Baby on Schedule

Why is baby advice so contradictory and changes every few years? As if parenthood wasn't confusing enough.

These days professionals advise to follow baby cues for feeding times, change diaper times and everything else times as baby knows what it needs.

In my pregnant days, this seemed to make perfect sense - follow nature and everything will be ok.

Now with a newborn baby, continued lack of sleep and frustration at wondering why is the baby crying now, I desperately searched for more information.

And I found it. First I discovered I'm a Mom that Sleeps. She informed me that apparently a baby can sleep through the night at 3 weeks! Although that sounded amazing, I was not convinced that was a good thing for the baby. And I doubted that it could apply to all babies. However, it got me interested in schedules. The idea that if I put my baby into a routine, she would sleep through the night sooner was too good not to try.

I managed to struggle through a couple of days trying to stretch her feeding times from 2 to 4 hours. She now eats approximately every 4 hours.

Advice for baby gave more specific schedule advice and I'm trying to follow.

Sophie slept for 2 nights in a row (waking up only for her pacifer) when she was 6 weeks. This week she started waking up for food in the middle of the night again. Giving her a pacifer only stretches her till 4am (the latest) which gets us off schedule completely.

The feeding schedule I'm trying to follow is 6am, 10am, 2pm, 6pm and 10pm (getting her to skip the 2am feeding).

I think that if she wakes up at 2am again, I will just feed her, instead of trying to stretch her. I will only try to stretch her if she wakes after 4am.

Maybe that way I'll at least get some sleep in the early morning.

I also have a problem of giving her a bath before the last 10pm feeding as she never wants to wake up at that time and is happy with only a little bit of food. I wanted to use bath time as part of getting ready for bed routine. Doesn't seem to be working (even though J and I gave her a bath before bed every day since we brought her home).

I have tried to incorporate some ideas from another schedule which advises to keep the baby awake for 1.5 hours from the start of feeding but Sophie is ready for a nap after 50 minutes. Then she wakes up an hour before feeding in a very fussy mood. Not sure how to solve this problem yet.

Even though I still have a few things to smooth out with our routine, I'm convinced that having a schedule is the best thing for the baby and for me. Happy mother = happy baby.