Newborn Routines and Schedules: The Essential Guide
If you only read one post about feeding, naptime, and bedtime routines, make sure it's this one.
If you have already read the previous post in this series about newborn sleep - which I recommend you do if you haven’t - you’ll remember me writing about how vital naps are. To recap, overtiredness is one of the main causes of baby discontent. Making sure your baby naps enough during the day - and therefore sleeps as well as possible at night - is the key to avoiding the havoc that overtiredness wreaks.
Naps and Wake Windows
Naps and overtiredness go hand in hand with a concept you’ll probably never have heard of before having a baby, called wake windows. I had never even heard of it by the time I had a baby; none of the many books I read while pregnant mentioned the term. As with sleeping and feeding, I was basically clueless about what a baby’s daily routine should be, only eventually learning what I needed to know on the job. The websites that taught me most about this particular topic were:
The Mummy Bubble’s Baby Wake Windows Explained {From Newborn to 18 Months}
Heaven Sent Sleep’s All About: Wake Windows
A wake window is simply the optimal length of time your baby is awake between getting up from sleep and going back to sleep. A one-week-old baby’s wake windows are extremely short - up to a maximum of around 30 minutes. As they age, their wake windows slowly and gradually increase, until they are awake most of the time during the day by the age of around one.
Thus, a baby’s schedule follows the pattern of: waking up in the morning, going back to sleep for a nap, waking up again, napping again, and so on and so forth, until they go back to bed at night, between 6pm and 7pm.
To show you exactly what I mean, I have written out each of Aiyana’s different daily schedules from when she was around two weeks old - when you can start getting your baby into a daily routine since they can start going longer between feeds - to the time of writing (she is still on the last schedule 14 shown, at age one and about nine months). Note that schedules 1 and 2 shown are the schedules I would have had her on had I known about such things at the time; in reality, I did not get her onto a schedule until she was about 12 weeks old i.e. schedule 3. In case it is not obvious, WW stands for wake window. You’ll see that she went from having four naps a day to now only having one. Also note that we gave her a late-night bottle to get her through the night until she was just over 8 months old, and eating enough solid food during the day that she lost interest in it, and that that wake window never increased past 45 minutes.
Each wake window is generally made up of the same activities, particularly until your baby starts eating solid foods when they reach six months. After you’ve woken your baby up - or they’ve woken up - feed them their milk, subsequently burping them thoroughly to avoid them getting a sore stomach due to trapped wind. Then, change their nappy, and spend the rest of the time talking to and playing with them. If you go to wake them up and they are still extremely sleep, sometimes changing their nappy first, before feeding them, will help to wake them up more.
The Difference Between Day and Night
The only difference is if your baby is still waking up for a feed during the night aged three months or less. In that case, you would of course feed them their milk to begin with as you would during the day, and burp them. However, afterwards, you would only change their nappy if they had done a poop, and you would talk to them as little as possible, avoiding eye contact, and keeping the whole experience very quiet and peaceful. This is so that they begin to learn the difference between day and night - and that waking up during the night isn’t “fun”. The reason for not changing their nappy unless they’ve done a poop is that it will likely cause them to become more awake. To a new parent, this may feel like child cruelty. James and I were obsessed with changing Aiyana’s nappy in the early days. Anytime she cried we would think it might be because she had a wet nappy. I’ve since learned that this was very unlikely to have been the case. Now that she sleeps through the night from 7pm to 6.15am, she wears the same nappy for over 11 hours. The longest a baby still taking a late-night bottle - the one between 9 and 10pm - will go wearing the same nappy, is 8.5 hours. The parent of a toddler would never think to wake their baby up during the night to change their nappy - unless their baby woke up having leaked through. To reassure yourself that they don’t need their nappy changed due to having done a poop, just peek in through one of the leg holes to see.
Teaching your baby the difference between day and night during their first couple of months on Earth is essential to them sleeping through the night from around two-to-three months old. The other ways in which you do so are as follows. Have them nap during the day in the busiest part of the house, i.e. where you are milling around, in full daylight, without making any effort to lower the noise levels around them. You don’t have to move their crib from the bedroom, or buy another one - unless you want to; they can nap during the day in something like a baby pod or nest, or their pram if you have space to leave it set up. Then, from bedtime onwards, have them sleep in their crib in the quiet of your bedroom, with the lights either off or dimmed, and their monitor on to keep an eye on them. Once they reach the two-month mark, and are therefore much more alert and aware of their surroundings, and have learned the difference between day and night, move their naps into the bedroom too.
Bathing
Once your baby reaches six months of age and starts eating solid food, you will most definitely have to give them a bath every night since they will get covered in their dinner. Plus, their poops will be more like an adults, so you’ll want to give their bum a thorough wash at the end of each day. Notice from Aiyana’s schedules that she was awake for 2 hours before bedtime at that age - plenty of time to give her her dinner, play, give her a bath and then go through her bedtime routine.
I wouldn’t feel under pressure, however, to give your baby a bath every night until then. When your baby is only awake for around an hour at a time, it is very difficult to fit in feeding them, bathing them, and going through their bedtime routine. Plus, you want to avoid getting bath water anywhere near their face until they’re over six months, since it’s not sterile.
James and I started bathing Aiyana nightly very early on; I think new parents hold themselves to extremely high standards. Inevitably we would be rushing, and she’d end up going to bed later than she ideally would have, extremely overtired and annoyed. What I would do now, if/when we have another baby, instead, is give them a sort of “bed bath” at some point in the morning, when time was more on my side. I would boil the kettle while they were still asleep, fill a bowl with the water once it had cooled down, then use it with some soft cotton pads to wipe down their face, neck, armpits, hands, creases, feet, and finally bum, once they were awake and had been fed. If I did feel the need to give them a full bath, I would do it during the day instead of trying to squeeze it in right before bedtime.
Bedtime and Naptime Routines
The bedtime routine you put into practice with your baby can be whatever you want it to be. I would guess that most involve: getting your baby cosy, by putting them into their sleeping bag or tucking them into their covers; reading or telling them a story; saying prayers if you are so inclined; doing the shush-rock-pat method if you are still at the stage where it’s useful - see the previous post on sleeping if you don’t know what I’m talking about; singing them a lullaby; and finally saying night night, kissing them, and telling them you love them and will see them in the morning, turning on their mobile, nightlight, noise machine, and/or projector before you leave. In one of the books I read - I can’t remember which - it said to choose a different lullaby for naps and bedtime, to help your baby distinguish between the two. I did this, and chose Go To Sleep Little Baby for naps, and Twinkle Twinkle for bedtime, since those were the only two lullabies that came to mind.
A naptime routine is very similar, although likely less elaborate. For example, I didn’t read Aiyana a story before naptime until recently when she started insisting I did, and I don’t say prayers (which, in case you are curious, mainly consist of me thanking the Universe, and our angels, spirit guides and loved ones in spirit for our blessings).
Adjusting Your Baby’s Schedule When Required
As discussed in Newborn Sleep, your baby won’t always sleep well at naptimes, especially the later in the day it gets. If they do wake up after their first sleep cycle, and you’ve tried to use the Pause to no avail, simply get them up and start their next wake window. Do the same if they wake up quite close to when their nap is due to end; if they only have half an hour left of their nap before you’re going to get them up anyway, there’s no point trying to get them back to sleep for that half an hour. To try to get their schedule back on track, I would then just elongate their next nap. For example, say Aiyana was on schedule 4, and woke up from her 10.30am-12.15pm nap at 11.15pm. If she didn’t settle back down to sleep again by, say, 11.30am, I would have just got her up for 1 hour and 15 minutes, and then aimed for her third nap of the day to last from 12.45pm-2.30pm, instead of 1.30-2.30pm. If the same thing happened at that nap, I would have just done the same thing, possibly putting her to bed earlier that night if necessary. Take notes on your phone, or wherever you like, to help you with this when it happens.
The impetus to move from one schedule to the next, i.e. from schedule 3 to 4, say, was when she woke up before 6am for a week in a row. That told me that she was starting to need a little less daytime sleep. I get up every day at around 5am, so that I can have coffee, shower and brush my teeth before she needs to wake up, so I look to see if she’s still sleeping on her monitor; once your baby is older they won’t always cry when they wake up so you might not know they are unless you spy.
Going Out and About
Don’t feel that these schedules mean you are tied to staying in all day. Once your baby is older and napping less, it is ideal to have them nap in their own cot most of the time. However, when they are still having multiple naps throughout the day, you can go out and about by timing their naps for when they will either be in the car or in their pram, and so still have the opportunity to sleep on the go.
Final Takeaway
Overall, babies are happier the more sleep they get. So, if you’re ever unsure, err on the side of them getting more sleep as opposed to less. When Aiyana was still younger than two months old, sometimes she would fall asleep as soon as we left the house, even when she was “meant” to be awake. I don’t think she could resist conking out due to the white noise aspect of outdoor hustle and bustle. I would worry that she’d then be more awake during the night, but this was completely unfounded, as I soon learned. I also felt like I was doing her some kind of disservice in the beginning, by encouraging her to sleep as often as a baby needs to (although I didn’t actually know how much sleep a baby needed then), thinking that I was depriving her of fun and stimulation. Please never think this - I guarantee your baby will love life more the more well rested they are. A baby who is put to bed a little too early by an unwitting parent will be perfectly content to lie in their cot and amuse themselves before falling asleep, while a baby put to bed too late will let you know how infuriating they find that to be.