8 week old routine advice

[wigglerose]

I'm a clueless FTM with an 8 week old. When do I start getting my LG into a routine?
Also she hates hates being laid down for a second even if I'm not trying to get her to sleep. I can't put her in her Moses basket for 1 minute while I brush my teeth etc.

She only sleeps on me or co-sleep right next to me while cluster feeding or in the sling when I'm walking (She cries if I'm not walking. sitting or littering round the house make her cry too. So unless I'm in bed she doesn't sleep much and the minute I move a teeny bit she wakes up. I think she's over tired but she just won't sleep.

I didn't bother with a routine until around 16 weeks. Just followed dd's lead and enjoyed lots of snuggles on the sofa. At 16ish weeks she was starting to want feed at regular 3 hour intervals and go to sleep by a certain time so felt like she'd created a routine by herself then.

DD2 has just started doing the three hour feeds at 9 weeks, sort of given us a routine now. I follow a eat play then sleep sort of routine. DD1 was much harder to get into one, think it was about 5 months!
With DD2 she wakes up, has about 3/4 of her bottle, change nappy, on the play mat with lots of eye to eye and then get her to sleep on me after about an hour to an hour and a half of being awake, then put into moses basket once fully asleep. It has literally been the past 2 days she has allowed me to put her down for more than a second without screaming!

A routine this kind of age is better being a cyclic kind of thing. So you do the same cycle if events over and over again all day, every day.

The typical form if this is called EASY (eat, activity, sleep, you time). It basically means baby wakes up and is fed, rather than feeding to sleep. Then have a set awake time then sleep, when you have "You time"). In mire detail this would take the form of:

• Wake (note the time)
• Full Feed. This is the E in EASY - "eat"
• wind well and nappy check
• Floor time. This is the A in EASY - "activity".
• Activity wants to end as soon as baby is unhappy and never more than 2h from waking. At 8 weeks is guess at a hour. As a general rule awake time between naps wants to be around double nap length.
• From when baby starts getting grumpy, upset or clingy, this marks the time to start settling to sleep. It may only be 30-45 mins from waking, that's ok.
• Top-up feed (what's left in bottle given when waking up earlier), wind well, start working on settling to sleep.
• Sleep (The S in EASY).
• You relax and chill out while baby sleeps (Y in EASY - "You time)

Then repeat this cycle over and over again all day, from first waking until you go to bed. Same every day.