Post by honeybunches101 on May 14, 2015 12:25:36 GMT -5
The title of this thread made me laugh, you really can't put a newborn on a schedule and you'll drive yourself crazy if you try! But there are a lot of great tips in the comments about following along with your child's natural routine to help you better map out your day. I highly reccomend an app to let you track feedings, naps, diapers etc, I think I used Baby Connect. It can help you see when a pattern evolves. As for waking the baby to feed, that's something to discuss with your pediatrician based on how your baby is growing. DS never slept longer than 2ish hours until he was over a year, so I never had that problem!
We had DS in our room for 8 months in the RNP because that worked for us. We are planning for at least 6 months to reduce SIDS this time but we'll see.
The hard thing about newborns, and babies in general, is that once you think you know baby's schedule, it changes! There are tons of growth spurts, so you may be used to feeding baby every 2.5 hours and suddenly baby is hungry every hour and it is frustrating, but eventually they pass. Same things for naps. By about 4ish months, DS was taking 3 pretty predicable naps a day as I had started to count on that, but eventually he moved to two naps on his own around 1ish and it threw me for a loop.
The great thing about newborns is you can't spoil them and they don't form bad habits until 4 months. We had a really hard time trying to follow the Eat Play Sleep schedule and out pediatrician assured us that it was fine to nurse a newborn to sleep, it won't ruin their sleep forever, you just have to do what you have to do to get by.
In general, just feed the baby when he/she is hungry regardless of what the 'schedule' says and help them nap when they are tired, and hopefully you'll emerge with a pattern. Pay attention to your baby's needs and you will figure out a way to make it work for your family.
We had DS in our room for 8 months in the RNP because that worked for us. We are planning for at least 6 months to reduce SIDS this time but we'll see.
The hard thing about newborns, and babies in general, is that once you think you know baby's schedule, it changes! There are tons of growth spurts, so you may be used to feeding baby every 2.5 hours and suddenly baby is hungry every hour and it is frustrating, but eventually they pass. Same things for naps. By about 4ish months, DS was taking 3 pretty predicable naps a day as I had started to count on that, but eventually he moved to two naps on his own around 1ish and it threw me for a loop.
The great thing about newborns is you can't spoil them and they don't form bad habits until 4 months. We had a really hard time trying to follow the Eat Play Sleep schedule and out pediatrician assured us that it was fine to nurse a newborn to sleep, it won't ruin their sleep forever, you just have to do what you have to do to get by.
In general, just feed the baby when he/she is hungry regardless of what the 'schedule' says and help them nap when they are tired, and hopefully you'll emerge with a pattern. Pay attention to your baby's needs and you will figure out a way to make it work for your family.
The schedule sounds like something great to strive for, but often it would take me an hour to get DS to sleep and he'd wake up 20 minutes later screaming and hungry and then be ready for another nap an hour later. You may also want to allow flexibility for growth spurts where babies will need to eat more and sometimes sleep more. But I have friend's with twins who said schedules were very helpful and thru always fed the babies at the same time to keep from just nursing non stop all day. This poor baby's 'schedule' will be dictated by her older brothers activities. Hopefully she will forgive me!