time we just want to change the time she goes to sleep from 2am to say 8pm… She has multiple naps throughout the day, usually it’s a case of she’ll rub her eyes to warn me she’s tired and so I’ll then have to rock her to sleep but then she’ll only sleep for around 30 minutes the most being an hour and this can be at any time.
& weve literally tried playing with her, with her still being in her Moses basket at the moment we let her sit in it and we will lay in bed and play with her but she’ll just scream and cry for hours so we then have to fight with rocking her to sleep.

She usually sleeps for 30 minutes 2 hours after her bottle if that makes sense - so if she has a bottle at 9 she might fall asleep around 11 & then wake up at 11:30 ready for a bottle at 12.
She doesn’t do this all the time but it’s mainly like this during the day.

Say she has a bottle at 6
she’ll have a bath around 7-7:30 the latest being 8
She’ll then have her next bottle at 9.
once she’s drunk it and fallen asleep she’ll then go into her cot upstairs but she might only be asleep for 30 minutes & then we have a fight getting her to sleep again.

Sounds like she has many small naps in the day, and a small wake window.

My six month old has two naps a day - a morning one (for 30 - 60min) and an afternoon one (for two hours). She will then sleep for 10 to 11 hours in the night (but she is breastfed, so she is constantly on me in the night).

Is there any way to limit the number of naps to two a day?

We have tried to keep her awake as much as we can during the day by playing with her & taking her to family members houses so she’s constantly around people who can keep her awake but most of the time she just wants to sleep.

She is waking up upset after 30 minutes because she is used to falling asleep with you and you're not there anymore, try some gentle sleep training to help her feel confident falling asleep in her own cot.

I really would recommend the No Cry Sleep Solution that I linked to further up the thread