I always was very much against running your life around baby …. My opinion has changed slightly after the first 2 months of having my own baby 🙂
When Chloe was around 12 weeks I noticed that she would only fall asleep on my breast and have a nap whenever she wanted to. This meant not much time at all for anything else in the day, and evening filled with either Chloe crying or Chloe being on my chest 🙂 .
After another evening of Chloe crying whenever we put her in to her moses basket I hit the internet…. Big big big mistake…. you start reading about everything what you do wrong, what you don’t do and you should do, and it just makes you feel like shit !!!! Then you start reading about ways to get you in to this perfect routine and thats when your head starts spinning !!! There is around 100 different ways of getting a good routine !!! Its crazy and my head is spinning just thinking about it.
FEEDING ROUTINE
From the very beginning I knew that I was against schedule feeding, there is a reason why doctors tell you to feed on demand. How do you explain to 3 days old baby that it needs to wait 25 minutes before getting milk as it’s not the feeding time yet ?????It may work for some parents but I didn’t want to try it.
DAILY ROUTINE
I knew that I didn’t agree with putting a newborn baby on a daily routine as in my opinion they are way too small for it. First of all they need to get used to this new scary word, scary smells, sounds etc and to do so they need to be dotted on. I do believe that in the beginning they know best what they want and when they want it. Not sleeping, not knowing what comes next it’s a part of having a newborn baby !
Me and my husband from the start have been letting Chloe do what she wanted: we feed her (or shall I say I feed her as my husband doesn’t have a milk coming out of his breast) when she was hungry, she was sleeping when she wanted, we been going out to the shops and cafes, walks etc when we felt like it.
As Chloe was getting bigger and we have been told by all of the informations we found on the internet that we aren’t doing it right we thought its time to set the routines in place. Apparently the reason our baby cries is because I got her use to sleeping on my breasts, she doesn’t know how to comfort herself and she is also tired because she doesn’t have a daily routine. I asked myself what do I want to achieve and what will benefit my baby?
For a week I stayed more at home and started observing Chloe. I started noticing when she is tired ( 10:00, 13:00 and 16:00) and thats when I started putting her in to her moses basket for a nap. I would give her a dummy and a comfort blanket, she would snuggle her face in to the comfort blanket and fall asleep. No, it wasn’t as easy and just doing that 🙂 it took us few days to get the routine going. On the beginning she would cry cry and cry then fall asleep. Now I just put her in to her basket and she is out.
I do admit that having a strutter in a day has helped her and me. I finally could predict what will happen 🙂 and when I can do some things around the house :-).
Did it help with her sleeping at night? no.
We always have been lucky when it comes to nights. Chloe would wake up for her feeds and then go back straight to sleep, it’s the evenings which were proving difficult which I mentioned in previous posts.
She still was for a while, quite unsetteld in the evening when we put her down into her moses basket. I think that it was just normal transition which she had to make.Come on its hard to sleep in a basket if you can in the safe place of your mums arms. We changed her evening routine a bit, after bath my husband started reading her a story. We also moved her basket in the evening to our bedroom so she could start falling asleep there instead of being with us in the living room. After a few days she started to fall asleep on her own and the screaming has stopped.
Is routine good? Yes, it is.
Does it work? Yes, it does but its not an answer to everything.
What routine is best? It depends on you. We have a bed time routine and we have set times for naps and thats it! I still feed my baby when she wants to eat ( which is very predictable now). If we want or need to go out and its Chloe’s nap time then we will let her sleep in the car or pram. I just wanted to have a healthy balance between Chloe’s needs for a routine and having a life.
My advice is yes baby needs a routine, routine which suits your baby and your life. Remember that every baby is different and needs different things, every parent is different and lives different life style….
NEW YUMMY MUMMY 