Sanity-saving sleep schedules: four to eight months
In a post about a year ago, I shared our sleep schedule for the newborn to three-month phase and started by saying that "reentering the baby stratosphere has been a wild ride;" our little guy is now 20 months old, and I'm just now finding the time to post the second nap schedule! I'm reminded that the only way that Twin Sanity went from idea to paperback was that I scribbled pages of notes when our girls were babies, and eight short years later, I had a coherently-written book to publish.
{Click here to see the first sanity-saving sleep schedule—for the newborn to three-month-old phase.}
In spite of all I knew to be true about healthy sleep habits and effective nap routines, I still found myself second-guessing what to do with our baby this time around. Blame it on the sleep deprivation, maybe? Or the fact that it is just plain hard to tune-out noise—and by noise, I mean too many voices out there with too many conflicting opinions. I'd finally turned back to my own advice in Twin Sanity and found success navigating the newborn phase, but then I got boogered-up again when he was about four months old and I was being told that I had to continue to feed him every three hours. Our girls—who had been four-and-a-half-pound preemies—were allowed to go four hours between daytime feedings at this age, so why did I think that our full-term, 8 lb. 10. oz. at birth, healthy baby boy needed to continue being fed more often than that?
After a few weeks of thinking that these continued frequent nursing sessions and consequently choppy naps weren't working for us at this stage, I once again found myself opening up my own book. What had I done with our twins that had worked so well? Was I doing that with our baby boy this time around? Was I following my own advice? (which, by the way, was the advice of other friends whose babies slept well, our pediatricians, and other trusted sources)
Just as in the newborn phase, when I returned to what had worked for our girls, it worked for our baby boy, too.
Excerpt from Twin Sanity:
At about 3 1/2 months gestational age, we were told the girls could go four hours between daytime feedings. I felt like I was given my freedom! As you can imagine, it's nearly impossible to do anything besides feed and diaper babies when they have to eat every three hours. Since we were continuing with the Feed/Awake-time/Sleep routine, changing their feeding schedule effectively changed their sleep schedule. It was at about the same time that we decided to try dropping the late evening feeding, which we had gradually moved earlier—to about 9:00.
At about six months, we started introducing "solid" foods. (How one part rice cereal and four parts breast milk or formula is considered "solid" is beyond me.) It took a while to work up to three meals a day with solid foods, but by the time they were eight months old, they were doing that. By around seven months they were more efficient and stronger at nursing, so nursing time gradually decreased from 30 minutes per baby to 10-15 minutes per baby.
Sometime during this period, they started waking each other up, and I stopped trying to stagger naps. {Many more details in Twin Sanity about staggering naps, alternating Baby A/Baby B for feedings, etc.!}
Their new routine came to look something like this:
The Four to Eight Months Nap Schedule
7:00 am Wake and feed* Baby A. By this time, they woke up on their own—if they slept late I counted my blessings. (If they both woke up, Baby B would have to wait in her crib, bouncy seat, or lying/sitting/playing on the floor.)
Feed Baby B
Solid food breakfast in high chairs (starting around 6 months) and then playtime
9:30 - 11:00 am Naptime
11:00 am Wake and feed Baby A.
Feed Baby B.
Solid food lunchtime and then playtime—lunch immediately followed nursing.
1:30 pm-3:00 pm Naptime
3:00 pm Wake and feed Baby A.
Feed Baby B.
Playtime
4:30 - 5:00ish pm Naptime—catnap
5:00ish Wake and feed Baby A (OR... You could wait until just before bedtime to have the fourth feeding of the day, which is what we did with our singleton.)
Feed Baby B.
6:00 pm Solid food dinnertime and then bathtime
7:00 pm Bedtime**
* "Feed" means nurse or bottle-feed. Solid food meals feel like more of an activity than a feeding at this stage!
** Our twins had a late evening feeding until they were about 4 months old and would sleep through the night after that—not every night, but often enough that I knew they were trending in that direction. They started consistently sleeping 12 hours at night sometime during this phase. Our baby boy still woke for a middle of the night feeding almost every night until he was about 8 months old. It's a really good thing that he's so sweet and cute.
The newborn phase is SO hard, and while there are a lot of changes to navigate in this next baby stage—starting solids, learning to sit up, possibly starting to crawl!—the fog of the sleepless newborn age starts to lift, and hopefully you'll find increasing moments of joy in those genuine smiles, big baby giggles, and maybe even hearing "mama" for the first time. Enjoy the journey!
Love,
