Routine for newborn

[christmasmum]

Just had my 2nd baby, a lovely and beautiful (to me at least!!) DS. You'd think that being 2nd time around I'd be able to answer this but...!

At what age do you start trying to get into something of a routine? I went a bit bonkers with my DD and grabbed every book going, tried different routines every day it seemed, got hugely stressed and essentially ended up with borderline PND. Don't want to do that again!!

But now, in my crazy world I'm worried that I'm now being too relaxed the other way! I'm feeding him on demand, letting him sleep whenever he wants to etc. Quite happy doing that at the moment but at what age should I try and restore order to my life?!

I'd spend a couple of weeks doing what you are already doing and maybe then try and build a routine that works around your first child. If your 1st has a particular time of day that they need your attention (grouchy at end of day or wants one to one after nursery or school) try and work it so that baby is fed and changed (and hopefully content) ahead of this time. If no 1 is still having a nap during the day try and work it so that baby naps at roughly the same time. I found it easier to build a routine with the 2nd one as we already had some sort of routine in place for the older child.

Oh and congrats by the way

i started my ds2 on some kind of routine about 4 weeks, which is earlier than ds1 i think for him i started more like 8 weeks
if your happy remaining flexible for now i don't think it's a problem, why not just start bringing in a routine in the most important thing that u want and stay flexible in other things? like my routines mainly focused on bedtime, and i can be more flexible other than that

Blimey I'd say about 12 weeks but don't expect miracles before 12 months, what's the rush ?

i started by getting him up at the same time every day, seeings as we all had to be up for dd going to pre school anyway. this was at about 3 wks which was when dh went back to work and i was doing the school run.

then i started a bedtime routine, if you can call it that. so i just started giving him a bit of a wash, changed, zipped into sleeping bag and settled down for a big cluster feed. this was at about 6 wks. so that happens every night at 7pm when dh is upstairs doing dd's bedtime.

other than that he has a morning nap after the school run, nods off in the car then snoozes on for maybe an hour in the house/pram depending what we're doing.

i then started to notice he'd seem tired/need feeds at the same sort of times each day. so as dh comes home from work at 4pm, we noticed ds is always on the feeding cushion snoozing. so that's his afternoon nap. also i noticed when i'm sorting dd's lunch around midday he's usually asleep.

anyway, so what i'm saying is, i just sorted out the beginning and end of the day, ds fell into a pattern in between himself, around dd's routine.

he's now 10wks old and fairly predictable. i think by 12 wks we'll be totally sorted.