4 months old - bedtime!

[lmstepho]

Hi!! Looking for some advice...
DD is 4 months old and in the whole is fab! She's not too bad at napping during the day (pram, car seat etc) and is generally a very happy baby, she's breast fed and is happily putting on wait.
The issue is our evening routine, the current routine is to bath her at about 6.30pm then keep her with us and we all go to bed at about 9.30pm when she proceeds to sleep really well (usually one wake up for feed) and wakes somewhere between 6-7am.
The issue is that following bath time she gets COMPLETELY past it and turns into a different child. She is quite obviously over tired but we can't seem to get her down on her own any earlier. I've tried putting her to bed in her cot in the nursery and also in the next to be crib in our room but she just seems to know the difference and won't go to sleep! She wakes up and cries for me to go back in. But no matter how bad she is she'll still go straight to sleep when we revert back to our original routine!

Have you tried bringing bedtime back by about fifteen minutes every few days so she gradually adjusts?

Also might be worth trying doing her bath just before bed eg at 8-8.30pm so that she associates bath with bedtime, then gradually bring the whole routine backwards.

6.30 is probably still too early for her. It wasn't until about 6 months my two went to bed that early. They were still about 8pm - 9pm at four months.

Also my two never settled if they had a bath before bedtime. Despite all the bath and bedtime routine stuff, it doesn't work for some kids who find it over stimulating. It was much easier in the day time when they weren't tired and hungry as well!!

This happened to us at 4 months too. We did as suggested above, bring the whole routine including bath forward to 9.30pm then adjusted it back by 15 mins per day until she was going to bed at 7pm. She’s slept 12 hours uninterrupted ever since (baring the odd illness, she’s now nearly 2).

That's such fab advice, thank you! Makes perfect sense to bath later and tie in with bed time then bring the whole routine forwards a little bit at a time...genius!
I did this tonight and managed bath, feed and asleep in cot by 9.15pm. Just woken now (half 2) for first feed of the night.
Thanks again, well worth me posting and great advice!

Marking my place my dd is also 4 months, doesn’t sleep as well as yours though 😂 just done night feed x

I always found a tinkly mobile above their cot, would send all three of mine to sleep. They all had the same one. I don't know if it was because it was just a particularly effective sound. It also helped with putting them down awake.