the routine - a few weeks on

Starting a routine when we did was the best thing we've done so far! Any sooner and it just wouldn't have worked, when he was a teeny tiny newborn he was sleeping more sporadically and it made sense for him to be downstairs with us in the evening until we went to bed. 

We started the routine just as he was able to take a little more food and sleep for longer stints. For the first week he was going down between 10pm - 12pm and waking twice during the night. We managed to put him down while he was awake to fall asleep on his own a couple of times but it was hit and miss. The difficult part of the routine was transferring him from me to the crib without him waking, and I knew that I didn't want to keep this up. We thought that the cold crib unsettled him after being in warm arms, so we decided to introduce the grobag (a sleeping bag for babies) - he was just big enough for it. 

The grobag is now my best friend! I put him down to sleep every night in his grobag and he'll settle himself to sleep without any cries! 

After a week we were able to move forward the time we put him to bed by a couple of hours, so he was going down between 8pm and 9pm. This was because we could see the signs of him getting tired such as rubbing his eyes and felt able to put him to bed upstairs and use the monitor to watch him. As he was now sleeping less in the day and more alert we could make sure he was tired out without having to go for a walk in the evening. We also tried blacking out the room by putting towels over the curtains (we do have a blackout blind to put up, but that's on a long to do list for when Adi's off work!).

He'd wake about 3 times during the night at first and this gradually reduced to twice and now it's often once. On an average night he'll sleep for up to 6 hours, then wake after another 3 hours and then will go down for another couple. 

Due to introducing the bottle and starting a routine Adi has done some night feeds so I've had more sleep and enjoyed a couple of baths without having to jump out to see to Hugo! Bottle feeding definitely has it's upsides!