Well, at themoment we totally just go with the flow with DD when it comes to sleep, we do dinner, bath then upstairs where she gets dressed in PJs and I feed her to sleep and then rock her before putting her into her cot asleep. She then tends to sleep fairly well, every now and then going 7pm till 0530 approx, but normally there is a wake up in there for which I will tend to feed her to sleep again cause it is easy.
However sometimes the feed/rock takes upwards of 1hr30mins and is very nork dependent, which obviously won't be feasible once a new baby arrivesin May time. Apart from the fact she is a big, heavy girl and I am starting to struggle with rocking for any length of time and will do so even more when I have a bump.
So what do I do? We have a long time to try to get her used to sleeping more independently, and I really don't want to do anything harsh that will confuse or upset her.
We have discussed something like this to try to tackle the nork dependency first:
Dinner
Bath
Into calm living room for feed, cuddle,sing etc
We then take it in turns to take her upstairs, dress for bed, rock to sleep etc.
This way she still gets nork/cuddles with me but doesn't fall asleep?
Then in a few months when she is used to that we can move towards reducing the rocking maybe?
During the day she naps well in the morning, she only needs rocking for a couple of minutes (no nork) if I catch her at the right time so that makes me wonder whether she isn't tired enough atbedtime? (7ish)
Basically,does anyone have any suggestions for me please? We love her dearly and know she is still very little so we don't have any desire to rush her through to indepence or whatever cause she is still our baby (I'm a bit hormonal about the thought of another baby distracting me from her at the moment as it is ) but I really think it will be in all of our best interests if we can move towards a slightly less me dependent, elongated night time routine!
Thank you!