I've never really tried to get my baby into a routine that's set by the clock mainly because I myself hate routine and one of the joys of being on maternity leave is that I don't have to go to bed at the same time every day in order to go to work at the same time every day.

So I've got to say that the first few weeks were easy peasy because she would go to sleep straight after a feed and I really didn't do anything. After those first few weeks, she would stay awake after a feed and have a long play and I really had to put in the hard yards in terms of studying her like a hawk and getting to know her sleepy signs. Once I got to know those, I was pretty hard-core about never rocking her to sleep - only to a point where she was relaxed or in a light sleep. I do believe that if you always rock them to sleep, they won't be able to do so without - great if you're always prepared to do that, but I knew I wouldn't be. I also use a lot of verbal cues - "shhhh ... sleepy time" over and over again. I had a few days where it was really quite tough because she would often not want to go to sleep straight away (even though I could see she was tired) so I would re-do the rocking to a light sleep three or four times. If, however, she looked wide awake, I would get her up as I'd obviously misread her signs.

Now she will go to sleep on her own - once I see that she is getting tired, I can put her down awake and I only rock her occasionally or give her a long, long cuddle with more comforting words.

So we don't do the bath time before bed at all (I have a dodgy pelvis which means I can't bath her so she has a shower with dad which could be at any time of the day because he's a shift worker).

I just follow her lead so she tends to wake up any time between 6am-8.30am (depending on what time she went to bed the night before), stays up for a couple of hours, has a morning nap for a couple of hours and another long nap in the afternoon, then goes to bed anytime between 7pm - 8.30pm.

So basically I let her show me when she's tired and don't worry too much about what time she does things.