I'm probably waaaaayyy too late but, uno me, gotta add my 2 cents


Do you work outside the home? At home?
For the moment I am a SAHM so I am with Gabby pretty much all the time. I am hoping to go back to work doing some emergency Primary Teaching next year - just one day a week to start off.


Do you encourage a daily rhythm for your baby or toddler? How / what?
I generally follow the feed/play/sleep routine - though, Gabby kind of worked this out on her own. She will wake in the morning, have a bottle and a play. She'll then have some breakfast and some more play. I wait for tired signs (rubbing eyes, grizzling and -my favourite - trying to suck my face, LOL). Sometimes she will be up for 2 hours, other mornings she'll be tired much sooner. She'll sleep for around 1-2 hours, then have a bottle, a play and a snack. I am finding that she is stretching out her waking hours a lot more now that she is 7 months so I am trying to really tune into her behaviours and cues to know just how long I can keep her up before bed. At the moment, it's between 2.5-3 hours before she's ready for bed again. She generally has 2 naps a day and sleeps between 8-10 hours a night.

Do you have any specific routines - ie mealtime/ bath time/ bedtime rituals that are special to your family?
As I said before, we generally follow the feed, play, sleep routine. When feeding solids, I try to put Gabby in the high chair so that she has a cue that it's time to eat.
She has a bath every second night just before her last bottle of the day.
During the day, her bedtime ritual is being wrapped, dummy and listening to "Music for Dreaming". Sometimes I will need to pop the dummy back in her mouth a couple of times but she generally drifts off to sleep on her own without much fuss.
Her bed time ritual at night is: a bottle, then a short story (if she hasn't zonked out from the bottle), wrapped and put into the cot without a dummy. I have a small fan going in her room for the constant sound. Most nights she drifts off to sleep with the light off without a peep. She knows it is night time because her bedtime routine at night is just slightly different to during the day. Some nights she will wake up at around 3-4am but the dummy is enough to placate her until 6-7am.