I was fully and completely warned that time escapes you when you have a baby, but it doesn’t make it’s any easier! You start off not knowing what the heck you’re doing, or what your baby wants, then you gradually start figuring it out and learning your baby, day-by-day. Each month with Oakley has only gotten better and better and now that we are over the newborn hump, I feel like we have a great routine down-finally ha!
When Oakley was about 4.5 months old, we hired a sleep coach from The Cradle Co. to help us sleep train. It got to the point where it would take us 30-40 minutes to get him to sleep for the night and he would wake up once to eat and about 4 times between the hours of 4am-7am and I would have to go in his room and try to rock him back to sleep. It was exhausting and I would always dread nap and bed time. I cannot express how much sleep training helped us. Oakley now sleeps throughout the night and if he wakes up in the middle of the night, he can put himself back to sleep. It’s seriously the best!
Our day goes as follows:
7am– Wake up/Feed him a bottle. Sometimes I have to wake Oakley up, but most of the time he’s already awake and chilling in his crib. After he eats, we play with toys and do tummy time and I drink my Califia Mocha drink! (it’s my newest obsession!)
8:30am-Oakley goes down for his morning nap. Nap lengths vary here. Sometimes it’s 1.5hrs and sometimes only 45min. This is when I’ll take my shower and get ready for the day.
10am-Feed him a bottle. We usually go for a walk at this time after he eats before it gets too hot outside. If we don’t go on a walk, this is when I’ll run to the store if I need to or we just stay home and play with toys and do tummy time!
11:30am-He goes down for his second nap. I’ll take a shower and get ready if I haven’t by now and I’ll eat lunch and catch up on a show while I eat. Oakley will usually nap for 1.5-ish hours at this nap.
1pm-Wake Oakley up if he’s still sleeping and feed him a bottle. If we go swimming, this is when we do that. Otherwise, we play with toys, sing songs and do tummy time. It’s usually too hot to do anything else.
2:30-3pm– I try to keep him up until 3 but he’s normally so tired for another nap by 2:30pm, so that’s when I put him down. He will sleep about an hour at this nap. Sometimes I’ll take a nap at this time as well 🙂
4pm-Feed a bottle. This is the longest stretch that he will be awake before bedtime. I try to keep him entertained by going to the pool if we haven’t gone already, let him watch a show in his activity center while I attempt to make dinner, or have Tanner entertain him because I’m no longer interesting to him haha.
6:30pm-Bedtime varies each night depending on how well he napped that day. Sometimes he’s in bed by 6pm, but lately it’s been 6:30-6:40pm. He can’t stay up later than 2 hours right now, so once he’s able to stay awake longer, we can have a 7pm bedtime which is our goal.
Oakley’s bedtime routine
We do bath time 3 times a week, otherwise he gets really dry skin if we do it everyday. After his bath, I put lotion on him, put on his night-time diaper and his jammies. I feed him another bottle and when he’s done eating, we read books. Depending on how tired he is, we usually just read 1-2 books haha. After story-time, we put him in his sleep-sack (he sleeps with a sleep-sack for naps too). We then say our goodnights and lay him in his crib. He will fall asleep within 5-15min.
If I haven’t started dinner or finished it by the time he’s in bed, I will do that. Sometimes we eat while he’s still awake if he lets me cook, but most times we eat when he’s in bed. We started HelloFresh again and it’s been a life-saver for me! We like that he goes to sleep early so we can have some alone time before bed and catch up on shows or study if you’re Tanner(snooze-fest haha). We are actually in bed by 9pm these days and it’s amazing!
That concludes the Day In the Life. Having a schedule is great and we thrive on it, but there are days where he’s not home to nap in his crib, or he falls asleep in the car on the way home. If he falls asleep in the car and it hasn’t been a long time, I will wake him up and have him finish his nap in his crib. He sleeps great in the car now that he can put himself to sleep, so it’s nice that it’s an option when we are out, but he definitely sleeps longer in his crib.
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