Trying to set a bed time and pre-bed routine for 9 week old - am I wasting my time?

[PinkFondantFancy]

For the last week or so I've been trying to set a bed time and stick to a nighttime routine for my DD. However, all this seems to have achieved so far is frustrating evenings from 7pm until 11pm (best case) or 1am (worst case) of sitting in a darkened room feeding, shushing, rocking, trying to put down, in various combinations until she eventually gives up and goes to sleep. I am so frustrated and wonder if trying to do this is all a big waste of time. The evenings just drag and drag and I am starting to dread them. Is she just too young? I'm not sure what else to try.

Yep, delusional. And don't drive yourself nuts with a daytime nap log either. Take your cues from her as you are doing. She will feel secure when her needs are observed and met.

Best advice I ever had with babies was 'take the batteries out of the clocks and forget time exists'.

Yes, you are at the stage where you dream of sleep when you manage to sleep, but this will all pass eventually. In the meantime, don't watch the clock. You can get very obsessed by the passage of time and very stressed too. This has the effect of making it all more frantic and tiring than it needs to be.

If the cot isn't working out, then don't try to force the issue. Do whatever works.

And the thing about all those "shoulds and shouldn'ts" is that the babies didn't get the memo.

When dd was that little I used to take her upstairs at nineish or whenever she seemed snoozy, bath, boob and cuddles in our bedroom without the main lights on until she went to sleep and then I would put her in her cot (and more often than not fall asleep myself).

As she got older I gradually moved going up for a bath earlier, but it wasn't until 6 months or so that she reliably went up at 7.

I think a loose routine is a good idea but I think setting 7pm as a bedtime at 9 weeks will lead to frustration and very long evenings for you.

We got our now 7 week old DS into a sleep routine within a week or two of birth, but we may just have been incredibly lucky. We feed him sometime between 7 and 8.30 with the lights dimmed, put him in his sleeping bag, soothe him to sleep (which fortunately rarely takes long) and then put him down. At first he was feeding every 3 hours or so. Now he sleeps from 8ish to 2ish and then goes back to feeding every three hours, sleeping fairly well in between. We soothe him to sleep and put him back down after every feed until 7.30ish, when we take him out of his sleeping bag, turn on lights etc to tell him its getting up time. At night we always go to him if he cries, but leave him to self-settle otherwise. We knew absolutely nothing about baby sleeping patterns when we tried this, bar a vague notion that it was important to distinguish between day and night. We also tried to give him plenty of stimulation during the day and encourage him not to nap too much.
Again we could have just been insanely lucky!

The next step will be to put him down awake....

When DS was 4 months, he had to have a mini nap between 4-5pm for a 7pm bedtime plus napping after 1-2 hours awake roughly.

My 18 weeker is the same. Nap every 2 hrs or so, 4 a day. She's asleep now (in my arms!), will nap again around 4.30/5 to get her thro to bedtime around 7/8.

Each baby is different and some will adapt to it, others won't, same goes for the parents I'd say, some will find it easy, some will find it hard, some will find it doesn't work and others will. We decided to put a bedtime routine in place at 6 weeks because she was wanting to stay up all night and wasn't napping properly, she would then take hours (and I mean hours to get down), every time I tried to put her down she'd scream the house down and wouldn't go down until middnight, 2am on bad days. This all coincided with me reading that babies who are overtired have more trouble falling asleep.

I had one of those annoying emails come through with advice about a bedtime routine (claiming to get your baby to sleep in 7 nights) so we gave it a go.
We started bath, pj's, milk and bed. The first night it took 6 hours and it was painstaking. Constantly rocking, shhing, calming and feeding her. We tried again the second night and it took 5 hours. All in all it took her 5 days to get it and once she did the change in her was immediate. She regulated her own day time naps, sleeping for 2.5 hours in the morning and 2.5 in the afternoon, sometimes longer, subsequently she was able to sleep for 6 or 7 hours at once at night, she'd wake for a feed and sleep for another 5 hours. Our only problem was that she wouldn't sleep in her crib in the daytime, only in the car seat/travel system. So in effect this was all going smoothly from 7 weeks, then at 9 weeks she started sleeping right through the night and going from 7pm-7am, we even had a night where she slept for 13 hours. She's 11 weeks tomorrow so granted I don't have a huge period of time to base this on.

At around 10 weeks she started feeding in great quantities at night time and getting quite fussy going to bed, so I assumed she was having some kind of crib aversion. DH works in a nursery and one of the girls he works with suggested maybe she was getting too used to the car seat. So we're currently in the process of trying to get her out of the car seat. I now realise that actually she's probably cluster feeding as she approaches the 3 month growth spurt, but being that I've been car seat weaning for 3 days now I'm not about to give in. What I will say is that taking her away from the car seat has thrown a MAJOR spanner in the works, she will only nap for 40 mins at a time in the crib, then in the afternoon not at all. So she's gone from 5 hours of napping during the day to less than 2 and she's waking up (just the once) again during the night at around 5am (and going back to sleep).

This tells me how much the routine made an impact on her life and how much she's got used to it. I feel like such a mean mummy but I might as well do it now or else it's only delaying the inevitable so for now I'm just going with the follow but keeping the bedtime routine every night, however much she wants to cluster feed.

I think the important thing to remember is that being a parent is hard work and you need to do what you need to do to get through it. It's quickly become apparent to me that just when you get one thing sorted something else comes along. No one really knows what they are doing, just look around on these forums for everyone asking for thoughts and advice. We're all just making it up as we go along, so why not give it a try, if it works it works, if it doesn't it doesn't. Good luck.

Hmmm I think that a nap every three or four hours is not enough - as in a baby of 17 weeks will probs be tired after 1.5/2 hrs max? My little one is 21 weeks and he naps every 1.5 hrs though can go a bit (not much longer). When he was 17 weeks it was a struggle to get him to go 1.5 before he started showing sleepy signs (especially for the first nap of the day). I started putting him in a routine on the advice of a sleep fairy-lady at 17 weeks incidentally, after similarly broken nights and utter exhaustion... It took about three days for him to get into the routine and I couldn't believe how quickly he took to it. About three weeks ago, we had the sleep fairy come and stay for three nights. It was a massive help for my confidence, because I was always terrified about not feeding him when he was hungry though I suspected he had fallen into a habit of waking and getting fed when he wasn't really hungry (he would fall asleep after only a couple of mins on the boob, often sleepy in the morning and not hungry for a proper feed til 10/11am ish).

She showed me he didn't need feeding after the dream feed, but that he was just in the habit of something having to happen before he could settle himself back to sleep. Two nights after she left he slept through from the dream feed for the first time. He has for the past week / ten days slept through (bed at 7, dream feed at 10:30 and sleeps through until 7).

My DS is now 8.5 months and I find that getting him to go down and STAY down at night is very dependent on daytime naps. I too don't think your LO is getting enough in the day.

I have always put him down max two hours after waking up. As we've recently moved to two naps a day, I then wait three hours for the next nap and usually four hours until bed. And by then he is SHATTERED. And this is a boy that would rarely nap at all! At your stage, I was still putting him down every 2 hours, aiming not to have him sleeping past 5pm for a 7pm bedtime.

Make sure your bedtime routine is consistent. We have bath, bottle (was boob), then I put him in his sleeping bag to make sure he's awake (ish) then bed. He's nearly always sleeping through, but has started waking at 5am (that's another post!).

I am pretty anti-Gina Ford, but the one thing I really believe in is making sure their bedtime and naptime routines are different, but always the same. If that makes sense? So baby knows when it's time for 'big sleep'.