Bedtime for 12 week old- help!

[BRITNEYLIZ]

Hi all

I have just started doing a bedtime for my little boy. He was sleeping in the bouncer up until a week ago in the evenings and would go into his deep sleep around 9.30 before transferring him upstairs.

The past week I have tried to do this earlier. E.g bath, bottle, bed from 7.15 to be asleep for 8pm.

Twice it has worked with him stirring at the 40 min mark but dummy in and he has been asleep but the other three times he has fully woken up after the 40 mins and I have spent the next 1.5 hours trying to get him back to sleep (I guess until his usual 9.30ish bedtime).

What time should his last nap end for him not to be overtired yet still sleep enough? The nights it worked I was letting him nap till 5.30-6.15ish and the nights it didnt were between 5 and 5.30 but couldn't get him to nap any longer!

My daughter only took a few days of doing this and got it so do I still with it or just forget about it for a few weeks?

I feel like so many people say their babies go down for the night at 7/8pm and its stressing me out!

He is still small. I wouldn’t stress about it too much. He’s probably not ready for an earlier bedtime.

Also people do lie about their baby’s sleeping so I wouldn’t pay too much attention to what people say.

NHS advice is that you should be in the same room as baby while they sleep - for all sleeps (day/night/evening) until 6 months old.

www.lullabytrust.org.uk/safer-sleep-advice/room-sharing/

For this reason, parents usually continue the "nap" routines with baby sleeping downstairs, until the parent goes to bed. Until baby is a bit older.

Usual awake time window between naps at this age would be somewhere in the region of 30-60 minutes. So the usual way to establish a bedtime routine is:

• Daytime naps as usual through the day, awake for max 1h between naps
• At the wake time that happens between 7pm-8pm, use that as your time for "Bedtime Routine"
• When baby wakes from nap, do bath, change from daytime clothes to night time clothes, feeds and whatever else you want to do as a bedtime routine
• Then put baby back down for a "nap" downstairs, now in night time clothing and having been bathed.
• At the next wake up, likely somewhere around 9-10pm, decide if this is your bedtime or if you'll wait for next wake up. If youre not going to bed yet:
• Don't have awake time after this "nap". Feed and re-settle baby back to sleep quickly. Continue sleep downstairs.
• At the next wake up use that opportunity to carry baby upstairs. Have no awake time, just feed, carry upstairs and settle back to sleep. Now you are in bed, sleep continues upstairs with you.

He's so little. We had exactly the same thing but just went with it. Bedtime will naturally get earlier in the next few weeks - we just inched back slowly, following her lead and soon enough she had a 7PM bedtime. I know it feels interminable but it does end quite quickly.