How to make bedtime earlier for infant?
Our 10-week -old baby girl has finally settled into a routine, her natural routine I guess. We have not yet done anything to try and change it. She goes to bed around midnight and sleeps for about 4 hours, up for a feeding and sleeps another 4 hours. While I'm happy she's only up once to eat, I am unhappy she goes to bed so late. We have not tried to change it because up until now, she has some "crazy time" (colicky?) starting around 10pm until she goes down for the night. Now, her crazy time seems to be diminishing and not even present some nights.
I hope to change her bedtime because by the time our son goes to sleep and we get the house settled down, it's at least 10pm so then I have no adult rest time and cannot go to bed before midnight. Her 2 night sleep stretches are also starting to get longer and I would like her wake up time to stay the same (same as my son's since his wakeup usually means household wakeup).
She is currently breastfed only but we are slowly switching to bottles + formula. Also, she does not respond well to being fed when she is not very hungry (ie, she screams bloody murder). We have not started any night time routines since we can never tell if she will actually stay asleep at night and we keep her out of the room so she does not wake up our son. His bedtime is 9pm.
How do we start moving her bedtime back 3-4 hours? Is there a way to move back the "crazy time" or do we need to wait for that to be completely out of her system? We have read some advice that says there's no point in a bedtime routine until they are 3 months. But our son was on a routine starting at ~9weeks. By 10 weeks he was sleeping 2 6-hour stretches through the night. He never had any real "crazy time" though, only something we called "the witching hour" and it was in the evening.
For more specifics, her current feeding schedule is roughly: ~9am, 12:30pm, 3pm, 6pm, 8:30pm, 11:30/midnight, 5am. She has about 1 40-minute nap between each feeding during the day, occasionally a long nap through from feeding to next feeding. Basically sleeps through the night.
2 Answers
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Your "crazy time" to me sounds very similar to how we think of our kids as tired.
When they're tired, they'll often cry more frequently than normal, make silly mistakes like tripping while walking, falling unexpectedly, have a much shorter attention span, switching from one toy or activity to another in rapid succession. The older one, when very tired, has trouble listening and following commands, like "clean up your toys" or "go to the changing table so I can put on your PJ's". We've also found that the longer you live in "crazy time" the harder it is to get them to settle down to go to sleep.
What happens if you try to put her down during this "crazy time"? I presume she'll protest and cry. Have you tried just letting her cry it out for a few minutes? I've found that our 12mo old daughter goes through periods where she just really doesn't want to go down quietly, and will cry for just a couple minutes after we've put her down, then swiftly fall asleep.
Another thing that I always remmeber is "sleep begets sleep" and by that I mean: Is she napping enough times per day? Is each nap long enough? This is something else to try to control to get an early bedtime. Again, our 12mo old daughter can stay awake for only about 4 hours at a stretch at most before she really needs to go down for a nap. Her daily schedule at this point is about:
- Awake @7am
- Nap at 10am
- Awake at 11am
- Nap at 2pm
- Awake at 3:30pm
- Asleep at 7:30 or 8pm.
I meant to also say that if "crazy time" means, "I'm too tired" we can try the 8:30 feeding in a dark room and try to put her down. We haven't really done that because that's usually hectic household time when my son is getting ready for bed and we are cleaning up after dinner. But we'll try it tonight!
- sweethi, Jan 21, 2010
2 words: Sesame Street. I know, I know, I know, it's horrible. But, it'll give you 60 minutes of time where your older boy isn't tugging your pantlegs and asking to play while you're trying to put down your younger one... I certainly know how that after-dinner time goes. It's really hard!
- Steve Lacy, Jan 21, 2010
Ok. I tried it last night. She did not sleep right after eating at 9pm but was fussy for another 45 minutes. She was fed in the semi darkness where she sleeps for the night. I finally put her down and she slept for 30 minutes. After that, the only thing that kept her happy was constant rocking and sometimes a pacifier. She was in a constant state of "almost asleep". If I try to feed her again during this time, she screams. Finally, after a 10 minute nap, I fed her again at 11:30 and she fell asleep for her night sleep. I won't keep posting all the failed attempts but will post again if there is any success. :)
- sweethi, Jan 22, 2010
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With our second we often realized that we were putting her to bed a good bit after the "just-beginning-to-get-sleepy-signs" that we'd learned to use with our son - that first or second yawn, or an eye rub. By the time our son got visibly fussy, we'd realized that he was getting overtired or overstimulated or both. It was the same with our infant daughter, but usually meal-time and evening-time were so much busier that even though we knew she was getting overtired, it seemed hard to figure out how to get her to bed before that scene even began.
We eventually started to "divide-and-conquer" for mealtimes and evenings. One parent would take baby to get changed and ready for bed either before or while toddler is eating dinner. For awhile we also deferred the clean up immediately after dinner job to occur after the two were asleep. It was just to hard to get both moving steadily toward bed with one parent each AND do the old dinner routine of cook-eat-cleanup-get ready for bed.
One other thing to suggest / remind you of... 10-12 weeks was about when the Baby Whisperer's EASY "Eat -> Active -> Sleep -> You" schedule began to actually be attainable for our kids. What I liked about that routine was that if I fed the baby when he/she first woke up, then later fussiness could always be interpreted as "overstimulated" or "overtired", which helped narrow down the number of variables and reminded my sluggish brain to whisk quickly off to bed / dark / quiet.
Thanks for the reminder that "crazy time" might really mean "I'm too tired." When we can get her to fall asleep during this crazy time, she does not stay asleep for longer than 30 minutes and continues with "crazy time" when she wakes up again until she gets to that last feeding. We have also tried feeding her during that crazy time too (say at 10) and even if she drops off to sleep again after, she will wake up repeatedly until she gets to that last feeding time (midnight-ish). It does not seem to matter if she's had a day when she's had long naps or a series of shorter naps. She is never awake for more than 1.5 hours or so.
- sweethi, Jan 21, 2010