Schedule, 8+ Months

LL has been on a clock-predictable schedule since he was about 6 months old (recorded here). The schedule changed when he was approximately 8 months old, which is when he dropped his third nap. Here, recorded, for posterity, is the schedule that he's been on since then. I want to get it recorded before it changes again. He's generally taking two naps right now, but one or two days each week he only does one nap, so I have a hunch that we're going to be down to one nap in the not-too-distant future. (Though, his one-nap days are always days when he's at Natasha's, because she tends to put him down late for his morning nap, leading to him being wide awake for his afternoon nap, so I think he'd be a consistent two-nap baby right now if he had more consistency in the morning.)

Having said that... the nice thing about his schedule right now is that LL is fairly flexible (within reason). It used to be that if we attempted to shift his schedule by even half an hour, keeping him up a little late or delaying a nap by a bit, LL would completely fall apart. Somewhere around 9 months of age, LL became much more forgiving. Home late one afternoon? The afternoon nap can start an hour later. Need to go out for dinner one night? Bedtime can shift for the night. We try to keep things as consistent as possible, but it's nice to know that we're not going to have a complete meltdown when we need a little bit of wiggle room. (As evidenced by the liberal use of wiggle room that Natasha requires of him.)

LL's Daily Schedule:

7:00 -- wake up, milk (we try not to start his day any earlier than this, but he does often wake up between 6-7:00, and he gets his morning milk whenever he's up)
7:30 -- breakfast
9:00 -- nap
10:30 -- wake up (morning nap is anywhere from 60-90 minutes)
11:30 -- milk (and after 9+ months, lunch)
1:30 -- nap (we try for 1:00, but who am I kidding, it's usually 1:30)
3:00 -- wake up, snack (afternoon nap is also 60-90 minutes)
5:00 -- milk, dinner
7:00 -- bedtime routine, milk
7:30 -- sleep

From 8 months on, LL fairly reliably was sleeping through the night. Teething always throws a wrench in the works, and when he wakes up in pain, he almost always wants a bottle in order to go back to sleep. Since he doesn't seem to be abusing our willingness to provide a middle-of-the-night-bottle when needed, we let him have this bottle without argument when he wants it.

As far as meals: when we started solid foods at 6 months, LL was getting two solid meals a day (breakfast and dinner). Sometime after 9 months, we added solid food at lunch as well. He very quickly dropped a mid-day bottle in response. Now, at 10 months, he gets three milk+food meals, an afternoon snack (usually cheerios or similar finger food), and a bedtime bottle. When it's hot out, he also gets water from a sippy cup, though at 10 months, he's still figuring out the concept of the sippy cup.

A "meal" for LL at this point means 1/4 cup of cereal (usually oatmeal, occasionally rice, occasionally a mixture of the two), anywhere from half to a full jar of pureed food (sometimes homemade, sometimes store bought), and some amount of finger food (cheerios, veggie puffs, fruit chunks, bread, cheese, whatever). We try to do fruit or yogurt for breakfast, some sort of meat-and-veggie combo for lunch, and veggies for dinner, and then we add variety with the finger food. Lately he's been wanting to feed himself more, so we're upping the finger food and decreasing the quantity of pureed food at each meal accordingly.

Schedule

When LL started at Baby Factory in mid-January, he was on a sort-of schedule. He was taking three naps a day, but there was a lot of variation in length of nap. Since his next nap depended on when he woke up from his previous nap, we never really knew when each nap after his first one was actually going to happen.

When we hired Rosie in mid-February, he was starting to get more regular, to the point where we could tell her approximate times for each of his naps. We gave her a lot of flexibility, though, to move naps forward or back if the previous nap went long or short. Still, for the sake of being able to look back later, I wanted to record his schedule as it existed at the time.

The basic structure of this schedule was in place by the time LL was 4 months old. It was starting to be more regular by the clock when he was approximately 5 months old. It was clock-predictable by 6 months. Sometime after 7 months, he would sometimes drop the third nap. By 8 months, he was regularly dropping the third nap, and moving towards dropping a bottle as well.

Recorded for posterity:

LL's Daily Schedule:

7:00 -- wake up (we tried not to start his day any earlier than this, even if he woke up)
7:30 -- milk (and after 6 months, solid food)
9:00 -- nap
10:00 -- wake up, milk (sometimes he would sleep longer; he ate whenever he got up)
12:00 -- nap
1:30 -- wake up, milk (sometimes only 1 hour instead of 90 minutes)
3:30 -- nap
4:30 -- wake up, milk (and after 6 months, solid food, usually around 5:00)
7:00 -- bedtime routine, milk (in the beginning, closer to 6:00, whenever he looked tired)
7:30 -- sleep

From 4 months to 7 months, he would wake up once each night to eat. For a while, it was reliably between 3-4:00am, but as time went on, it got more erratic. After 7 months, he would occasionally skip it, leading to us purposely eliminating the middle-of-the-night feeding (except when he was really really upset or sick) by 8 months.