schedule

When did you start a consistent schedule for your babies? My girls are 8 weeks (4 weeks adjusted) and every day and night are different. some days, they sleep 6-8 hours at night, other nights they are up every 3 hours. some days they take very long naps either in the morning or afternoon and other days, they take shorter naps. sometimes they are on the same schedules and sometimes they are not. Thanks for your advise!

 

We kept a 3 hour feeding schedule from day one. The exception being that once they were about 8 weeks, they started to sleep 5-6 hours at night. By 12 weeks, they were sleeping 12 hours at night, but naps were still all over the place. I tried to make naps more routine, but they were not ready yet. By 4-4.5 months, I could tell about when they would nap (3 naps a day). Thats when it became easier to be consistent. Gl!

 

Our feeding schedule was every 3 hours from the beginning almost. As far as naps and bedtime, that really fell into place around 5-6 months.

 

In the past two weeks we have been getting on a consistent eating and napping schedule. From about 2 months on I scheduled their feeding during the day, started at 7 am, every 2.5 hours and we finally worked to a four hour schedule at about 4 1/2 months.

 

QUOTE(becky5 @ Apr 9 2009, 02:38 PM) [snapback]1266158[/snapback]
Our feeding schedule was every 3 hours from the beginning almost. As far as naps and bedtime, that really fell into place around 5-6 months.


Us too! I wasn't able to get us on an eat/sleep/play schedule until 3/4 months. Even then, every day was different. They napped and slept everywhere (bouncy chairs/swing/pnp/car seats) then and I was in survival mode for quite a while.

 

We started implementing some sort of schedule at around 3.5 months then "tweeked" it here and there until we formed a pretty solid schedule at about 4.5 months. We still leave a lot of room for flexibility, though, so as not to limit outings and such. The only thing we try to be very structured with is our bedtime ritual, but now that they go to sleep just fine at the same time each night we are going to start being a little more flexible with that, too. By flexibility, I mean that they don't go down for naps at the same exact time and place every day, but their naps typically follow the same pattern. They might be out and about napping in their stroller or the car, though. Same with feedings. We feed them about every 4 hours but if it's been 3 hours and they are obviously hungry, we'll feed them. Same with naps, they sleep when they want to sleep. As for the night ritual, the flexibility we will allow is perhaps not giving them a bath if they are super tired. We want to get it so we can go away for a weekend with them and not have them freak out if they don't get their bath routine.

 

our nap schedule really didn't fall into place until they hit about 5 - 6 months old. We fed on demand and that typically was every 3 - 1/2 hours.