Sleep Schedule and Traveling

 As every parent knows your baby’s sleep can make or break your day.  I don’t have any magic tip solutions.  I do have a few favorite Instagram pages I follow that I have gotten all my advice.  I wish I had a magic wand for overnight sleep.  At 9 months, Mary is occasionally sleeping until 5 am and occasionally waking up around 3 or 4 for a feed.  She then goes back down until 7.  I am so looking forward to a full night’s sleep, but at least it isn’t more frequent.  What we do have down pretty solidly is her day sleeps.  In the day she takes 2 naps between 1 hour and 2 hours. Her first nap is normally at 10 am and her second nap at 2 or 2:30 pm.  


This works well for our family until we want to do something.  If we want to do an all-day activity, or are on vacation, that perfect schedule can go out the window.  We handle it in several different ways.  Number one is we encourage her to nap. If we are out and we have her pram, we will put her in the pram, give her her dummy, recline the seat back, cover the pram with a shade, and roll the pram around.  The pram shade strategy is going to stop working really soon though.  She loves to play peekaboo with the cover. However, we can still normally get her to sleep.  It is a shorter nap, but she does nap.  We also will try to plan drives around her nap time or shortly after her nap is due.  So if we are meeting up with people at 9 or 9:30, we will go and let her play, then try for a pram nap. If that fails, I don’t worry too much because when we get in the car she will normally sleep.  We went on some great drives around Perth to let Mary get her nap in.  Getting her to sleep in her portacot for extra naps was sometimes tricky.  We would cuddle her to sleep if we needed to or I would nurse her to sleep. 


If the nap is shortened, we don’t stress about it.  We get her up when she wakes up and we just shorten the time before her next nap.  We also add in an extra nap if they have all been short so that she is getting at least 1.5 hours of sleep during the day.  Overall  Mary has done really well with this schedule.  Hopefully, this is a strategy you can use with your baby!  I think routine is really important for babies, but I do not want to be a slave to it if we can make anything else work.  I don’t want to wait for Mary to grow up before we start traveling and visiting places, I want to teach her how to work with us and how to enjoy the world from a young age.  


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