week 11 - moving bedtime earlier
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[00:00:00] Welcome to this sleep by Alex podcast. I am a certified pediatric sleep consultant and a mom of three, and I will be bringing you quick science backed sleep advice to get you and your baby or a toddler sleeping well
Hello everyone. Woo. I hope you are surviving this holiday season. Christmas week really took it out of me. All of my kids were sick. Plus just making all the Christmas magic. Holy moly, I'm tired, but I'm excited to get back to regular scheduled programming this week.
I love me a new year, just like I love Mia Monday. I love MA new month. A new year is like the ultimate.
I'm obsessed with making goals, making checklists, making schedules like
examining my life and my day to day and trying to figure out what's going well and what's not going well. So a new year is just so exciting for me.
there's just so much to look forward to this [00:01:00] year. Last year I was pregnant for pretty much the entire year, since January, and then obviously in that sort of newborn fog. So this year I'm excited to not be pregnant and to be coming outta the newborn fog. And of course I'm still breastfeeding, so I'm kind of, you know, go gonna be in the breastfeeding fog for a while,
but I'm just feeling invigorated for this new year. Before I get into today's episode, I did wanna touch on one thing that has to do with the new year. If you have anything you would like to change or get better at, or a goal you would like to reach in this coming new year, sleep is going to be the very first thing you're gonna wanna make sure you check off.
In order to set yourself up for success. If you have a goal of meditating in the mornings, journaling, losing weight, eating healthy, exercising, spending more quality time with your partner, being more patient with your children, learning a new [00:02:00] hobby, going out with your friends more.
Whatever it is. Pretty much every one of these goals that I can even think of someone having is going to feel really, really hard if you or your baby or your toddler are not sleeping well. If my kids didn't sleep consistently, I could not continue to get up at five in the morning to work out and meditate and journal and do all of the things I need to do for myself to be a patient and rested and strong and happy parent for them the whole day.
If I was up all night long with them, if I was co-sleeping with them, if I was doing any of that, it would be really, really hard for me to get up early and fill my cup. Or if you're more of a night person, it's really hard. I know if you have to lay with your toddler for an hour before they go to bed, for you to have the energy after they go to bed, to read a book or do some self care, or even watch a show with your partner, like sometimes that's even too exhausting once you've made it through the hole.[00:03:00]
Crazy bedtime routine. So if you have any goals this year, big or small, you're gonna wanna get sleep on track first to help make sure you're set up for success so that you can actually reach these goals and not have another year go by where you're like, oh, said I do that this year. And that really didn't work out well.
Did it? That's why I decided to do something I've never done before. I am offering your first week absolutely free in the Sleep by Alex membership. So anytime you sign up, between now and January 5th, you're going to be charged. Zero. Nothing. That whole first week is free. You can go in there, you can send me your questions, you can come to a live call.
You can go through the entire four to 24 months course if you want to. You can download the guides if you want to. Whatever you wanna do for that week, I do not care. And in that week, it's gonna help you make a decision if you feel like it's a right fit for you, if you wanna stick around and work with me so we can get sleep on [00:04:00] track for you.
Or if you're like, eh, I checked it out, not for me, and you canceled before the week is up, I don't really care. I just want everyone to have access to better sleep so that you can set yourself up for an amazing year. So check it out. You don't need any special code or link or anything. You'll just check out the Sleep By Alex membership, which I've linked in the show notes.
When you press sign up, it's just gonna say, free for seven days, and you can sign up that way. Go ahead and get in there. Attend a live call. Send me some questions, watch the course if you're curious, if you decide to stay, great. I am so looking forward to having you as part of this community and getting you and your baby or your toddler sleep on track.
I help with anything from newborn sleep all the way through five years old. So if your baby's up all night, if you want help, sleep training, if you want help dropping a nap, if you need to drop night feeds, if you wanna work on independent naps, if your toddler is taking hours to go to bed at night, if your toddler comes into your bed all night [00:05:00] long and you don't want them to, whatever it may be.
I've got you in the membership and I'm really excited to chat with you there. Okay, let's get into today, week 11 with Hank. I again, don't have much to update you on, which is a really good thing because I'm just like waiting around for the ball to drop and for sleep to go haywire. Knowing that he's approaching this sort of three month mark, usually between three and four months things can start to feel a little bit wonky.
So for now, we're still on going to bed between usually seven and eight. Then he will get a nice first stretch. It's somewhere between five and seven hours. It just varies. Then I'll feed him and he'll go back down for another few hours. I feed him and then he'll go back down for another couple hours.
We're usually starting the day somewhere between like six 30 and seven 30, sometimes 7 45. I'll let him sleep in if I can't.
By the way, if you're wondering how I got to this point with Hank so far, like going to bed between seven and eight and getting a [00:06:00] nice long stretch, having two night feeds, straight back down to sleep, et cetera, et cetera, then I recommend you going back and listening from week one. This podcast is really best listened to like in order.
I'm not gonna break down each week and repeat over and over again how I got to this point. I tried to make sure the episodes were short and sweet so that you can sort of binge it quickly and catch up if you need to.
The one change I have noticed this week with Hank is we're increasing wake windows, just the tiniest bit. So he was for a very long time, awake around 45 to 60 minutes max, more like 45 minutes in the morning before his naps, and then it could extend as long as 60 minutes for the rest of the day.
He's been on that sort of wake window routine for quite a while, but I do notice this last week, he's not showing those sleepy cues quite yet as early. He's not as tired at 45 minutes or at 60 minutes, so I've just bumped it up by 15 minutes.
Now his wake windows are more between 60 and 75 minutes. [00:07:00] So 60 minutes first thing in the morning, and then somewhere between 60 and 75 as the day goes on. Just that little 15 minute increase has been perfect for him and we'll probably rock with that for quite a while
because I don't have much to report on changes with Hank's sleep this week. I do wanna address something that you may be experiencing with your baby around this age if you're sort of following along with your own baby.
So Hank has been a little bit different than my other newborns and the typical newborns, and he's always kind of had an earlier bedtime for the most part, since the get go. He's gone to bed usually by like eight o'clock. I.
I don't know. It's just somehow worked out like that with his naps and he was so cranky and fussy in the evenings. If he took an evening nap around, you know, 6 37, he would just wanna sleep the rest of the night. So for him, it's just worked out that he always has gone to bed by around eight o'clock. This is not typically the case for newborns.
Most newborns aren't [00:08:00] going to go to bed and get their longest stretch of sleep until a little bit later in the night. Usually somewhere between like nine and 11 o'clock at night. So if your newborn goes to bed really late,
that is actually really biologically normal for your newborn. A late bedtime in the newborn months is not a bad habit to have. It is completely normal and usually works better for newborns. They'll get a longer stretch of sleep when they go to bed later. So if you feel like you're struggling to force that like 7:00 PM bedtime with your newborn and they just keep waking up and they're not sleeping well, you're not doing anything wrong, they probably just aren't ready for an earlier bedtime.
They would probably do better with going to bed between nine and 11:00 PM which actually works out great for you. I usually recommend trying to put your newborn to bed when you are going to bed, which between nine and 11 is more feasible usually for adults than 7:00 PM. That way if they are going to get a four or five, six hour stretch of sleep, you're gonna get that [00:09:00] stretch of sleep as well, which is going to be so life changing.
So if your newborn has a late bedtime, don't worry. This is normal. Ride it out. I know it can be exhausting. Not going to bed until late when you're tired. My bedtime preferably is 8, 8 30. So like I'm happy that Hank is an early baby. It works for me, but my previous newborns always went to bed later. And this is not the norm.
Today I actually wanted to talk about the process of moving bedtime earlier when your baby is ready.
And the reason we're talking about that this week is many babies are going to be ready somewhere between three and four months old.
Some it will be earlier, some it will be later. Of course, this is just the average, but for the most part, between three and four months, we see most babies start to shift from that 9, 10, 11 o'clock bedtime to that sort of 7, 7 30, 8 o'clock bedtime.
At this point, the circadian rhythm has developed. Their wake windows are getting more predictable,
and an earlier bedtime often just [00:10:00] works better for those babies who are around three or four months old and beyond.
Some signs that your baby is officially ready for that earlier bedtime, or maybe they're just getting extremely cranky in the evening. So it's normal for them to have witching hour or for them to be more fussy in the evening than they are during the day. But I'm talking like they don't seem like they wanna be awake at all.
Just their entire last wake window, they're just a hot mess and they really wish they were just being put to bed.
We are talking very cranky and tired that whole last week window when maybe they should have just been asleep.
Another sign is if that last snap of the day is getting really long or really sleepy, you always have to wake your baby up from that last nap. And they just seem really tired. It's hard for them to wake up from that last nap, and they're very, very sleepy through the bedtime routine. They just wanna fall asleep the whole time.
As you're trying to do a little bedtime routine, it's usually a sign that we can probably just make bedtime earlier.
If you feel like your baby is ready for that earlier bedtime, here are the steps you can take to get there. The first [00:11:00] thing you wanna do is set a pretty predictable wake up time in the morning.
Now, it doesn't have to be exact down to the minute what time you start the day, but if you could have at least like an hour window where you know that you're gonna get your baby up or your baby wakes up for the day between this hour, so that may be between six and seven.
Setting that predictable morning wake up is going to be a great place to start
if we're going to be moving their bedtime earlier, we do wanna plan that their day is at least 12 to 13 hours long. And what I mean by that is if they wake up at six in the morning. We would expect them to go to bed somewhere between six and 7:00 PM so if we're letting them sleep in in the morning until nine o'clock, that's fine if it works for you, but don't expect them to be able to go to bed until at least nine or 10 at night.
We really can't expect them to have this super long, like 14 hour night most nights, by the time we're moving bedtime earlier [00:12:00] are going to land around 10 to 12 hours. So day needs to be at least 12 to 13 hours. So if you would like them to go to bed by eight, I would wake them up between seven and eight.
I know that's kind of confusing. I hope it makes sense.
The next thing you can do to help at morning wake up is getting them exposed to morning light as soon as you can. So get them up, feed them, grab your coffee, toss 'em in the stroller or the carrier. Head outside for a walk or sit on your porch and drink your coffee.
Just get a little bit of morning light exposure on their eyes first thing in the morning. This is really going to help them with that earlier bedtime.
Before messing around with bedtime, , you're also gonna wanna make sure that you are getting them the proper daytime sleep for their body and their age. If they're over tired, it's gonna be really hard going to bed. So make sure you're following age appropriate week windows. You're helping them get nice consolidated naps during the day.
This is going to help take the chaos out of bedtime.
Now, if you have everything in order and you're ready to move bedtime earlier, there's two ways that we can go about [00:13:00] this. The first way is a gradual shift. So in this gradual shift, you're just going to scoop bedtime 15 minutes earlier every couple days. So if you're starting at 10 o'clock the first night, you might make sure that they're down by 9 45, , and then after a couple days, you'll move to nine 30 and then you'll move to nine 15, so on and so forth until you get to a more reasonable bedtime between seven and eight.
Shift bedtime earlier by 15 minutes. Give them a couple days, see how your baby adjusts, and then shift again. If it seems like they're adjusting well,
As you're gradually moving bedtime earlier, you're gonna be playing around with that last nap of the day. That nap might have to be moved earlier. It might need to be shortened in order to accommodate for their last week window. In the earlier bedtime.
Make sure you are doing a consistent bedtime routine every night. This is also going to help cue them like, Hey, this is not a nap. This is bedtime.
Now, another way you can move bedtime earlier without going gradually [00:14:00] is you can just make the last nap of the day into bedtime. Now, this way is of course, faster to get to your new schedule, but it can mean that you're gonna deal with some false starts for a little while for example, if your baby used to nap from seven 30 to eight, instead of that being a nap, we're now going to treat it as bedtime.
And before that seven 30 nap, you're going to go through your bedtime routine and put them to bed at seven 30 rather than down for a nap. Now, at first, your baby may still wake up 30 minutes later because their body is used to taking a nap at that time. And then what you can do is just treat it as a middle of the night.
Wake up, you do whatever you need to do to get your baby back to sleep. You're keeping the lights off. You may even need to give them a little more milk to get them back to sleep. You just wanna make it clear to their body like, Hey, that's no longer a nap. This is actually bedtime.
After a week or so. Your baby should get used to that earlier bedtime and it should go much more smoothly for you.
With all this though, keep in mind your specific baby might not be quite ready for the earlier bedtime, [00:15:00] so whether you choose a gradual shift or the quick shift to an earlier bedtime, you may find that if you're just fighting them and fighting them and fighting them on going to bed early and it's just not helping with night's sleep and it's not helping your routine, then you may just have to stick with a later bedtime for a little bit longer.
As I said earlier, some babies do hang onto that late bedtime until four months old.
I hope this was helpful for you when navigating your newborn's bedtime.
On next week's episode, I'm going to talk about how to gradually remove intervention for helping your baby fall asleep at nap time around this age.
So if you're curious about moving away from rocking to sleep or feeding to sleep during the newborn months, Then stick around for next week. Make sure you subscribe. And of course, don't forget to join the Sleep at Alex membership before January 5th for your first week.
Free to check it out before you commit. I hope you have a great week and we'll chat next week.
