Baby Sleep Routine at Seven Months Old

Holly is now seven months old and her sleep routine and night feeding pattern has changed so much from when she was a newborn – praise the Lord! Night-times are a lot more structured now and I thought it would be a good time to do a round up of how her habits have changed across the months. If you have a younger baby and want an idea of what to expect then by all means, read on but remember this very annoying and infuriating fact – babies are all different and tend to do things at different rates. Some babies sleep through the night from the get go (don’t message me and tell me about your baby if he/she did this, I might just cry). Some babies are still having two or three bottles when they are one, so please take Holly’s progress with a pinch of salt, ‘kay?

From the top ya’ll

In the first few months of her life, Holly needed a bottle every two hours – day and night! Going two hours between feeds is even harder than it sounds as, for all you folk who don’t know, you take the time from the start of the feed – so if a feed started at 12am but it took Holly thirty minutes to drink it, it doesn’t matter as the next feed is still due at 2am. I honestly don’t know how we made it through that stage…it’s a bit of a blur now to be honest. The phrase “sleeping like a baby” is absolute Bellshill (I don’t know what Bellshill is but autocorrect picked it and I think I like it). Don’t know who came up with that nonsense because newborn babies are so snuffly and shuffly – they kick and fling their arms and legs all bloody night. There’s a spare pull out bed in Holly’s room and one of us would stay in there with Holly for three hours, then we would wake up and swap beds so that the other could get some sleep. Newborn parents – I feel you. It’s so bloody hard. You’re trying your best to stay afloat on probably the least sleep you’ve ever had, learning what to do, what not to do, worrying ‘is this normal?’ and everyone’s saying daft things like, “Aww she’s worth it though isn’t she?” and making you want to swear at them. Also, not being sexist lads but dealing with that level of sleep deprivation after giving birth and the trauma your body experiences can make things feel a million times harder for women. I remember being so tired that I felt hungover most of the time. It’s pretty rough but somehow you make it through.

At around two and a half to three months, Holly started going three hours in between feeds through the night. Better but still exhausting. Eventually her daytime feeds dropped to three hours apart too.

Then at six months old, she began dropping to two feeds through the night most of the time but sometimes she went back to the three hour cycle. Nothing seemed to influence why this happened and what sort of a night she would have. It didn’t seem to matter if she had drank full bottles all day, sometimes she just needed more throughout the night.

Now at seven months, we have had some nights where she has gone to one feed (but before you get too excited, she has still woken for a nappy change). She is sleeping sounder too – much less shuffly and kicky. From around six and a half months, I noticed that Holly started to settle down on an evening and now she’s in a nice routine. Hopefully it won’t be long until we are on one feed EVERY NIGHT. Imagine the luxury guys…imagine.

Here’s how her current bedtime routine goes:

• Holly goes in the bath with me at half 7pm and then I take her lead as to how long we are in there – when she seems fed up or is yawning, I take her out of the bath. By the time I get her nappy and a babygrow on, it’s roughly about 8pm by this point and my baby girl is tired. I know this as she does this superman flying thing with her arm – she manages to puts herself to sleep this way (sometimes she does this while I’m trying to dress her which makes it loads of fun). I put her in to her sleeping bag, in to her cot and then turn on her teddybear mobile which has a night show and plays nature sounds. We put her camera on and then go downstairs to watch her on the monitor. She normally drifts off within 5 minutes of us leaving the room. When I/we go upstairs to bed at around 10pm, we give her a bottle and change her nappy if needed and then she should sleep after than until 1-2am. She has another bottle around this time and I check her nappy. I know she’s ready for a bottle as she stirs and shuffles about a lot and makes little squishy noises with her mouth. Then the next bottle is due at around 5.30-6.30am and then she wakes up for the day anywhere from 7.30am onwards.

I want to stress to you that Holly picked her bedtime herself. Obviously she’s too young to talk so she didn’t tell us with words but we noticed that she struggled to settle down on an evening if we had her in the moses basket downstairs. She had almost outgrown the moses basket anyway so Andy moved her cot in to our room and he suggested that we try her in the cot instead. I was reluctant but she seemed to settle in there much better and every night she began to do the ‘superman arm sleep thing’ at around 8pm. We chose to do bathtime just before this time and it seems to work really well.

To keep an eye on her while we are downstairs having a bit of downtime, we use the BT Smart Baby monitor with the five inch screen attached to a universal flexible mount. I think we bought the monitor direct from the BT website and if you’re thinking of getting one, it’s worth looking in to as I think it’s a pretty good quality camera and monitor. Some of the features that the monitor includes is the ability to play lullaby’s, to talk to your baby through it, see the temperature and move the camera up/down, left and right. The battery on the monitor unit doesn’t last very long however you can use it plugged in to the mains too. If you download the BT Smart App, you can also watch the camera feed on your phone and do everything the monitor can but with a few extras such as taking photos and videos. The app is great and can be linked to multiple cameras however, only one phone can connect to the camera system. If any other phones use the app, the original phone will be disconnected and you will have to do the syncing process all over again. There’s no way to use multiple phones at the same time unfortunately. I still rate the system an 8/10 as the image quality and night vision make up for the few blips here and there.

So that brings us up to date with our baby’s sleeping patterns and bedtime routine. I guess the main thing that bothers me now is that Holly can roll over in the cot but she isn’t too great at rolling back. She seems to cry if she’s stuck and the first time this happened through the night was pretty scary – for us and her – but she is getting better and better at rolling back. She’s improved alot over the course of about three weeks so pretty soon she will have cracked this rolling business and I won’t have to worry anymore.

A quick word about naps

I’ve focussed very much on night-time sleeping but thought I’d add a note about daytime naps too. For most of her life, Holly has never had a regular nap time. First of all, she was never a big napper even as a newborn; she had twenty minutes here and there but never for long. People were amazed by how wide awake she was for such a young baby. She would start to sleep at the same point in the day for maybe a week and I’d think, “Okay this is when she wants to sleep, I’ll remember this”, but then the next week, it would change. It went on like this for a long time and again, it’s only been in the past month that she has cemented one regular nap time. She can sleep for around an hour at lunch time (dinner for us Northerners) in her cot. If she can’t go to bed at home for an hour, she will tend to sleep a little later in the afternoon if we are out and about in the pushchair. I try not to get too obsessed by her daytime naps – I’m more bothered about her having a solid night-time routine.

So that’s it, that’s where we are right now. I don’t know how long we will be in this stage or what will come next – who knows! But I’ll try and keep you all updated and maybe by the end of the year, I will be able to have a full night’s sleep. A girl can dream. As always, thanks for reading this Baby Sleep Routine at Seven Months post and if you have any questions, get in touch in the comments.

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