With our second noob on the way this May, I’ve been rereading many of my parenting books with more intensity, attention and renewed trepidation. I feel like I’ve been living in the lap of luxury for the past two years with Noob Baby sleeping an average of 11 hrs at night! Did I just voluntarily sign up to sacrifice all that beauty sleep again?! And by “beauty sleep”… I mean SANITY sleep.
I thought this would be the perfect time to create a cheat sheet with all of the Baby Whisperer’s E.A.S.Y Schedules on one easy-to-reference page! Download and print the E.A.S.Y Cheat Sheet here. Be sure to Share, Like, Tweet, Pin, Email it to your heart’s content! I love having useful content shared!
The E.A.S.Y Cheat Sheet includes 4 schedules which span the ages of 4 weeks to about 1 year. Here are some tips to remember:
1. If you aren’t already familiar with the Baby Whisperer’s E.A.S.Y method, please visit my Parenting Tips section to read a detailed explanation:
2. These schedules are adapted from the The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems (Hogg and Blau). I’ve made a few minor adjustments based on my experience. So, you’ll see that bedtime might be between 7:30-8:00 (slightly different than what’s written in the book). I just figured that for most people, the bath and bedtime ritual is longer than the 30 minutes Hogg indicates.
3. These samples are simply guidelines of how you can structure your day. By no means are you supposed to be following these suggestions minute-to-minute. Do not feel like a failure if your day doesn’t go as planned! Flexibility is something that all parents learn sooner or later. Read more on what do When E.A.S.Y is Not So Easy.
4. Don’t stress about a schedule for babies under 2-3 months. Hogg clearly states that the first six weeks is a time of huge adjustment. In fact, Dr. Harvey Karp, author of The Happiest Baby on the Block, hypothesizes that babies ages 0-3 month are making up for their “Missing Fourth Trimester.” My advice is to go with the flow and just try to make baby as comfy as possible while he’s adjusting to life on Earth!
5. Follow your child’s cues, but use parental judgement. All the parenting experts I’ve read (Hogg, Karp, Ferber, Ezzo, Sears, Weissbluth, to name a few) agree that you should always be in tune with your child’s needs. So even though you may desperately want to have an organized schedule, babies certainly don’t understand that (and they just don’t give a crap). Again, be flexible but remember that you are the adult and parent. An infant doesn’t understand what’s best for him/her. If you aren’t establishing some predictability and structure by 3-4 months, you are setting yourself up for a lot of habit-breaking, fussiness and even poor eating and sleeping later on.
6. The last sample schedule goes up to about 1 year. After this age, the day doesn’t really lend itself to the E-A-S-Y pattern anymore. Generally, toddlers (1 yr+) take 1-2 naps and have 3 meals w/2 snacks a day. Preschoolers will usually take 1 nap a day (or drop naps completely by ages 3-4) and have 3 meals w/2 snacks a day.
Just in case you missed the link for the FREE PRINTABLE EASY CHEAT SHEET.
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