What time is/was bedtime for your infant?

[Judegirl]

And who determines the bedtime - us or them? LOL!

Bedtime for dd (2 months) is in the works. We are trying for midnight, so that her days don't start until 10am, once she's on a schedule. But since it seems that she likes to take her only real nap of the day between 7-10pm, we're wondering if maybe her bedtime should be around 7 instead? Should we follow her natural sleep patterns? Or should we teach her to sleep when we sleep?

Hmmm. If she's going to be a 7-5er, I'm afraid she may have to make her own breakfast...

Kidding!!

Jude

[ShayleighCarsensMom]

Our kids both go down between 7-730...
They say that it is a natural sleep rythem for little ones...
"Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" talks a lot about this and is a very informative book...
Some day soon you will join the rest of us...you'll be thinking that 7 am is sleeping in, LOL!

[Judegirl]

Egads, I hope not, since neither of us get home from work before 10pm! Dinner's at 11ish...if she's in bed by 7pm, whoever's working that day will hardly see her. :(

[C99]

Yeah, unfortunately that is often the case with little ones. When Nate was tiny, we'd go to bed around 9 p.m. but when he started to develop into his own sleep pattern, it was 6:30 p.m. - 6 a.m. And we are NOT morning people in this house...we just gradually learning to adapt.

[RwnMayfair]

Taran's bedtime is about 9:30/10PM which is later than a lot of other babies, but he does well with it and with this bedtime he sleeps late enough in the morning for me. (I'm not a morning person at all.) When he was really young it was around 11PM. Granted, he was waking up more frequently to eat then too, so I dunno how much you can exactly call it a schedule then, but he did sleep 5 to 6 hours straight at that point. But now that he sleeps longer at night and more regularly, it's the 9:30/10PM time. He does get an evening nap from around 6PM to around 7:30/8PM, but he always wakes back up from that nap and enjoys playing for a couple of hours before bedtime.

He never acts overtired going to bed so late, sleeps very well, and just does very well in general with his "schedule." So I honestly think the "natural" bedtime for each child varies a bit. Some do better going to bed earlier, and some are fine with later. It may honestly change when he gets older, but right now he does very well with his later bedtime, and I'm quite happy with it, so it works well for us all. :)

I dunno, this is what has worked out best for us. I'd just try a few things out and see what works best for you all. :)

-Melissa

Taran, November 20, 2003

[Imperia]

I know a lot of people suggest an early bedtime for babies, but my DD is a night owl. She must take after her mama, I guess. She doesn't fall into her deep overnight sleep until around 9:30 or 10:00 every night. Which is fine with me because then she doesn't wake up early (I am not good at waking up very early).

This is just the way she is as a person though. I tend not to really schedule her at all; she fell into her own pattern and I just follow along with that...it's easier on me and DD that way. Maybe you should just see how things go and follow along? It's tiring and frustrating to try to make an infant sleep when they aren't ready (or keep them awake when they want to sleep).

Imperia

[llcoddington]

At 2 months, Lauren pretty much went to sleep around midnight and slept until 9 or 10. (With a bunch of feedings in between.) However, she was so fussy and miserable from about 9 pm to midnight that we started waking her up at 7am everyday and putting her to bed between 6 and 8. She was much happier this way. It's hard on both of us- we are both NOT morning people. But, it saves our sanity at night!

Granted, her dad doesn't get to see her much at night- he works late quite often. But, he does get up with her at 7 most mornings and plays with her until he leaves for work around 8:30. Works well for me because I get a little extra sleep.

As your baby gets older, I am not sure she will stick to a 10am wake up time. I have two nephews and they both were going to bed around 10 or 11pm and STILL got up at 6am and were grumpy, cranky all day. Just watch your baby and see how/what she does.

Lana
Mommy to Lauren 12/5/03

[Rachels]

I agree. I had a night owl, too, and just exhausted myself trying to get her to sleep two hours before she was ready. Once I started ignoring what time the books say a baby gets tired and started following the cues of my actual baby, life got a lot easier. The most important thing is total amount of sleep, not the hours during which it happens. That said, if she wants to go to sleep earlier than you get home, she needs to be allowed to do that. At some point, the 10pm thing will not work for her and she simply won't get enough sleep.

-Rachel
Mom to Abigail Rose
5/18/02

http://www.planetsmilies.com/smilies/character/2/character39.gif

"We have a secret in our culture...it's not that birth is painful, it's that women are strong!!" - Laura Stavoe Harm

[August Mom]

At 2 months, DS generally wouldn't go to sleep for the night until 1 or 2 a.m. Talk about a night owl. LOL We would try to get him to sleep around 10 p.m., but it generally didn't work. When we were reading about all these babies going to bed at 6:30 or 7:00 p.m. we couldn't believe it. Our little guy was not into that at all. Granted, he was nursing fairly frequently, so I'm thinking of his ultimately bedtime as sleep before the longest stretch without nursing. But, generally he was wired in that 10 - midnight or 1 a.m. time period. For the longest time, though, he would wake up around 7 a.m. regardless of what time he went to bed. I would just go with your child's natural rhythms if it's working.

[Marisa6826]

When Sophie was young, she too, did the 10-11pm bedtime and then woke up around 10am.

As she got older, she pushed herself further and further back, so that of her own accord, she now goes to sleep around 7:30-8pm. She will get up for milk around 8am, and I can sometimes can get her to go back down till 10.

As Riordan gets older and more more importantly, more active, her sleep patterns will change.

-m

[StaceyKim]

We followed the 7-7 routine. DS would wake up at 10pm for another feeding and then went to sleep for the night. They wake up pretty early (5:30am) but I found it didn't change even if the actual bedtime was put later. So, we stayed with the 7:30pm bedtime and now he sleeps till around 7am sometimes 8am!

[JenCA]

My DD went to bed later (9:30-10pm) when she was younger. She now goes to bed between 7:30-8pm. Getting her down for the night at that time was a combination of following her own sleep cues and us working with her. We never forced her to go down before she was ready, though. It just seems like the older she gets, the earlier she goes down for the night, which is a blessing for us!

[McQ]

We followed Declan's lead and let him determine his schedule. When he was little he was going down 9:30/10ish and was up around 6am (with a 3am snack). Gradually he started going down around 7:30 and eventually dropped the night time feeding but still got/gets up around 6am. It's his schedule and for the life of me I can not change it to 8:30pm-7am. So I gave up trying.

Allison
~ mommy to Declan 3.24.03
and number 2 EDD 9.14.04

[miki]

My DD has always been an early bird. Until about 8 mos., she'd always wake up by 6am, sometimes earlier, no matter what her bedtime was. But most often it was 6pm. No matter what I did, I could not change when she woke up. And DH only saw her in the mornings--sucks, I know. Now she is much more variable--the change came very suddenly. Bedtime is anywhere from 6:30-8:30pm depending on when she woke from her last nap. DH may see her before bed once a week. She'll generally sleep about 10 hours overnight.

[jbowman]

We never tried to "schedule" Ellie, but we did establish an evening ritual early. Until she was about 5 1/2 months old, though, the time she went to bed was precarious, LOL (and I can laugh about it now)! We begin her bedtime ritual around 6:30, so she'll be in bed by 7. This works really well for us! DD is a *morning baby* and her parents are definitely not! But, as a PP said, we've learned to adapt.

[hellosmiletoday]

I didn't know that a baby's natural bedtime is 7pm...so I havent been observing to see if she's sleepy at that time. However, what we have noticed is that DD is fussy from 8pm until about 2-3am!

We've been trying to start some sort of a schedule, where we feed her at 11ish and put her crib in a dark room. However, she continues to wiggle around and suck on pacifier, dropping it and resuming crying until someone puts it back in, then repeating this routine until about 2-3 am. She then finally falls into deep sleep for about 5 hrs, wakes at about 7-8 am, eats, and sleeps more until about noon or so. I've tried to wake her up in morning but she's just too sleepy! Guess her biological clock is off! I wouldn't doubt it, since I'm not a morning person myself, and in the last trimester of my pregnancy, I would work on my dissertation from home late into the night, and then sleep in the morning.

In a way its good that she's a night owl, b/c DH gets to spend lots of time with her at night -- we take her out for a walk at 7 pm. DH handles the morning diaper change. I stay up late and sleep in morning. I'll be SAHM for a year, so her crazy sleeping schedule is fine until then :)

[starrynight]

I have just followed my kids sleep patterns and then starting at about a year old I try and start making bedtime a bit closer to the time I want and by 2 they all go to bed when I say it's time. It's worked out fine with my older 2, seems to be ok with the baby also.

The baby(9 mos.) goes to bed around 8-8:30pm she usually sleeps the rest of the night and gets up around 7-7:30 but occassionally she will wake up one other time to either eat or just be snuggled back to sleep. And she will sleep a bit later if she wakes up one more time. My older kids are in bed by 9pm.

If your dd seems to want to nap at 7pm and sleep for awhile I suggest getting her to bed by then. And you might not want to start a midnight bedtime because you might not be able to break it. My ds was a midnight kid by his choice, it was horrible getting him to sleep, every single night without fail he was up until midnight or later. He would nap during the day and sleep in until 9am but still 9-midnight+ is a long day for mom! He was 2 years old before we got him to a reasonable bedtime.

Also I have found that the later I put the kids to bed the more cranky and sometimes the earlier they wake up. My sil said the same thing about my neice. But if they go to bed when they are ready and get good sleep they usually sleep better and sometimes longer in the morning :).

[Judegirl]

Just wanted to clairfy - we're not trying to force her to go to sleep when she isn't tired, or keeping her up when she is. Yikes...my morning sleep isn't *that* important to me!

I guess my question is...how do you know what their inclination is? We can't really tell when she's tired until she gets overtired (eye rubbing, looks very tired, not as happy) since she's not fussy, we have very few cues. So we put her down for a nap every 1.5-2 hours throughout the day (usually she naps for about 20 minutes each time.) By the end of the day she's pretty tired, so her evening nap turns into a few hours, which makes me wonder whether that should be the start of bedtime.

Yesterday she hardly slept all day, and when we put her in her crib at 10pm, that became bedtime for the night. ("Bedtime" means she sleeps for 5-8 hours without waking up.)

So we just don't know when to put her into her crib for the night. (Right now, she naps in her swing during the day, and we start using hte crib when it gets dark.) She doesn't seem very tired until somewhere between 11pm & 1am..but maybe this will get clearer to us as we get more practice.

Thanks, everyone, for your input.

Jude

[Judegirl]

Hey Christina! Your dd was born 4 days after mine, and I'm also working on my dissertation! :)

Until recently, our dd didn't sleep much before 1 or 2 either, and slept until 1 or 2 in the afternoon (which was great for me, but I knew it couldn't last!)

Your schedule - and arrangement with dh - sounds a lot like ours. I was going to be a SAHM while I finished my dissertaion also, but things changed and we had to rework the plan. But I'm optimistic.

Good luck with your writing!

Jude

[hellosmiletoday]

I'm having a hard time knowing what her inclination is too...but maybe it is because both of our babies are just over 2 mo? It seems that DD sleeps most of the day...and then wiggles half the night, so we barely get to spend much time with her. I just tried to wake her up now, but she just cries. Then at night, any minor little sound will wake her

[babymama]

Don't remember what Santiago's sleep schedule was like around 2 months. He really didn;t develop a sleep pattern until about 5 months. Now he gets sleepy btwn 7:30 and 8:30 PM. He gets up twice on most nights - btwn 12AM-1AM and again around 4:30AM-5:30AM (I usually just get up for the day with him at that point).

We are morning people in my home, but on nights when he's been really wakeful, 4:30AM is just *too* early. Learning to be a coffee drinker again - last time I needed caffeine was grad school.

Mama to Santiago, born 11/16/03

[jpang]

Hi, Jude,

I think the baby's sleeping inclinations grow clearer as she grows older. It sounds like for a lot of us, me included, the babies slept very late when they were younger and then their bedtimes started moving up as they grew older.

Our DD was a night owl the first six months of her life-- never asleep before 10pm, often awake til 1 or 2. At six months, she suddenly started going to bed around 8pm (I remember I was so shocked the first night I didn't believe it) and waking up at 7:30am.

You said you were letting her nap in the swing during the day and then putting her in her crib after dark. That sounds like a reasonable tactic to me. Once babies start developing a regular sleep pattern, a lot of them do synchronize to light/dark cues. In fact, the one thing that helps DD to sleep in in the morning is to keep her room really really dark. She eventually wakes up, but at 7:30 or 8 instead of 6am.

HTH. Good luck!

[hellosmiletoday]

I actually graduated in May. My due date was about two weeks after my graduation, but I went into labor early and walked at my grad. 5 days after delivering. My dissertation was actually only a minor part of my grad school, since most of the time was spent in lab. The last 3 mo I devoted to writing...I cant imagine writing while taking care of newborn. It must be hard...good luck :)

[Imperia]

Yep, ITA.

I just follow whenever she wants to sleep, if she changes her mind and wants to sleep earlier then that's how it will go. I really can't imagine her being 3 or so and still going to bed so late.

She gets plenty of sleep and hardly ever gets overtired anymore. She sleeps about 10-12 hours each night and then usually has 3 or 4
45 minute to 1 and half hour naps a day. So, I am not concerned. I don't really clockwatch though; I find it easier just to go with the flow of things. I have found following DD's cues has made everyone in the family much happier =)

Imperia