No routine + 3 storey house not really sure what to do

[TheKingSits]

Wonder if anyone has any suggestions as we haven't got a clue. We have a 9 week old DS. He is an OK sleeper, will often do 3/4 hours at a time but I'd love to get more! I know I shouldn't compare but my friends seem to have babies who are sleeping for 8/9 hours or more even though mine is a good 4lbs heavier than theirs.

Anyway, we have very little routine at the moment, DS is mostly BF and cluster feeds in the evening and then gets a bottle from DH before he goes down properly. We don't really have a proper routine at the moment though because of the shape of our house! Kitchen and family room (ie where we all spend the evening) is in the basement, bath and bedroom are on 1st floor (so there is a floor in between with other rooms).

I would ideally like to bath baby every night and then bottle and bed in our room with a monitor but then if we go downstairs we are two floors away and DH thinks it is too far... I kind of agree with him but our current non-routine cannot continue! Will we have to put him down and stay up in the bedroom? That doesn't really give us any time to have any dinner unless we put him down pretty late, as DH doesn't get home from work till 7pm so the routine can't start till after then unless I do it myself, which I'm not keen on!

Sorry for the incoherent ramble, as you can tell we are just totally clueless and poor DS is a bit all over the place as a result. His bedtime and bottle seem to be at different times each night! Any suggestions of what you did at this age to get a routine established would be really helpful.

Hi,

You have a monitor, just keep checking and keep him in your room. Maybe I am a meany but you can't spend every night upstairs. You need to live to keep your sanity, your time x Your LO will get too used to that. Or, if you feel uncomfortable get him to sleep in a quiet place downstairs and transfer after his first night waking/ feed/ dzreamfeed(ideally that is your bedtime). At least he will be used to sleeping around noise that way. my DS slept downstairs until he was about 5 weeks I think. Don't worry about your routine at such a young age. In all honesty mine has only just got into a proper one and he is 9 mo. I have been trying to establish one for months but they just keep on changing :) good luck. .and congratulations x x

Ps 8 or 9 hours sleeping at night for a nine week old extremely rare. Most mums on here will verify that. Yours sounds ideal only waking up every three to four hours. That is a dream x x

We didn't have two floors between us but we put DD to bed alone from slightly earlier than that, with a monitor and with the door ajar and the light outside, and checked regularly.

It's up to every parent to decide, following the guidelines, what they are comfortable with. Like you, the non-routine didn't suit us and made my (often alone) evenings very difficult to deal with for me. DD also didn't settle well in a basket in the living room - we discovered by accident that she wanted a quiet, dark room at night to fall asleep.

We made the risk assessment we were comfortable with i.e. that there are a variety of aspects to the SIDS guidelines and as we were following the rest - cool room, on back, not in a blanket etc - we were comfortable with 2 hours or so in the evening.

As for starting the routine, we were lucky that DD was naturally a routine baby and liked a bottle at roughly the same intervals throughout the day. So one day I made sure our day started at a set time, offered bottles at set intervals (unless she was clearly hungry, routines don't mean starving your baby!) and within a few days a natural bedtime started to emerge. We then did bath and wind down and put her to bed about 8, with one of us going to bed between 9.30-10.

All you can do is try it, see if your baby starts to go with the flow within a week or so - some babies do, some don't - and see if you are comfortable with him being in another room.