The hardest thing about having a newborn baby is the fact that you will be exhausted for the first month or two. Babies basically do three things when they are born: sleep, eat, and poop. Your newborn baby is not going to have much of a personality and this can be a really difficult time as their only instincts will be about survival. He’s learning to adjust to a scary new world and you’ll have to learn to adjust with it. This means that if your baby decides to wake up every hour or two to eat, you will be at her mercy. That’s why the running joke about parents with sleep-deprived newborns has a lot of merit.
However, as your baby approaches three to four months, this is an ideal time to start establishing a sleep schedule. With our daughter, my wife and I got her into a set routine, which is extremely important if you want your baby to sleep until morning. It doesn’t necessarily matter what her routine is, it just has to be a specific sequence of events that she does every night, before she puts her baby to bed. In the case of my daughter, we always bathed her and then fed her around eight at night. Then we would change her diaper and put her in her pajamas for the night. This type of established routine helps your baby understand the difference between night and day.
Remember, your baby may need to be on this routine for a while before he adjusts to it. It can take from several days to a few weeks or more. It all depends on your baby and how quickly she adjusts to everything, before she can start to tell night from day.
Keep in mind that a baby’s sleep schedule will never be linear, and there will be times when they start waking up in the middle of the night again. This could be because she is practicing a new milestone, such as rolling over, or perhaps she is going through a growth spurt and is hungry. It’s important to note that these interruptions usually don’t last more than a couple of weeks at the most, and it’s important to stick with her routine when these instances occur. Eventually, if she sticks to her routine, your baby will return to her normal sleep schedule.
