The three first month of your baby you are in survivor mode, learning how to keep your baby alive and don’t die  in the process. Then in a couple of months you start to feel more confident and expert with your baby. You master breastfeeding or how to feed him with the bottle and it seems that everything start to work properly, when a new worry comes to you. IS MY BABY SLEEPING ENOUGH ?. 

I started asking this question myself  when my baby was almost 5 months old and the 4-month sleep regression left some sequels. My baby woke up every night each 2 hours or in the worths cases each hour and a half. He did not sleep well and obviously neither did we. My baby started to be very restless during the day and somehow irritable. He cried more and during the day he didn’t sleep much. So our dynamic began to change around improving our baby’s sleep and incidentally ours.

So in order to improve my son’s sleep we did a great research (google again) and we took the advices that some friends and acquaintances gave us. And this is what my post it’s about, some tips that we discovered about the babies sleep.

 

Routines are very important

Have a sleeping routing is very important, babies like the routing and knowing what is going to happen helps them feel safer. The sleeping routing has to be simple and constant. You can choose the order in which you execute the activities but it is important that these are always the same and at the same time. 

Here I leave you how our routine is and why we chose that order. 

  •  Dinner, we start at 18h, with the dinner so he can rest the food a little, before going to sleep.
  • Shower, we give him a bath with warm water and we let him play a litter with his bath toys. We also do the bath step after the dinner because when my son was a baby he used to wear the food more than eat it, and it was the best idea star with the dinner and then clean him all up.
  • After the bath, you can give him a little massage and profit to put some cream in his body.
  • After you put on his pj’s it is story time, you can tell him a small story or read a book. I highly recommend this step, it creates the habit of reading in your child. For example it is thanks to this that my son (two years old) loves books as much as he loves toys.
  • PD: You should try to give him the bottle of the breast before the story, and make sure he doesn’t fall sleep during the feeding so as not create dependency on him falling asleep while hi is sucking.
You should try to do all this small steps in the same order and the same time, constancy and repetition are your best ally to create good sleep habits.

With noise

This is a little help we use to isolate external auditory stimuli. We always have the belief that for the baby to sleep better everything must be silent. But in fact babies heard a lot of noises when they are in the belly, and white noise is a really great tool to help them in their sleep creating a continuous environment and protecting them from varying external sounds.

You can use any play list to reproduce white noise, but we recommend a white noise machine to make sure that the noise is continuous so the play list do not end, or that the cell phone or tablet runs out of battery or an unexpected call or alarm sounds. 

Here I leave you the one we use and until the moment it has been excellent: 

Wrap them in a simple way

I think that I’m not the only one, but I kept awake trying to wrap my baby safely, but naturally they don’t stay wrapped for long, even less after they learn to sit and crawl.  I was never a lover of wrapping them like a taquito, and for the safety of babies, blankets should not be put in their cribs.  After much analysis, we saw these sleeping bags on an Instagram account, which keep them safely warm.

I leave you the different models he has used until now: 

Good atmosphere

It is recommended that the room where the baby sleeps should be as dark as possible, this helps them secrete melatonin necessary for better sleep. But if you kid as mine begin to be afraid of the dark, the most advisable thing is to put some lights in yellow, orange or red tones.

The white noise machine has a yellow light or we use this small lanterns that give my child confidence in the dark:

General tips:

  • No screens at least one hour before starting the sleep routing because the light from these devices interferes with the production of melatonin (hormone that we produce naturally and that help us to rest).
  • Do not over-fatigue your baby, it is a myth that the later you put him to bed, the later he wakes up, believe me I checked it.  It is better for the baby to take advantage of the first hours of the night and for this reason it is ideal for his bedtime to be between 7 and 8 pm.
  • Try to know the sleep windows for each age of the baby.  This point can generate a little stress because you are thinking if it is time to sleep or if your baby  slept enough, but it is necessary to avoid having an over-fatigued baby. 
  • It is always good to ask for help, if you feel frustrated, tired, overloaded, do not hesitate to ask for help.  Being a parent is beautiful but also challenging.  If you feel that something is not right, go to the doctor, or ask for help from someone who has gone through the same thing. And remember you are always doing great.

I also want to share two links that really help me, you can take what works for you and ignore what you think is not ok for you:

If you wan to share your experiences and tips about this subjet, I will be glat to red it.

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