How I Set Up My Baby Routine
I hope I managed to successfully convince you in my last post about the importance of baby routines! Truthfully, I cannot claim credit for setting up Baby Dozer’s routine. I was a working mum and only recently transitioned to being a stay-at-home mum. It is to my mother-in-law, that I owe credit for making the effort to establish his routine! I can perhaps at best, claim credit for improving the routine.
Enough of the small talk! I’m sure you have been impatient to know how I managed to successfully implement Baby Dozer’s routine. Here goes!
1. Identify your baby’s sleep requirements first based on his age
Because sleep is so important to a baby, the routine pretty much revolves around sleep. Establish the sleeping / napping time for your baby and then plan the rest of his / her routine around it.
Babycenter has a wonderful guideline for sleeping requirements. You can read it here, but here’s the summary of what they recommend:
Newborn: Sleep almost all the time - just let them sleep whenever they want
6 - 8 weeks: 2 - 4 naps a day, or more
3 - 4 months: 2 - 4 naps a day
By 6 months: 2 - 3 naps, 1 in the morning, 2 in the afternoon
9 - 12 months: 2 naps a day, 1 in the morning, 1 in the afternoon
By 18 months: 1 nap in the afternoon
This is a loose guideline and every baby is different. For example, Baby Dozer is nearly 18 months but he still needs his 2 naps a day. The key is to have an idea based on the guideline above and match it to your baby’s patterns.
2. Fix the times
Once we established that Baby Dozer needed 3 naps a day (this was way back then when Baby Dozer was 2 - 3 months old), we fixed the times. His nap times were 10am, 2pm and 5pm.
Why did we fix the times? So that we could start the naptime ritual about 30 - 45 minutes before his naptime started. For example, bathing, feeding milk, read a book.
Initially we always rocked Baby Dozer to sleep. So after we completed his naptime ritual, we’d rock him until he fell asleep. Later on, I learnt that rocking your baby to sleep is NOT a recommended practice unless you want to do that each and every time. The better way would be to teach him to sleep on his own by placing him in the cot while he was still awake! Anyway, sleep training is another whole topic on its own.
3. Be prepared to be UNSUCCESSFUL for the first 2 weeks
It’s always easier preaching than practising. The first 2 weeks were very very very difficult for my mother-in-law. Baby Dozer would sometimes cry and refuse to sleep. Or he would cry once we placed him in the cot. Or he would awake after only half an hour of sleep.
In other words, the routine will be awry at least for the first 2 weeks. I remember how when I was home, I was so frustrated and almost prepared to throw the routine out the window! It was easier, I felt, to just follow baby’s cues and let him sleep whenever he wanted or feed whenever he wanted.
It was such a good thing that we stuck to it. If we hadn’t, our lives would be always on hold. Wait for baby to sleep before I can do this or postpone running those errands because baby looks like he’s sleepy. You wouldn’t want to be waiting upon your baby, right?
4. Stay under house arrest for at least 2 weeks
No weekend gallivanting while you’re setting up your baby’s routine. The most crucial time is when you’re setting up the routine. As if frustration wasn’t enough, I had to stick to the routine like military. I knew this because I’d read enough to know that despite all the different methods and practices, the one common thing was sticking to the routine for the first 2 weeks in order to get baby drilled into it.
What about grocery shopping? What about house errands? Well, if you really want the routine to succeed, either hubs or parents or in-laws have to help out during this duration…OR you just have to squeeze in your errands during baby’s waking times.
5. Don’t sweat the variations and adjust as he grows
So, did Baby Dozer stick to his routine beautifully and perfectly after 2 weeks? OF COURSE NOT. He isn’t a robot! He’s a human! Generally, the routine was working well, but there would be times where he’d nap at 11am instead of 10am or refuse to take his 3rd nap in the afternoon. No problem. We just went with the flow as long as 5 out of 7 days he was practising the routine.
As he grew, we noticed that he could stay awake for longer and he started rejecting his 3rd nap. That was when we shifted his nap hours to suit his needs!
I hope you enjoyed the post and good luck in setting up your baby’s routines! If you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to ransack my memory for answers!
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Photography: WEaVE
Weelee and Veron are a husband and wife team with a passion and interest in photography. They can be contacted at [email protected].
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