Sleep and routine with two!

[LJSY]

Does anyone have any advice on the how to manage a sleep routine for a baby when you already have a toddler please?!

My DS is 7 weeks old and a generally pleasant baby, he’s able to self settle and will nod off on his own when in the right mood however I’m struggling to give him the time to get into a proper routine with naps and daytime sleep as my DD is 2 and of course very demanding.. and loud.
Sometimes it seems he can sleep through a hurricane but others she wakes him with every little noise.

I’m worried as he’s just not napping and getting so fussy and overtired and Fussy and I feel awful for him.

Is 7 weeks far too early for a routine and consistent naps? I can’r remember from my first!

Thanks

@LJSY I don't have two so can't really advise in re to that but I wanted to respond as I also worried about needing to get my baby into a routine from a few weeks old. I just assumed it was the done thing and something which was needed. I did lots of googling about routines etc but quickly realised it wasn't for us and I didn't want to be restricted by a strict routine and proffered the flexibility and just going with the flow each day. I had lots of reassurance on here that many people do this for the first few months and a routine will gradually develop in time.

A routine might work for some if you prefer the predictability but you may find it more stressful if you're trying to stick to a schedule and baby isn't quite falling in line? I guess it's personal choice as to what works best for you.

My baby is 10weeks old now and we still play each day by ear (but im also not juggling a toddler so I appreciate this might not help). She roughly wakes the same time each day, can tolerate being awake for about 1-1.5hrs and the length of each nap will vary depending on what we're doing - sometimes she will contact nap for 1.5hrs, sometimes she just has a 30min nap in the pushchair or car seat if we're out. We aim for the same bedtime each night too but that's it for routine for now. She comes to bed with me quite late but it makes more sense than me spending the evening battling to get her down early to then have to keep coming up and down the stairs when she wakes. If she only has a short nap I don't worry and just try to make sure she's not awake too long before the next nap to try and prevent the overtired ness - some days this means she has quite a few 'cat naps'.

Good luck - im sure you'll figure out what works best for you ☺️

Following with interest as I also have a 7 week old and a 3yo and it is very challenging to cater to my 7 week old's sleep needs when my tazmanian devil of a 3yo is not around.

Fwiw, I don't think we'd established a proper routine with DS1 until he was quite a bit older, maybe 4-5 months.

@Fizzl- thank you! I do appreciate your advice regardless of only having one! It’s good to hear what you’re doing and yes playing it by ear i sooooo much more stressful!! Mine is the same at the moment with regards to a late bedtime. Does your fussy one have what they call the witching our?!

@HumunaHey Tasmanian devil is the right word!
Yes thinking about it I don’t think we had any kind of routine until abit later on.

Is 7 weeks far too early for a routine and consistent naps?

Not too early.

But you possibly need to rethink what you consider routine and consistent naps to be. It doesn't mean "Its X o'clock so time for baby's third nap" or whatever.

Up until naps get consistently long (around the 6 month mark), younger babys work best with a cyclic routine. By that I mean a predictable and routined set of events, that happen over and over again throughout the day.

That basically involves a period of time awake (wake window) and a period of time asleep, with a feed and some floor time in there somewhere. A typical cyclic routine is called EASY, but you can find any sort of cyclic routine that works for you. EASY means Eat - Activity - Sleep - You time. In practical terms that might look like this:

• Baby wakes (make a mental note of the time)
• E - Eat - Full feed when baby first wakes up
• A - Activity - Floor time at this age. So after winding put baby down, check nappy while you're at it. Wake windows tend to be consistent lengths of time. When baby starts grumbling, you know it's not hunger so it's sleep time.
• S - Sleep - Dummy or whatever settling technique you use.
• Y - You time - while baby sleeps.

Then wake, and repeat the whole cycle.

As an approximation, wake windows tend to be about double nap length, give or take 15 minutes. So, for example, you might start noticing that the whole cycle starts to last 2h - 40 mins asleep and 1h 20 min awake. Or it might be that your baby gives you 2h30m cycles, or 3h cycles - the point is that as you get to know baby's cycles better, it gives you some predictability to your day. When baby wakes, you can have a fair idea when you'll need to be settling baby again and when baby will be waking after that, and so on.

What @FATEdestiny has described is pretty much what we do. So no set routine but a rhythm as I call it! Works well and far less stressful than thinking it's 'x o'clock' so I need her to nap now. We just work around her and our plans and it means she just sort of slots in a lot better.

We did used to have really fussy evenings up until about week 6 (I used to call it witching evening as it definitely wasn't an hour 😑) and it gradually started to ease. Now she's pretty settled in an evening and we just continue with the napping, eating, playing cycle until we go to bed around 10pm - asleep by 11pm. Up until she was 4 weeks she was really unsettled in an evening - naive ftm who didn't really know about wake windows and I think I misread tiredness for huger and thought she was cluster feeding. from 4 weeks I got on top of her naps in an evening and the fussiness gradually started to ease shortly after. I don't know if it would have eased up at this time anyway, whether she would have cluster fed regardless of me trying to keep on top of naps in an evening or if the naps made a difference but it definitely eased up around that time 🤷🏼‍♀️.

@FATEdestiny
@Fizzl

Thanks both for the helpful info!

So if he wakes around 5am he might typically go back down 5.45/6ish say he had 40 mins sleep I would then work from that point onwards throughout the day with the cycles? What if the naps are super short? Some days he just seems to cat nap and can’t drop off and it continues throughout the day. Some days he just seems to fight in and get ridiculously overtired!

It seems if he sleeps well first thing after his first feed/wake up, it sets him up for the day.

I found it best to just always have he same routine day in and day out. So always getting up and feeding at 7am no matter what the night had been like. It made it easier as I knew roughly what the toddler would need at any given time and then I could shuffle the baby around that a bit, but the baby was then getting fed and napped in roughly the same time slots each day as well. Then as the baby got older their routine became firmer and still worked with the toddlers needs.