Baby sleep routine...

[Lilly00700]

My son is 4 months old. Since he was about 6 weeks we have had a great bed time routine, bath at 7, bottle and cuddle then bed at 8 where he sleeps unroll around 6.30-7am. I have friends with babies of a similar age who often take their babies along for dinner/days out etc. and just put the baby to bed once they are home. They keep telling me one night without the routine won't hurt once in a while, although I may think different when he is a bit older I feel at 4 months he still needs a consistent routine. What are people's opinions? Would it affect him to disrupt his routine on the odd occasion as he is such a happy baby at the moment :-/

 

[Bee7]

I can't give you a definite answer on this. My LO is only 8 weeks old and i've only been doing a routine for the past few weeks. What i will say is that we had a fixed routine to begin with that involved Jack having a bath and bottle at around 9pm, waking up at 1am for another feed then sleeping through til around 6:30am. This suited me nicely because i was usually still awake at 1am anyway so it meant just getting up once to do the early morning feed. Then we went away for the weekend and his routine was totally disrupted. When we got back i tried to get him back into the routine but for some bizarre reason he now has bath/bottle at 9pm then sleeps til 3am and gets me up again at 7am. No idea why he's decided to alter his sleeping pattern after this two day break but i wish he hadn't! I much preferred the old one!

Having said that, Jack is a bit younger than your LO so maybe he was more sensitive to it or something? As i said, i don't really know a great deal about it. You are entitled to a night off here and there though, could you not get whoever babysits for you to follow your routine? xx

 

[l_maclean]

We don't have a set routine for G. She comes to be when we go to bed (DH tends to go to bed fairly early anyways. This is normally about 9.30 when we're at home.

But we've had nights where we've been out. The last 2 months we've gone to a country music club, left there at 11/11.30 (cos daddy was tired) and driven nearly an hour home, and it didn't affect her at all. Just made sure she was in her jammies before we got in car to come home, so if she was asleep we didn't have to fuss with her.

Some babies are very flexible, others need constant routine - unfortunately the only way to find out which one you have is to give it a try. Xxx