help with routine? 7 month old

[wild at heart]

:wave:

Hi everyone,

I have a good routine for my ds who is 7 months old (no i'm not too nazi-ish asbout keeping it to EXACT times, but having a good routine is helpful for me)- see below.

7am: wake. breastfeed
8am: solids (farex and fruit/ porridge and fruit/ weetbix and fruit)
9am: sleep
11am: wake up. breastfeed
12pm: solids (yoghurt/ veges/ fruit)
1pm: sleep
3pm: wake. breastfeed
4:30pm: catnap if I can get him to. Otherwise I need to entertain him
5:10/ 5:20pm: solids
6pm: shower/ bath (earlier if he is tired)
6:20ish: breastfeed
7pm (at latest) bed
sometimes 11pm feed then awake again, but if doesn't wake at 11pm then sometimes wakes around 4am for quick feed.

The problem I am having is that ds has started falling asleep during the 6pm feed and hasn't been wanting to stay up til 7pm (this has been going onf or the past 3-4 days) and while I am giving him his solids he is really crabby and doens't want to eat properly. He won't really take a sleep at 4.30pm very often- very rare. Has anyone got any suggestions how I can "tweak the routine" so he is able to stay awake later? If he goes to sleep at 6.30pm it's very hard for me to keep him in bed til 7am. I'd appreciate any help..

[Wivi]

Ahhh - this all sounds very familiar. Your DS follows the same kind of routine as my DS at the same age - although mine just stopped the 4:30 catnap one day and it never happened again!

What I found we had to do was stretch that middle of the day awake period. So he would get up at 11 and then I didn't put him down again til about 1:30pm. After a little while I stretched him a bit more til 2:00pm. It took a few weeks to master it. He would then sleep from 2 til 4 and the solids etc were much better at night. After a little while of this w also started to move the morning sleep to 9:30 instead of 9 and then it settled really well.

[Teto]

Yep, when DS dropped the third daytime nap, it was the 5pm nap he dropped, so then we started stretching the morning nap to start about 9.30am and the afternoon nap to start about 2 or 2.30pm. But he didn't drop the third nap until about 9 months, so a bit older than your bub.

Also if you want to stretch him out at night, do non-physical things like a pram walk when he first gets up, or fun/routine things like the bath towards bedtime, so he really knows when it's bedtime for real.