what sort of routine should a 6 week old baby have? HELP!

[suzym1984]

Hi!

DS is 6 weeks old now and I am starting to think about getting him into good sleep routines. Problem is......I am a cluesless first timer and seriously doubting myself!

What sort of nap times sshould I aim for in the day? Do most people put their baby down for sleep after every feed? or do you keep them awake for a bit?

And what about bedtimes? At the moment he sleeps in his pram downstairs, usually at about 9.30 ish. DH then gives the final feed at 11.30 and brings him up. Do you think we need a stricter routine?

Thanks for any advice/ ideas!

I think it completely depends on you and your baby. If you would feel happier having a little more structure, or if your baby is prone to becoming screamingly overtired (which might suggest he would benefit from more structured naptimes to try to avoid this), then having some kind of flexible routine might be useful.

If you're happy as you are and simply feel you 'should' have a routine - then don't worry about it, you really don't 'need' one - just carry on as you're doing!

If it's more that you feel you would be happier with a routine then there is nothing wrong with trying to introduce a little structure - I am a fan of routine and followed a flexible one with both my boys from the very early days, and there are lots of positives, BUT you do have to remember that they are tiny and it will take time to establish a routine and lots of days won't go how you think they 'should' go!

But for what it's worth this is what worked for us:

• offered feeds at least every three hours during the day and also in between if they seemed hungry (both were BF). Never, ever made them wait for milk, but would offer it after three hours even if they hadn't 'asked' if that makes sense.

• aimed (certainly at 6 weeks) to have a small bit of awake time after each feed but neither of mine could stay awake much longer than an hour to an hour and a half at that age - a breastfeed could take 45 minutes, so often they might then only have 15 minutes or so of being awake before needing another sleep. Obviously they are able to stay awake for longer after feeds as they get older, but at six weeks the 'awake' window is often quite short!

• tried, always, to settle for a nap before they become overtired - avoiding overtiredness was always the aim for me and pretty much the whole point of having a routine

• aimed to have one nap per day in the cot, so that they became used to it, but certainly didn't become "rigid" about where naps took place. Both mine tended to have 3 naps per day until about 8 months - at six weeks, DS2 was napping 8:30-10am (in the buggy because I had to do the school run), 11:15ish to anything from 12pm to 2pm (in the cot) and about 3pm till 5pm (again in the buggy because of the school run)...

• aimed for 6pm bath and 7pm bedtime but to be honest this didn't really work properly until they were nearer to 4 months - they enjoyed the bath but didn't always settle to sleep afterwards! Again bedtime really does depend on what you'd be happiest with as a family - plenty of people are more than happy with a late bedtime for their baby, so don't feel you 'should' have an earlier one at this stage. As your baby grows up you may well feel it would benefit him to go down earlier, but I wouldn't worry about it too much at this stage...

hope this helps

This may be controversial but it might be worth reading the Gina Ford book which has routines for all ages in it. I am a first time mum without a clue of how to establish a routine but needed one for both my own sanity and because I felt I was interpreting every cry as a hungry cry and didnt know whether this was right.

GF's approach is far too rigid for us so I am not following it to the letter. I have cherry picked the bits of the routine I liked and ignored the parts that I dont like and which do not work for us. However, it is helpful to have as a reference and my DD now loosely follows the pattern in the book but not strictly to timings or anything like that.

HTH

Thats really helpful, thank you so much for taking the time to reply

Routine doesn't have to be a dirty word! There are plenty of books such as GF, baby whisperer etc that you can choose from and either follow to the letter or cherry pick from as suggested. What really, really helped me and I'm a first time mum too, was paying really close attention to her sleepy cues. For my dd it's lots of fist chewing, even before she starts yawning. Once you get the hang of these, you can get her napping before she reaches the screechy over tired stage.

I only started to really get the hang if this at about eight or so weeks and then tried to put her down at roughly the same time each day. Thus might not be popular but I did look at GF and my dd had put herself in a very similar routine anyway!

I think roughly you could think about a morning, lunch and afternoon nap and go from there, if you're not keen on anything too structured.

Hope it goes well for you, it does all get a bit easier to cope with as time goes on.