What can we do differently? Settling 12wo in the evenings

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I'd really appreciate some advice re our DS. We haven't been able to get him to settle in the evening and he is awake crying until his late feed at 10.30-11. He is so tired but fights sleep.

At bedtime we spend the first hour-90mins shush-patting/picking up and putting down. After that we tend to put him in the sling and he sometimes goes to sleep then.

His routine is massage, bath, feed upstairs and lullaby, then gentle wind (we've tried without but he had reflux and is often sick if we don't), then in his cot. We've tried putting him down asleep or sleepy, a white noise app. his bed is tilted and we warm it before he goes in. He is pretty knackered by 5.30pm but we've tried various bed times between 6 and 8 with no change.

In the day I force him to nap by putting him in the sling and he gets about 4hrs in total which seems about right. He fights sleep and often had a good cry before going off. After his late evening feed and night feeds he generally goes down without a problem.

Sorry for the length of post but I didn't want to leave anything out. Should we just persevere and he'll eventually go with it or are there things we can change now to help him settle? We could go back to just keeping him up with us but I really think he needs the sleep and we need to start somewhere.

At 12 weeks, I still had DS downstairs on me of an evening but - I was in a rocking chair and cuddled/rocked him to sleep. Maybe that would work, and then you transfer him?

Also, I think some babies are more stimulated by baths and it makes other babies sleepy. Maybe your DS is in the stimulated camp - have you tried not making a bath part of the routine?

Just kicking ideas around

Sometimes babies just don't go to sleep till 10-11pmish... If you didn't try to get him to sleep in the early eve would he be happy? How about slinging him after bath etc and seeing if he sleeps there till his later feed?

You say he had reflux, past tense, is this no longer a problem?

Safe sleep guidelines advise on a flat sleeping position for infants, however a paediatrician, Health visitor and GP all recommended a slightly elevated sleeping position for our baby who suffered badly from reflux. We put DVDs under the mattress to tilt it up slightly. They do say you must never put anything under a mattress. You could put books or similar under the legs of the cot on one side to raise up.

When is your baby's last feed? Are you cluster feeding in the evening?

Lastly, and perhaps unpopularly, SIDS guidelines state the baby should sleep in the same room as you for daytime and nighttime sleep, so ideally your baby would be occupying the same space as you whilst they are asleep. There are a lot of parents sitting with a baby snoring on their lap in the evening until their baby is 6 months or more. I wonder if you are perhaps fretting that everyone else's babies are sleeping normally by now and yours isn't. I did that sometimes. I was actually so much better at being a new parent and so much happier when I let my baby and me be.

Thanks so much all, lots of food for thought.

I wonder if it is a bit premature, I have become a bit fixated on him clocking up enough sleep as he was a really poor sleeper during the nights until about recently. I used to keep him up with me but have been trying to put him down for the past couple of weeks in the hope that he'll get a few more hours in (clearly failing!)

ZebraZeebra, I think it might be worth cutting the bath out and seeing how that goes.

Josieannathe2nd, he does seem really tired and if he stays up he gets overwrought. But he is happy generally when slinged.

purrforamincepie, his reflux is being managed pretty well with ranitidine at the moment. We have tilted his cot and this definitely helps.

You are right about letting things be though, I've generally been pretty laid back and for e.g let DS sleep on me/in the sling during the day. I just want him to get enough sleep.

Thanks so much, I think I've been a bit blinkered and maybe we need to go back to bedtime routine then DS with us for a while, even though he might not sleep...

Oh, I meant to say no he's not cluster feeding generally unless his reflux is bad, so he feeds roughly every 3 hours.

Cluster feed, swaddle, white noise ( loud!!) as well as your bed time routine. At that age I managed to get DS down around 8, but it took ages.

We went back from there and now he goes down well at 6.30.

Just thinking again... The health visitor said to try getting him down alone from about 10weeks (would have been six weeks but he was four weeks prem). I think she felt that if he always went to sleep on me/ in the sling he'd develop a strong sleep association that would be hard to break. So we have persevered with it in the hope that he'd manage to go to sleep alone.

Thanks BonaDea, he used to love swaddling but sadly hates it now...

Yes, mine started to hate swaddling too. It only worked as long as it worked!

I reckon just keep going. It does take time to get them to grasp what bed time means. Just try to make it nice and soothing and try not to get anxious yourself to avoid bad associations.

At 12 weeks our DS was still in with us during the evening. If he seemed tired then we would sleep cuddled on me or DH or he would be up and having playtime with daddy. He would always go into his cot after his 10.30 feed.

We now have a 7 month old who goes to bed at 7pm, nothing particular we did with him just followed his lead and he let us know when he wanted sleep and also when he was happy to sleep in his cot instead of with us.

my advice would be try not to become too worried about bedtimes, make sure you have a consistent routine and things will eventually fall into place when your lo is ready for them to.

Thank you, Miggs, it's really nice to hear your experience, and great that your DS now sleeps from 7!
Clearly this isn't working for any of us, so back to being with us in the eves, but keeping up the bedtime routine and maybe trying to get him to go down in his Moses basket downstairs.

Thanks so much everyone

What time does he finish his afternoon nap? If he is really tired by 5.30pm, presumably he is overtired by 6pm and that may be why he can't sleep.

Oh just wanted to come back and say similar to a previous poster. Our dd is 7 months and she sleeps through a couple of nights a week. Like last night. And I mean sleeps through - she fell asleep on me at 7 (we normally put her down awake but drowsy, but she was very sleepy after her bath) then when she was still snoring at 7.45 we carried her up and put her down. She slept til 6.42 this morning. The big bowl of banana porridge for supper might have helped :) weaning has totally changed everything here, no more ranitidine or domperidone.

We haven't done anything special though. Letting her sleep on me hasn't made any rods. Sleep is just happening. I wish I hadn't worried about it now.

Really good to hear people haven't had problems down the line. I'm definitely going to try and relax. It was only a fortnight ago he had never slept in his cot and now he can so it 11 onwards...
Cavell, his pm naps are less set than his morning one but he is perhaps asleep 3-4. I really work at getting daytime sleeping in. Maybe I could try a later nap and later bedtime routine.

Hey OP< just a thought, at that age if my DS woke up from a nap at 4pm, I would definitely expect him to have another short nap in the evening (say 6pm-6.30) whilst I was faffing about in the kitchen he would nap in the moses basket in the lounge (we never did the whole sling thing but I imagine a sling nap might work here too?).

I would always make sure he had this weird teatime nap in a bright noisy room, and then aim for his bedtime 2 hours after waking from that nap. So if he woke up at 6.30pm I would then aim for a 8.30pm bedtime. It seemed a bit daft at the time and I remember getting my knickers in a right twist about it thinking why is my baby napping in the lounge at 6pm when most people's babies are getting ready for bed now. BUT (like al of a baby's sleep phases - both bad and good) it was a short lived thing which only lasted a week or two. The he shifted onto a new pattern (of his choosing!) and we had to arrange things differently again.

With my DS I found the key thing at this ages was he literally couldn't stay awake for more than 2 hours at any time of day without becoming a screaming overtired wreck. And he fought every nap so I would do daft things like go for a 40 minute drive 'on the way home' from a baby group round the corner if he was tired and due a nap, just to make sure the rest of the day wasn't a write off :-S

So maybe try approaching every evening flexibly, thinking that bedtime will be two hours after he wakes from his last nap - sometimes it might be 2030, sometimes it might be 2000, on a good day it might work out to be 1930.....and you might find that in a few weeks time he will gradually become more and more consistent of his own accord, settling into his own routine. His naps during the day will also shuffle around and happen at different times of day every day so try not to get hung up on that - just follow the 'no more than two hours awake' rule if you can, to stave off meltdowns!

In case you need another heartening story to cheer you up, my DS is now 12mo and sleeps through the night from 6.45pm - 6.30am every night unless he is ill :-) I really didn't do anything to make this happen and I always tried to be led by him in terms of following his sleepy cues and putting him down to bed when he was tired. We had some mad bedtimes when he was your LOs age - sometimes v late and sometimes v early, and some very disturbed nights, and a wonderful phase of regular 5am starts to the day when he was 7mo....we have been through it all!! But the general pattern has been a gradual improvement in nighttime sleep until at about 10mo he suddenly settled and became a v good night sleeper. I think it coincided with him crawling and really knackering himself out in the day?

Anyway I am rambling on, I remember the stress of those 3-month-old days, feeling like i had to fix a routine and make everything ok with DS's sleep and what I have realised in retrospect is he kinda got there himself in the end. Good luck!

BotBoticelli, I'm sorry it's taken me so long to reply, I just wanted to say a big thank you for your post. I'm grateful for you sharing your experience and thoughts, it's very reassuring to hear your LO found his own way and now sleeps through.
The two hour awake approach is really good--we're trying that now and it definitely is true that he's sleepy after that time. Still having challenging evenings even with him being with us downstairs as he's refusing to nap and crying lots but shoving him in the sling is helping.
Thanks so much X