Tips For Establishing A Sleeping Routine For Your Baby
The most difficult thing about having a newborn baby is the fact that you will be running on fumes for the first month or two. Babies basically do three things when they are first born: sleep, eat, and poop. Your newborn baby is not going to have much of a personality and this can really be a trying time as his only instincts are going to be about survival. He is learning to adapt to a new and frightening world and you are going to have to learn to adapt with him. This means that if your baby decides to wake up every hour or two to eat that you will be at his mercy. This is why the running joke about parents with newborns lacking sleep, has a lot of merit to it.
However, as your baby approaches three or four months old, this is an ideal time to start getting him in on a sleeping schedule. With our daughter, my wife and I put her on a set routine, which is extremely important if you want your baby to sleep until the morning. It doesn’t necessarily matter what your routine is, it just has to be a specific sequence of events that you do every night, before you put your baby to bed. In my daughter’s case, we would always bathe her, then feed her around eight o’clock every night. We would then change her diaper and put her into her sleeper for the night. This kind of set routine helps your baby to understand the difference between night and day.
Remember, you may have to have your baby on this routine for awhile before she adapts to it. It could take anywhere from several days to a few weeks or more. It is all dependent upon your baby and how quickly she adapts to everything, before she can start distinguishing between night and day.
Keep in mind that a baby’s sleep schedule is never going to be linear, and there will be times that she’s going to start waking up in the middle of the night again. This could be because she is practicing a new milestone such as rolling over, or perhaps she is going through a growth spurt and is hungry. It is important to note that these interruptions usually do not last more than a couple of weeks at most, and it is important that you stick with your routine when these instances do occur. Eventually if you stick to your routine, your baby will get back onto her normal sleeping schedule again.
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