written by lucy olpadapo, family consultant

This family came to us for a parent consultation, not because they were having any major difficulties but because Mum wanted some support in putting a routine in place for baby. The catch was that it needed to fit in around their 3 year old’s daily routine including nursery drop offs and pick ups.

 The first part of the call was spent discussing how things were currently going:

•  Baby was exclusively breast fed. Mum enjoyed the convenience of this but wanted baby to take a bottle as well as she currently felt unable to leave baby for long in case they needed a feed.

• Mum felt that she often offered baby a feed when baby wasn’t really hungry and this would often get refused or be a very brief feed.

• Baby fell asleep as soon as they got in the car to do nursery drop offs and pick ups.

• Mum had a good bedtime routine in place that worked for both children.

• Baby slept fairly well at night, going to bed at around 8pm and then waking at around 1am for a feed and then often again at around 4/5am but not always wanting a feed at this time.

A typical day
We then worked through a typical day to look at how to space out feeds and sleeps. I spoke about the typical wake windows for a baby of this age being anywhere between one and a half, and two and a half hours and that we would be expecting baby to have 3 to 4 naps a day. We talked about how it’s important to remember that no two babies are the same so we would need to follow baby’s lead if timings weren’t working. I also reiterated that the routine would likely change quite significantly over the coming months as baby’s sleep and feeding needs changed.

The routine
We put together a routine that would fit around the older sibling’s day but would also allow flexibility for Mum. We didn’t want her to feel that she always had to be at home for naps, but equally wanted to have a nice nap routine in place for when they were at home. We spoke about starting day naps in baby’s own room to start getting her used to this in preparation for when she started to sleep there overnight.  We scheduled one particular feed of the day for when Mum would continue to try offering baby a bottle in the hope that she would start to accept this and therefore give Mum some more options with regards to leaving baby with Dad for longer.

While the bedtime routine already worked well, we put in place some suggestions for tweaking the feed times so that baby would be less likely to be hungry over bath time. We also discussed the feeds overnight and I made some suggestions about what baby wears to sleep and also about winding after the night feeds in case that is what was waking her again a while later.

Feedback
Overall, the call was a great success and Mum said it was really helpful to have the foundations of a routine in place to work from. She was keen to start implementing it straight away.

When we checked in with the family after a couple of weeks of starting the routine we were happy to hear that the routine was going well and that the family found it really helpful knowing when to get the baby ready for naps and feeds.

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