How do you get your baby to go to bed at 7 or 8pm??

[Mahonia]

Hi everyone

I'm really struggling with my LO's sleep. She is 5.5 months old and really suffered during the four month sleep regression. She naps for 35-45 mins at a time during the day and is up hourly throughout the night (although last week she managed a whole seven hours without waking for a feed or cuddle! So I know she can do it!)

Anyway, I've read so many threads where babies go to bed at 7pm or 8pm and I just have no idea how? My LO just doesn't seem to be ready for actual bed until around 9pm and even then she'll wake up 45 - 60 mins later. She gets up around 8am, give or take 15 mins, and that's after a couple of early morning feeds. We don't have a strict day routine where I put her down at a specific time for naps, I try to recognise and act on her sleep cues instead, but she does seem to be settling into a rough pattern of napping around every 2 hours, even if she seems tired earlier than this she just won't sleep until the two hour mark. I feel like I must be doing something wrong.

Any advice or example daily routines welcome.

Thanks.

I think you need to start her day earlier. Sorry! I know it's grim when they're waking up all night long and you're knackered and you want to stay horizontal til 8am.

Try doing it gradually; set an alarm for 7.45 and stick to getting her and you up – whisking open the curtains, daylight and noise straight away, start the day. Then move it forward to 7.30, then 7. Hopefully once her day starts at 7am her bedtime will shift earlier as well (even if she wakes up after an hour and you have to resettle her, it's still bedtime).

Also I read that the first awake window of the day should be the shortest, and the last the longest. So you could try suppressing her into a nap after an hour, hour and a half, after the morning wake up, then extend to two hours for the rest. First nap is always the easiest one to achieve.

The night sleep does get better, I promise! (Eventually.)

An 11-hour-ish window of "night" is about right at that age. So 9pm - 8am is fine if you're happy with it.

We're on 7pm ish to 6am ish, sometimes 7.30 to 6.30. Having an evening is great, but you do end up with an early start!

Sorry about the frequent waking, though, that sounds very tough.

Sounds absolutely normal

My friends little girl did the 9-8 routine, but it proved problematic when she had to go back to work as baby got up to late.

DS also woke regularly until he was 18 months so that's normal also

Bring bedtime forward by 5 minutes each night. Within a few weeks you will be at 7

@2007Millie waking up hourly every night is normal? Really? I've only ever read about it as being a problem. I expect night wakings just not quite as frequently. Thanks for the advice about gradually changing bed time, I'll give it a go and see how we get on.

@burritofan and @ILoveStickers I would be quite happy to have an earlier start. In fact she wakes up for milk around 05:45 - 06:00 and seems pretty awake babbling away to herself quite happily, so perhaps we should just get up then. She gets tired again pretty quickly and I usually feed her back to sleep and she dozes off around 07:00 - 07:15, and wakes around 08:00. Thanks both for the replies and advice, I'll try the gradual bedtime change and see how we get on. I do feel that an earlier bedtime might just settle her more for the night.

Waking hourly is normal and is a problem. My best advice to survive it is to not clockwatch or time the night wakings; cosleep – ideally with a sidecar cot so you're not disturbing each other when you shift on the mattress – so you don't have to get up; hot shower and fresh air in the morning; simply vast quantities of Dairy Milk. It will end, one day!

We had a similar routine with DD at that point, gradually she has gotten into a routine of going to bed earlier and earlier and now is in bed for 7:30pm - 7:30am but at 5 months she would be up until 9-10pm easily.

Sounds like you are doing all the right things- I would read her cues on naps during the day and she’s now put herself in a great routine so I know exactly what times she needs a nap. It’s taken a bit of trial and error to get here though - good luck x

I had a similar problem with my lo. Waking at best every 90 mins. At worst 25 mins.
I used a sleep consultant. Within a week slept 7-7
At around 6 months his routine was
Start day 6.30-7
Nap 9-9.30/10
Nap 2 12.30-2.30
Nap 3 4.30-4.45
Bath 6.15
Bed 7

We used a gentle settling technique which involves trying to teach baby to self settle

It's totally normal. The issue is most people make you think it isn't.
DS used to wake hourly for months. I truly believe you can't teach a young baby to self settle

I taught my 5.5 month old to self settle. From 4 months to 5.5 months he was waking every 1 to 2 hours and was breastfed back to sleep.

At 5.5 months I decided I could not cope with the sleep deprivation anymore and moved him to his own bed in his own room. Instead of being fed to sleep my dh settled him at night. Within a few nights he was sleeping 7.30 to 5.30 with a single wake for a feed.

For us breaking sleep associations was key and he now transitions between sleep cycles on his own without getting upset.

Im with @weepingwillow22, that's exactly what we did and DD wakes once every now and then.

Hi everyone

Thank you for all of your replies and advice, it's much appreciated. Apologies for the delay in responding.

I feel better knowing that a 9pm bedtime is normal for the 8am wakeup. I am going to try however to move to a 7pm bedtime if possible.

At the moment we have a very loose daytime structure, based on when she wakes up and when she naps. We seem to end up with four naps during the day as she rarely sleeps for longer than 45 mins at time... For example, so far today:

06:20 wake up, milk, nappy change (pooped just as she was dozing off, so then needed more milk)
07:10 back to sleep
07:50 wake up
10:00 - 10:30 nap
12:20 - 13:45 naps - 3 separate sleeps, linked together with breastfeeding, total of 1hr 20 mins sleep (sometimes we only manage 30-45 mins here, sometimes I can get two sleep cycles)
15:15 - 15:35 nap
18:20 - 19:00 nap (really struggled to get her to sleep any earlier, was aiming for around 17:15 as she started to show sleep cues, then she pooped just as she was dozing off (this is a regular occurrence), so had to change her nappy and that woke her up. Then she just wouldn't settle for a nap.)
She'll manage about an hour now before getting tired but I won't be able to get her to sleep until around 21:00, possibly 20:30, even though she will seem really tired.
Her first wake up of the night is then sometime around 22:00 - 22:30 and then it's every 45 - 60 mins from then on. She only feeds back to sleep a couple of times in the night, most of the time a cuddle or a handhold or a gentle shhhhhh-ing settles her back to sleep.

Does that seem OK? We have a vaguely similar variation of that each day.

I think I need to sort out the feeding to sleep, it's just working out how to break the habit - she is very stuck in her ways!

@sk283 which settlling method did you use?

OMG at 5.5 months old I was in survival mode! I never managed to get my baby into a proper routine until age 1 so just wanted to say solidarity and don't beat yourself up about it

@oflancs thank you its less the routine, more the regular (45 - 60 minute) wake ups during the night! Wondered if I could tweak anything in the day - she doesn't fall asleep until around 9pm even though she seems tired much earlier so I'm not sure if she's staying up later than ideal and therefore getting overtired and affecting her sleep overnight.

Why do people say hourly wake-ups at 5.5 months is normal? It’s not true or helpful. Yes, there are lots of babies that do, but plenty more are doing at least a few hour long stretches by that point.

OP how quickly are you going to/picking up your baby when they wake? Do they have time to resettle themselves? x

It is completely normal - that doesn’t mean it happens to everyone, there’s a spectrum of normal sleep behaviour.

OP, for us the key was waking periods - when I looked it I saw they were getting tired about 3.5 hours from waking up, if I left it longer they’d get overtired and sleep would suffer. This time will vary from baby to baby but if you look at this you might be able to spot the optimum length of time for yours.

@NewMum293 I try not to go to her too quickly as very occasionally she does go back to sleep. But if I don't get to her quickly enough (within a minute or so) she escalates to fill blown crying and becomes very hard to settle again. Usually a gentle shhhhh or a song or hand hold is enough to get her back to sleep, but the last few nights she has needed feeding several times, although she did seem genuinely hungry each time.

@SinkGirl I have tried to determine her wake window, I also use the huckleberry app and look for sleep cues too. She tends to get tired around an hour after waking up, but no matter what I try she will not go to sleep until she has been awake for around two hours. By this point she's really tired. Her naps are usually 35-45 mins long, I rarely manage to get her back to sleep for a longer nap over lunch for example. We just about manage three hours of daytime sleep and she gets around 11-12 hours TOTAL in 24 hours, due to the broken night sleep, which I'm sure isn't enough. But I can't get seem to get her to sleep more in the day to make up for the broken sleep at night.

I'm just so stuck on what to do. I go from being desperate to getting her to settle herself in the cot without boob, thinking this will help her at night, to being desperate to just get her to sleep whatever it takes and without faffing around with picking up putting down (or any other method) for 45 minutes past her nap time making her even more overtired. I'm so worried about making her even more overtired than she already seems to be.

I don't know what to tackle first. I can't think straight. I can't make decisions. I'm desperately hoping it's just a phase and we'll get back on track but I'm feeling so tired it's making me miserable and irritable and angry and sad and it's hard to enjoy anything.

I would suggest focusing on settling time for daytime naps. Ideally you could do with a settling method that gets her to sleep in 5-15 minutes of first noticing she's tired (except on odd occasions). You mention noticing she was tired at 17.15 but not getting her yo sleep until an hour later. If this is indicative of most daytime naps it will be adding to the over all over tiredness, which then impacts the nights.

So, to be blunt and to-the-point, your settling method for daytime naps is ineffective.

What are you doing?

What could you do (that suit your parenting style) that would make it a lot easier for your DC to go to sleep?

What have you tried?

Reading between the lines (and I might be wrong) it seems you are so focused on "Good Habits" that your making it really hard for baby to get to sleep.

Don't suppose you've tried a dummy? Best sleep tool there is.

Hi @BabySleepTeacherUK thanks for your reply.

She currently feeds to sleep, a habit I'd like to get her out of sooner rather than later. Well, she'll feed until she's had enough, unlatch, get comfy, then doze off. I can't transfer her to the cot when she unlatches as it wakes her up and she won't settle again without more milk. A big issue I have is that she always poos when feeding. She'll have some milk, start getting fidgety, I'll sit her up and within a couple of minutes she'll poo. So we've gone from sleepy milky baby to needing a nappy change, needing light in the room, and she loses her sleepiness. This is so reliable that I don't put her in her sleeping bag until she's pood in case of leaks. We'll then go back to feeding and she will doze off after about 10 mins feeding, although sometimes much longer e.g. 20 or 30 mins. So usually she falls asleep close to the huckleberry predicted nap time but sometimes it can be 30 or more minutes past this time.

We have tried a dummy, three different kinds, and she just doesn't seem to like them. She makes a game of popping them out of her mouth. I've tried them at all times during the day too, when she's playing, when we're cuddling, reading, when she's busy chomping on her hands and it's always the same, she spits it out and takes great pleasure in doing so.

I've tried rocking her, this occasionally works. She finds her pram exciting. I've tried pushing her back and forth in it in the kitchen, and doing loops in the house but she just lies there smiling. I'm so worried about overtiredness that I'm reluctant to just keep going with something, so it might take an hour but I'll never know because I'd have stopped after 20 mins worried that it's not working.

I'm really not sure what to do, I'd like her to sleep independently but I'm just not sure how to achieve that without the dreaded overtiredness getting worse. Really am obsessed with overtiredness!

My partner has some annual leave coming up and I wonder if this will be the perfect time to try to get him involved in settling her to sleep, so she stops associating sleep with me and milk.

I know I need to :

1. Address the feeding to sleep
2. Improve napping during the day

And hopefully this will then improve her night sleep. But I'm not sure where to start and how to go about it. I'm not sure how many more crazy nights I can honestly cope with at this stage.

Sorry for my late reply I'm hoping things have improved for you.
We used a gentle controlled crying approach.
We'd tell baby it's time to go to bed,
Make sure room is very dark, gave a comforter (teddy) and made sure temp is cool enough.

Then place baby in sleeping bag

And place hand firmly on baby and whisper ssh 3 times loudly and leave for one -3 minutes.

Return and repeat baby not asleep within 3 mins

We didn't pick baby up just lay him down if he was stood up.

The first time it took about 20 minutes to settle. Which was really difficult but baby napped for 1hr and 45 mins. Which was unheard of for us!
And was sleeping 7-7 in 6 days.

Sorry for my late reply I'm hoping things have improved for you.
We used a gentle controlled crying approach.
We'd tell baby it's time to go to bed,
Make sure room is very dark, gave a comforter (teddy) and made sure temp is cool enough.

Then place baby in sleeping bag

And place hand firmly on baby and whisper ssh 3 times loudly and leave for one -3 minutes.

Return and repeat baby not asleep within 3 mins

We didn't pick baby up just lay him down if he was stood up.

The first time it took about 20 minutes to settle. Which was really difficult but baby napped for 1hr and 45 mins. Which was unheard of for us!
And was sleeping 7-7 in 6 days.

Sleepless nights and restless babies are so tough. Hope you're getting lots of support xx

With my first I did a more gradual approach, sat beside him with intermittent sshhh until asleep, with brief pick ups every 20 mins or so. As he got used to that we stopped picking up at all and moved chair away and then left the room and popped head in

With my second I went straight to ferber method (settle baby then lay in cot and left the room, pop back in at the recommended intervals, google the ferber method chart). It was much quicker although more stressful but both babies cried and both did learn to self settle so it's just whatever you feel you can manage. Then you can also trust that any wake ups are genuine hunger. Feed and pop back down to self settle again

Once night time sleep was sorted then I worked on daytime. With my second he really struggled to sleep more than 45 mins at a time as he got used to managing on little sleep. So I would help him get back to sleep however I could and then with time as he got used to self settling more and was happier in the cot he relaxed and did sleep longer spells (up to 2.5 hours!).

It's well worth sleep training imho. Happier baby and happier mum

The routine which worked for me at that age was based on a 7/7 schedule. Nap around 9-10 then 12-2ish and then 4-4:30 or something.

But awake by 5pm latest to be ready for bed by 7pm

It sounds like your LO is treating the first wake up at 6ish as a night waking if she is tired so quickly. Consistency is key as well

Good luck!