Hi all.
DD is 17 weeks (14 adjusted) & provided she is well rested, is generally a lovely, smiley happy baby. Up til now I've been trying to follow her lead with feeds & napping in the hopes it'll settle down into some sort of pattern/routine. But we are still all over the place (no regular wakeup time or feed times), naps are mostly AP'd & mostly short (45mins max & often less). I feel like I need to get a decent routine going for all of us.
Our day currently goes something like this:
Wake: 7-7.30am. (but can be anything from 6- 8am, depending when she wakes for a feed & if I can resettle her! I let her sleep only because it makes it easier for me to get me/ds ready for school if she doesn't need a nap before we are due to leave.)
Eat: 7am, 11am, 3pm, 6.30pm (FF on demand & these are the times I aim for but it can vary by an hour either side depending on wakeup. Also she often refuses her morning feed if she eats at 4/5am.)
Bedtime: 7pm. We usually start bedtime routine at 6pm, last feed at 6.30 then we start trying to put her to sleep. She (mostly) goes down in her cot awake, & settles eventually after repeated dummy plugging & sitting with a hand on her chest. It can often be 8pm before she is properly asleep
Night feeds: occasionally just once at 2-3am, but most often twice - at 12/1am and then again at around 5am. As above this second feed is affecting her morning bottle. Not sure what to do about that.
That is pretty much it as far as routine goes. Our big 'problem area' is daytime sleep. Mostly because I am finding it a real struggle to accomodate her sleep needs as well as look after/play with ds (4.5) & do the school run etc. How do other mums do it?!
Mornings are particularly difficult. I have to get us ready & can't stand over her, so often the first sign of tiredness I see/hear is fussing. She will only nap in my arms but I can't always drop everything to do that. There is no point putting her in the cot for her morning nap as I'd have to get her back out for the school run. She screams if I lay her in the pram (unless its moving). She screams in the sling. So I have to leave her fussing/crying until I am ready to leave & then she will sleep in the pram en route to school. By this time she is so overtired that she often does a really short nap of say 10-30mins. Then I cuddle her to sleep to try & avoid overtiredness. This catnapping continues through the rest of the day & she fights it more as the day goes on.
I can't carry on like this much longer as its not fair on her, she isn't getting any decent restorative sleep. I feel like I'm neglecting DS as I can't even have one to one time with him during her naptime, & I'm getting zero 'Y' time as I'm permanently stuck under a baby!
I know I need to focus on teaching her to self settle (can she do this with a dummy?) but I'm at a loss as to how to do it or where to do her naps at the moment (pram or cot?), in order that she sleeps well but is still portable so I can get her out on school run/kids parties etc. Sleep training all seems so futile when she only naps for 20 mins!
Since she catnaps so much I have no idea what A time she can actually do, so don't know where to start in establishing EASY. I guess we should follow a 4hr routine since thats how often she feeds, but how does this work if she is only catnapping & not able to pull off a lovely 2hr nap. What age do they start to naturally lengthen? Hopefully soon!
Wow that was lengthy! Can anyone help me with where on earth to start? I followed BW with DS (4.5) when he was a baby but its all a distant memory! Tia.x