When I arrive home from picking Reagan up from me mothers its around 18:00 and I put her in the living room surrounded by toys and CBeebies on TV and she will happily play for 20 mins with just an occasional visit from me to check on her and have a little play too. At 18:30 I check her nappy and then put her into her high chair with some snacks (see Reagan eating fruit, post for an idea of what she does.) while I prepare the family tea. Mommy will arrive around 19:00 and she will shower and then join us for the meal which is usually finished with at 19:40 when we make a bedtime bottle and run a bath.
Reagan’s bedtime is such fun now with lovely warm soapy water loads of toys and some playtime before we bathe her and wrap her up in a towel and take her to the bedroom for drying, moisturising and dressing in nappy, onesy, jamas and sleeping bag all done with relaxing classical music playing quietly in the background. When she’s nice and warm and calm and relaxed one of us sits in the chair and feeds her a bottle which sends her off to sleep every single time, at this point you can pick her up and lay her in the cot switch the lamp off close the door and she will not disturb.
After 45mins to an hour though she will disturb and cry and bawl for no apparent reason so we comfort her for a minute then leave her for 15 until she falls back to sleep once this happens we never hear her again for the rest of the night? It is so difficult to listen to her cry and scream for no reason, we no there is nothing wrong apart from maybe missing mommy and daddy because if you go to her she stops crying immediately sometimes even before you get to her if she hears you on the stairs. For that reason we have to let her cry it out otherwise we will be sat next to her cot all night every night and that is just not practical.
Now she isn’t teething just at the moment she sleeps through to 08:30 even 09:00 some days and in a morning is quite happy to play in her cot until one of us comes for her, the only problem with this is I don’t get any time with her at all in a morning as I leave for work at 08:50 but I know “never to wake a sleeping baby” as we all need sleep and if she sleeps so can we.
Apart from that little blip in the evening her schedule is spot on and she is thriving on it, if it could change we would start bedtime earlier because we know she wants it but it would mean mommy would not see her at all in the evening after work but as it is its working so we’ll carry on as we are unless something happens to change it.
