Ethan and Logan love their sleep. We got lucky. They've both slept through the night since they were very very young. And whilst I know that this isn't the case for some other parents and their babies, I've had a few requests for a post about my boys' bedtime routines and so I thought I'd share our general sort of every night routine. It's not one we are super strict about, there are some nights when we're out late maybe at Adams parents house and the boys go to bed a little later. We and they just adapt but if we're at home this is generally how it goes for us in the evening..
7.30pm is the time we try and aim for for bed. Logan generally gets tired around 6.45pm-7pm and so we'll take him upstairs, get his pyjama's on (unless he's had a bath and is already in them) and do his nappy and then we'll get him into his sleeping bag. (We use different types of sleeping bags, but at the moment it's one sort of like this one from Amazon). Once he's in his sleeping/grow bag, we give him his last bit of milk before he goes to sleep for the night.
If he doesn't fall asleep with his bottle, we'll rock him gently in his Snuzpod. We tuck the bottom half of him in with a thick blanket as it's cold at the moment, making sure it's tucked underneath the sides and is only on the bottom half of him so that it can't get up anywhere near to his face. If he's awake, he likes to have a dummy and he has to have his little jellycat bunny, he likes to snuggle his face in to it. We always make sure though that once he's fallen asleep, we take the bunny away as it's not advisable to have anything in the cot/crib with them at his age. This usually settles him, but we also have a Whisbear that we use if he's still a little unsettled or we turn on the de-humidifier as the noise helps to settle him. Once he's asleep, Adam and I tend to watch a bit of television downstairs in the living room in the evening so we turn on our BT baby monitor (we have a Tomy monitor for Ethan which works just as well but I always advise reading a few baby monitor reviews before purchasing).
Logan will generally stay asleep for the night after this, he wakes up at around 6.30am - always happy and gurgling away! It's actually his gurgling that wakes us up every morning.
For Ethan, we tend to head to bed around 7.30pm/8pm - he has his nappy done, gets his pyjama's on, does his teeth and then we read two bedtime stories - his current favorite is 'Spot can count" - it's teaching him to read numbers which is great! After that he gets into his cot (we will be upgrading him to a toddler bed next year after we've had the conversion done and the bedrooms redecorated) and it's bedtime. He sleeps with a JellyCat dog which is called 'Doggy' and he also has a dummy, we'll probably try and lose this next year too. He can stir a little and calls for 'Mummy' or 'Daddy' but once he's asleep, he'll stay asleep until round 7am. He has a cot monitor that he had as a baby that we still use, it's the Starlight mobile from Fisher Price - we love it and I've recommended it before. He likes to take a favorite toy to bed sometimes and sometimes asks for his Lindam nightlight owl also.
Both my boys nap through the day. Ethan sometimes more than Logan! Ethans nap is from around 12pm/1pm until around 4pm - he loves his sleep more than I do!
We are very lucky with their sleeping patterns at the moment. It's not always been plain sailing, we've been through really hard phases where Ethan refused to get into his own bed. But luckily they've just been phases and we've got through them. I'm sure it'll come with Logan!
So that's what our general bedtime routines look like right now. I think we'll probably go through a bit of a stage when Ethan starts sleeping in a toddler bed and loses his dummy but I think that's just to be expected.
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