Parents who keep their babies downstairs in the evening...

[Germantree]

...And take them up when you're ready to go to bed - how do you manage it? If your baby is already asleep downstairs does moving them not wake them so much that they then can't settle quickly upstairs? Do they wake more frequently in the night after having their sleep interrupted? Do you change them when you go up or feed them? Tempted to try with dd who is 8weeks tonight in the hope that shell either sleep for a bit longer (11 to 2 maybe?!) or at least ill be tired enough to actually sleep when she is rather than tossing and turning for an hour and a half but im a bit terrified I'll do it wrong and end up with a horrible night of constant waking after disrupting her initial sleep. At the moment she goes roughly from 9 to 12 upstairs (having been put down at 8), then 2, 4 and 6 for feeds which last about 45 mins to an hour.

'I try and keep him awake between 8 and 10 - is that wrong??'

Not at all if he is happy.

PP you cancarry Snuzpod around?

Anyhow we do bedtime routine at 7pm then downstairs in Snuzpod for 7-11. We don't have the lights on full and keep voicws low. It's only 6 mos, then we can have normal evenings again.

Feed at 11pm, upstairs sleepy but awake and into cot in spare room where I also sleep.

I would breastfeed my DS when he was newborn and put him down in the lounge. If I was knackered (most of the time), id have an early night upstairs and DS would be downstairs with OH. At first wake up, normally midnight, OH would bring him upstairs and hed then stay with me. As he got older, I wanted night sleep to be upstairs so I’d either have an early night but think we just used a monitor from around 3 months

Well we've been keeping her down with us for a few nights now and have found that even though she's not necessarily sleeping any longer than she was when we all went up to bed at 7, we feel better rested as parents just because we've actually spent an evening together rather than holed up in a dark bedroom with her, whispering and being terrified of making any noise at all! Although she had her jabs yesterday and slept a total of 3 hours (broken. Argh) last night so any semblance of routine has been thrown out of the window anyway.

Both of mine slept on our chests until about 11 when we would feed and change and take them up to bed.

We had ours in a Moses basket then a snuzpod in the living room, lights on low and we could still watch TV and talk as long as it wasn't too loud.

We're in a flat though so it was easy to slide the whole basket/snuzpod into the bedroom next door when we were ready to go to bed. The top of the snuzpod can be a crib alone but it's pretty heavy and I wouldn't fancy carrying it upstairs with a baby in it.

DD just stayed downstairs until it was time to go to bed. I often went to bed at 8/9pm and DH would stay up with her until 12/1am.
That uninterrupted sleep really helped me.
He would often only have the lamp on and would turn the TV down a bit but she slept fine.
We used the carrycot from the pram downstairs.

Dd always woke around 11pm anyway, although I'm a lover of creature comforts so I always took myself and baby to bed every night at 8 to watch tv and baby slept in Moses basket beside me!

With my first I hadn't even considered putting them to bed before me!

I just carried on as we had - if she fell asleep on me watching tv then fab or if awake playing then fab.

She came to bed with me when I went to bed. I wasn't up for fussing hours before I was ready!

Having said that we tended to go about 9.