6 months old no routine, does it get better?

[Aria28]

Hello. My lovely baby is 6 months old but sleeps worse than ever and just has no routine :(. I love him to bits but feel so crap with myself that things just haven't settled. Literally all the other mums in my NCT group are doing all sorts of things with their days, and I just sit at home trying to get through. My family live far away so can't help, and my husband works a lot. Does it get better? I just need a little routine, at the moment he won't sleep unless I hold him (during the day, at night he sleeps in his cot). Anyone had a similar experience?

@Aria28 hi sorry to what this - my baby is 12 wks and I'm just starting to think about a routine

What have you tried ?

For us we bath her around 5pm ish at her awake window - her current routine for bottles are

7am
11am
3pm
7pm
Dream feed at 9:30ish and she generally goes down until 6ish

After bath I do a baby massage, fresh pjs and cuddle to sleep. She sleeps down with us until we go up for 9ish and we dream feed her

She normally naps on me in the day or her snooze pillow which is on the sofa

She has a sleeping bag for night sleeping which I think helps

Keeping day bright and fun, from her bath time onwards so 6pm we turn lights low and keep it chill.

X

My baby was quite unsettled but has got better
Used to cry a lot but now not so much and normally it's the early evenings

She cat naps so between her 4hr feeds she will have 2 naps - some are shorter than others

I think once I found out her awake windows and when she needed to nap it this helped

She is a noisy sleeper at night so we don't get much sleep!

I think it does get better in time from what I've read and I have an 11 yr old but I can't remember when! I remember finding the baby stage hard and I still do ! X

Short answer: yes, it does get better. In my experience kids have random sleep regressions on a fairly regular basis but there's a general upward trend. The first 6 months are so hard in basically every respect, especially if you don't have much help.

Please try not to compare yourself/your baby to your NCT group, all mums and babies are different and you don't know what goes on behind closed doors. I really regret that I spent so much time worrying about whether my first baby was 'normal' and whether I was doing anything wrong.

Will your baby sleep in the pram? If so you could start by going for a walk or coffee at the same time each day until he gets used to the schedule. Try to make sure you're giving him meals/milk/bath at a similar time each day, a sleep routine will follow eventually. I also found that mine napped much more reliably when they dropped down to one nap a day, but you're probably a while off that unfortunately.

Thank you so much to everyone who responded, really helpful.