sleeping from 7-11pm

[Cookiemg]

hi

i have a 14 week old daughter who is a great sleeper through the night and when she wakes at 6 or 7 will often go back to sleep until 11am or 12pm. i would like to change her pattern so she goes down in the evening so that my husband and i can get some time together. do you think this is possible or should i just be thankful that we get a full night

cheers

My DS (3-months) goes down between 5-6pm, wakes around midnight and then again around 4-5am, then we get up at 7am.

I think it is perfectly possible to change your DD's routine. I have recently swapped from Gina Ford (done for feeding not for sleep) to SleepSense (done to target sleeping, I want him to sleep between 6pm and 2.30am without waking up). SleepSense by M.Faure and A. Richardson has some good ideas and was easy to get into.

FWIW we put our first down around 7pm from about 2 wks, and he woke for feeds around 10pm and 3am and stayed in his cot (for the most part asleep) until 7am, until around a year when he dropped the last early morning feed). DS2 was put down about 7pm from about 3mths, but still (at 18mths) takes about an hour to settle, and still has an early morning feed (at about 5-6am) before going down in the cot until 7ish.

In both cases we had a very rigid bedtime routine (bath, stories, last milkfeed) and take about an hour to wind them down and settle them. I also got up at night for the feeds until they dropped these of their own accord (having tried unsuccessfully to get DS2 to drop the night feeds a couple of times around the 9-13mths mark).

If you're BFing I think it'll be harder to get your LO to sleep for longer than say a couple of 4 hr stretches, but you should find that once they've fed they settle back to sleep quickly, and will drop these feeds when they are ready. If they are FF they should go a bit longer (from what I've heard) but I would say they are unlikely to go 12hrs at night at such young ages. That said, they're all different, and you might be super-lucky.

Hope this helps.

thank you i will look into it