Schedule and routine for a 9-10 week old newborn baby. Get info on this baby’s daily schedule and what her routine was each day.

This is a summary for McKenna age 9-10 weeks old, or the tenth week. This week was really quite exciting because McKenna started to sleep through the night some nights! If you have read previous posts on the newborn summary, you know that I was not expecting her to be able to do this yet since she is small. She weighs nearly two pounds less than Brayden and Kaitlyn did at this. It is nothing I am worried about since she weighed nearly two pounds less than they did at birth. I don’t know that I have ever mentioned this, but she was born three weeks early. Some people will adjust for age if baby is born three weeks early, but I don’t. I do, however, consider that she was three weeks early and because of that there is a good chance she will be slower on some milestones. She is moving up her growth curve, so she is growing well. She is just small.

NURSING

I realized that McKenna was falling asleep while nursing again. It is not uncommon for her to doze off from time to time, but she was really trying to sleep instead of nurse. I remembered that when Kaitlyn did this, she cried more before naps. My theory was that she was not as tired for a nap since she had a mini nap while nursing. So I put my efforts into keeping her awake again.

I also started to notice that she is seeming to finish nursing faster. She seems to fall asleep around 10 minutes into one side. I think that she is snoozing since she is basically done. So I have been switching sides at that point if she just won’t eat any more.

WAKETIME

This week, I moved McKenna’s waketime back more, and that seemed to do the trick. I am feeling really anxious for her to be awake longer and spend more time with the family. I have to tell myself that she will get there some day. Right now she needs more sleep. Before too long she will be awake longer. I now swaddle her after she has been awake for 45 minutes and have her down for sure by 50 minutes.

This is excepting the first waketime of the day when she has her bath. That process takes more time, so she is typically up about 60 minutes, but that is always her longest nap of the day. You are probably thinking I should then change her other waktimes to 60 minutes, but that is no good for her. She seems to have different optimal waketime lengths for different times of day, which just adds to the joy of figuring out her optimal waketime length 🙂

I also decided to accept that she takes 20 minutes to fall asleep. I decided that since she is not crying, it isn’t a big deal. The Baby Whisperer, Tracy Hogg, says the average baby takes 20 minutes to fall asleep. So, I accept! The funny thing is that as soon as I accepted that, she seemed to start to fall asleep faster.

Babywise Schedule week 10 pinnable image

NAPS

Naps got back on track for the most part. She still had some shorter naps than I would have expected this week, but in reality I think that is to be expected. Short naps will happen, especially in these newborn months.

WITCHING HOUR

We decided that since McKenna has a witching hour in the evening, we would just go out during that time. There was no point in trying to stay home so she could sleep if she was going to be fussy the whole time. So we ran errands, visited friends, and even went to dinner one night. She would fall asleep for little catnaps and she wasn’t fussy. This is our solution to her fussiness. I think this has really been a blessing for our family. We are able to have a nice stretch of time to get out and enjoy the summer. I am sure Brayden and Kaitlyn are happy for it.

How To Manage Baby’s Dreaded Witching Hour

NIGHTTIME SLEEP

As I mentioned in the beginning, McKenna started sleeping through the night some nights! The first night of the week, she only slept five hours straight before eating. That is roughly what she had been doing for a while. The second night, something interesting happened. My husband took Brayden camping for a father/son campout. I had a bunch of girlfriends over for a girls night out. We ended up talking until about 12:30 AM. I didn’t get McKenna up for her 10:00 PM dreamfeed until just after midnight. That night, she went 5.5 hours before waking to eat again.

The next night, She went nearly eight hours without waking! This might have been a coincidence. But it also might have happened because of the late dreamfeed the night before. It was enough to get her past the 3 o’clock hour hump. It is impossible to know if it is the reason, but it is worth a shot for you!

The next night, she went 6.5 hours. I fully expected her to go back and forth. I didn’t think she would STTN consistently yet.

The next night she went 8.5 hours. Wahoo! I was thrilled. The next night was 6.5 hours again. The next night was 6 hours. The last night was eight hours.

You can see her nights are random right now. I know some babies start to sleep through the night and never look back. Brayden was that way (though he was much older–this is how old he was when we started Babywise!). Kaitlyn wasn’t. She was back and forth. I fully expected McKenna to be the same way, and I was right. I am not worried. She will get consistent when she is ready. If she doesn’t, I can help her along when I see she definitely doesn’t need to eat in the night.

I like to wait until baby is 12 weeks old before starting to evaluate and worry about nights. I would change this policy if I felt like night feedings definitely weren’t needed, but if I have any doubt, I just go with the flow.

EARLY MORNING FEEDINGS

There is a down side to baby starting to sleep through the night. The down side is that you usually end up with early morning feedings. This is true for us since our dreamfeed is early, at 10 PM. In the end, I want our morning waketime to be anywhere from 7-7:30 AM. McKenna is often waking between 6-6:30 AM now, which creates a difficult situation.

There are many ways to handle these early wakings. With Kaitlyn, I fed her, put her immediately back down, and then woke her at 8:00 AM (her morning waketime was 7:30, so 8:00 AM was within our 30 minute window). I have tried that with McKenna, but it doesn’t work well. She ends up not eating well at 8:00 AM and then she wakes early from her first nap. Then her first nap was short, and she again doesn’t eat well. It creates a cycle like this for the day.

Read: 5-6 AM Night Wakings

With McKenna, I treat anything after 6 AM as our first feed of the day. I then let her sleep 30 minutes extra for her first nap and slowly adjust her day as it goes on. By the end of the day, she is back on schedule. This makes our day go much more smoothly. I know many people worry about 6 AM becoming their waketime. That is a risk of doing it this way. I figure that if she gets stuck there, I can move her just as I would a time change. I am not worried about it. I would rather have our days run smoothly right now.

This brings up an important point that your morning waketime can change as needed. Change it as your baby changes. Just try to remain consistent during that time period. Kaitlyn’s waketime was 7:30 for a really long time, but it isn’t what I wanted for her throughout her toddler years. I wanted it to be 7-7:15. In the end, I want my children all getting up at the same time so we can all eat breakfast together, but that obviously is not possible right now. McKenna nurses; she isn’t joining us at the breakfast table :). Some day, she will.

COLD

McKenna had a cold this week. This fact made me even more impressed with how well she slept at night. I have the same cold. It isn’t a terrible cold (it is summer), but it is still annoying. One night, I woke up every two hours in desperate need for a drink. So if McKenna wants to eat once a night, I have nothing but sympathy for her.

OUTINGS/EVENTS

As I mentioned, we went out a lot this week. I did focus on our days being consistent, but for her witching hour (the period between her 5:30ish and 7:30ish feedings), we often went out. One night we had a girls night and had friends over. One night, we went out to dinner. One night, we went to visit friends. One night, we ran errands. One night, Grandma and Grandpa watched the kids and she slept in Grandma’s arms during her fussy period (which Grandma of course loved).

McKenna had her first full feeding from a bottle with formula this week. I took Brayden to go get his four year old pictures done while my husband stayed home with the girls. She ate it well. We figured out about how much she should eat through the calculation in the book Super Baby Food. That book says babies eat about 2.5 ounces per pound of body weight. You then would want to divide that by the number of feedings in a day. So if she is about 10 pounds, she should have about 25 ounces a day. With 7 feedings, that is roughly 3.5 ounces. My husband made a four ounce bottle. He wanted to get at least 3 ounces in her, with ideally feeding her 3.5-4 ounces. She ate nearly 3.5 ounces. There is a more exact calculation (you calculate down to the ounce of your baby’s weight) in the book The Nursing Mother’s Companion: Revised Edition. I hear there is also a calculator on kellymom.com.

One day, I put McKenna in her bassinet for all of her naps. This is because we have the bassinet set up so the mattress is elevated (we did this for Kaitlyn’s reflux). McKenna has a little cold, so I put her in it that day so she could breath easier being on an incline. She slept well.

10 week old baby schedule pinnable image

OUR SCHEDULE

I thought it might be helpful to post what our schedule is like each week. I will put two schedules. One is what happens when she wakes around 6 AM. The other is what happens when she wakes in the night and then I start her day between 7:30-8:00 AM.

6:00 AM–eat
7:00 AM–nap
9:30 AM–eat
10:20 AM–nap
12:30 AM–eat
1:20 AM–nap
3:30 or 4:00 PM–eat (sometimes she wakes at 3:30, sometimes she continues sleeping and I get her by 4:00).
4:20 or 4:50 PM–nap
5:30 or 6:00 PM–eat (I always get her by 6)
WITCHING HOUR TIME PERIOD–sometimes she sleeps, sometimes not
8:00 PM–eat
8:30 PM–in bed
10:00 PM–Dreamfeed

7:30 AM–eat
8:30 AM–nap
10 or 10:30–eat (I always get her by 10:30)
10:50 or 11:20–nap
1 or 1:30–eat (I always get her by 1:30)
1:50 or 2:20–nap
3:30 or 4:00–eat (I always get her by 4:00)
4:20 or 4:50 PM–nap
5:30 or 6:00 PM–eat (I always get her by 6)
WITCHING HOUR TIME PERIOD–sometimes she sleeps, sometimes not
8:00 PM–eat
8:30 PM–in bed
10:00 PM–Dreamfeed

You can see how I end the day on the same schedule either way. Some times with a 6 AM start, she might start her last feeding between 7-7:30 instead of 8:00 PM. That is no problem for me. She still takes her dreamfeed at 10:00. She will often even take a better feeding at the dreamfeed since she has gone longer since eating.

HELPFUL BOOKS

There are three books I found very helpful this week. One was
Secrets of the Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect, and Communicate with Your Baby , one was Super Baby Food, and one was What to Expect the First Year . I looked to the Baby Whisperer for a refresher on the stages of sleep and for how long it takes a baby to fall asleep. I looked to Super Baby Food to easily figure out about how much formula to feed McKenna. I read What to Expect the First Year to read up on McKenna’s development for month 2-3 months. Here is my list of books for the newborn stage (and a couple of websites):