Hi Blossom,
My baby is now 8 weeks old and (now) fully breastfed, and has had a routine from birth. The reason for this was a mixture of the fact that I personally preferred to have a general 'order of things' - I think that it helped me to be able to 'read' dd, and to know what she needs at any point in time, but also that dd herself has grown into someone who definitely seemed to like routine. I also don't like the idea of waiting until she cries to be fed, or put to sleep. I find it easier to get her to settle if I know that she is likely to be tired, and calm and settle her before she actually cries, and the same with feeding. When she was born she was jaundiced and didn't wake for feeds, so we were advised to wake her every three hours to feed. After a couple of weeks we were allowed to leave her up to four hours if she hadn't woken herself. But still now, she wakes, we have a short cuddle/play until she is not too sleepy still to latch on well, then we feed her and then she plays. She stays awake about 2 hours now before needing her next sleep. I read Tracey Hogg's book and based our scheme on that, but I also bought Gina Ford's sleep book last week and have used that for a guide as to how long her daytime naps should be. I don't go by her routines to the letter - we are flexible enough to suit us, but when dd suddenly stopped settling well in the evening I bought the sleep book because I wanted to know whether our expectations were reasonable. I realised that I had forgotten to guide her into having shorter naps during the day - she would sleep for England still! - and so she was just not tired at 7-7.30pm any more. We have spent a couple of days waking her from her daytime naps 'on time' and now she wakes naturally, and is back to settling well in the evening and sleeping through the night. She wakes herself at 7am-ish and has a feed, has an hour or so's nap at 9am, up about 10am, feed, then nap at 12pm-ish for 2-2.5 hours, up at 2.30pm-ish, feed, nap for 1 hour at 4-4.30pm, feed, play bath, bed at 7-7.30pm. We dreamfeed her about 11pm and she sleeps through until the morning. I know that we are very very lucky with her, but I am sure that her daytime routine helps to make sure that she sleeps well at night - she is not too tired to settle easily, but neither is she too awake! We did have problems breastfeeding, so most of her feeds were EBM in a bottle until recently, but that does seems to have helped her to get used to taking a full feed each time, to see her through - she has never got into the habit of snacking, and she has continued to take full feeds from the breast. The one thing that we have found is that it is easier now to still give her her dreamfeed from a bottle - she is so deeply asleep at 11pm that I can't get her to latch without waking her up, and as she hasn't been used to that it is very very hard to settle her back to sleep again. We only made that mistake once!
I'm not saying that it will be easy to start this now, but I do believe that it is worthwhile - dd is very contented and rarely cries. I started by waking her at 7.30am (this was our one fixed point in the day), whatever time she had last woken in the night, to start our day and make sure that she got all her feeds in, and then following EASY. My top tip would be to make sure that your dd takes a full feed - make sure you have a good latch, she comes off satisfied, then offer her the second breast - rouse her by changing her nappy if you need to. If she seems to be sleeping at the end of the feed, it is not necessarily tired sleep per se, but may just be drug-induced sleep from the hormones during breastfeeding! At about 4 weeks, dd had a roughly 3 hour cycle - 1.5 hours awake, then 1.5-2 hours asleep. She was waking one in the night after her dreamfeed - this started at 2.30am, then moved to 3am, 4am, 5am, 5.30am, 6am (that one was a bugger - too early to be up, too late to go back to sleep!) and then finally 7am. I couldn't be happier, and neither could she. Although that may change later today - she has her first vaccinations this afternoon .
Good luck with whatever you decide to do.
Jen