i've been busy spawnchorus hence only now getting back to you.
i am not sure how you currently sleep with your baby at night, or naptimes or why you want to achieve a routine. i have posted the paragraph below because it gives a good idea why a 'sleep routine' is not necessarily useful. it is just a stick to beat parents and babies with. sleep routines only came about with the advent of bottlefeeding and if you are breastfeeding, there is little or no benefit to getting your child to sleep on its own at any time of the day or night. so, if you don't mind having your child sleep in a sling during the day, then don't sweat it. you are not 'teaching him bad habits'. the paragraph below gives an idea of what i mean. it comes from a longer document which is very enlightening. you don't have to read all of it or can read some, return to it and come back to it later. you don't even have to read the sections in order.
here
the following paragraph also has an interesting title: "What Scientific Evidence Actually Reveals: Do Cosleeping Or Solitary Sleeping Arrangements Lead To Independent, Happy or Competent Children ?"
if you still do want to look at a sleep routine, you may want to read this one. it says not to try it till after one year but i think you can read it and take away things from it. one of them is that you don't have to leave the room and let your child cry and come back to 'reassure' and then leave.
Why Infants and Children Have ?Sleep Problems? to Solve: The Solitary Infant Sleep Model and the Emperor?s New Clothes
Anywhere between 20 and 45% of otherwise healthy western infants and children are said to suffer from ?sleep disturbances? or ?sleep problems? (see Sadeh and Anders 1993, Anders and Eiben 1997); and western parents are described as the most dissatisfied parents of all with their infants and children?s sleep (Morelli et al 1992). Surely they continue spend millions of dollars each year to learn why their healthy infants seem less interested in sleeping alone than what learned authorities claim is healthy for them.
Clinicians continue to warn parents that in order to establish lifelong ?healthy? sleep habits, infants ?need? and should be ?trained? to sleep alone?and surely, they should never cosleep if the infant or child is ever to complete it?s psychological separation from the parents (Ferber 1999). If the infant cannot fall asleep, or fall back to sleep alone, once it is awake, (self-soothe) a sleep ?disorder? may exist, jeopardizing the infant or child ?s growth toward adaptation, so it is claimed (see Ferber 1985, 1999 and AAP Guide To Your Child?s Sleep, 1999). Self- soothing, which is presumed to reflect early infant independence, is supposed to promote early and later self-assuredness, the emergence of individual competence, as well as personality characteristics judged to be socially advantageous (see Ferber 1999).
The problem is that none of this has ever been shown to be true. It is not known if the type of ?independence? achieved by a self-soothing infant is relevant to any permanent developmental advantage or competency whatsoever. In fact, no researcher has ever defined what ?independence? or ?autonomy? actually means for an infant or young child (McKenna 2000), nor whether infant ?independence? is beneficial at all, or correlates with any particular set of skills or talents not obtainable, or more effectively acquired, through other social experiences or child-care practices, including cosleeping (see below). Indeed, according to the most recent annual report of the National Sleep Foundation (1999) in the United States, 62% of American adults ?report difficulties falling and staying asleep. Sixty percent of children under the age of 18 have complained to their parents about being tired during the day, and 15% admit to falling asleep in school (1999 National Sleep Foundation Annual Report).
Such reports indicate that the solitary infant and childhood ?sleep training? models which promised ?healthy lifetime sleep habits?, advocated for at least 60 years, either failed miserably, or the correlations between early sleeping arrangements and adult psychological development were never true to begin with. Despite this fact traditional folk beliefs refuse to go away. Ferber (1999) and more recently continues to promote myths and false and misleading reasons to keep infants separate from parents during sleep, despite his own public claims to the contrary (Seabrook 1999). When it comes to infant sleep, like religion, believing that solitary infant sleep is superior t o all other sleeping arrangements appears more important than knowing if it is true, or if so, under what specific circumstances; and, of course, even answering such a question, begs yet another question: is this the right question ?
Our work suggests that it is not?that similar to the question about bedsharing safety, what is gained or lost through solitary infant sleep depends on what and who goes into the bed?and what the relational content and meaning is for the participants?who bedshare. We suspect that there exist no such easy psychological correlations between adult character and early sleeping arrangements of a kind used to warn parents against cosleeping. The issue of social, personality and psychological outcomes is, yet again, much more complex and multi-facetted than current literature indicate. For example, it may well be that bedsharing enhances that which is already good about the relationship between parents and their infants and children, or enhance that which is already bad; but it is doubtful that sleep location functions independently of what occurs, for example, between cosleepers during the entire day ---to influence the nature of the social and emotional components that determine moral and personality development.
Sleep guides continue to prefer, however, Spocks and Ferbers? (1985) simplistic and uniform notions that infants sleeping separately and alone from their parents leads to developmental advantages for children as well as benefits to parents and families in general (see AAP Guide To Your Child?s Sleep 1999; Ferber 1985; Godfrey and Kilgore 1998), even without the information on individual families, and systematic studies needed to prove such assertions. And still, anti-bedsharing researchers, in many different areas of discussion, still hold the advantage that comes with 100 years of misunderstanding exactly what healthy infant sleep is. They continue to present and distort, for example, data to fit their own presumptions and cultural predilections about the inherent dangers and disadvantages of parent-infant cosleeping-and sometimes they seem to get away with it as particularly deficient papers continue to pass peer review, as discussed below.