I'm going to be the voice of dissent. I fought having a "schedule" in favor of a routine for at least a few years with my first dd because I wanted her to be adaptable, and it's hard for me to be on a set schedule. DD, on the other hand, needs a schedule that is very predictable and pushing bedtime back by an hour or two results in sleep patterns being off for a week (and by "off" I mean waking up for the day at 3:00 a.m. and not going back to sleep for hours). I wish I would have given in to her signals earlier. Now bedtime is sacred at our house, which limits our flexibility but not as much as not sleeping for weeks at a time. For what it's worth, she never could sleep with a lot of stimulation around her and never could tolerate being transferred while sleeping. The more predictable her day, the better she sleeps.
DD2 is the complete opposite - sleeps anywhere, anytime. She's still really young, so it still might change. But already she's about a billion times more flexible than dd1 was at birth.
For sleep, my favorite book by far is Mary Kurcinka's Sleepless in America. I actually paid for a sleep consultation with dd1 because things got so bad. She's not pro-CIO, and she's very sensitive to individual kid's temperaments.
DD2 is the complete opposite - sleeps anywhere, anytime. She's still really young, so it still might change. But already she's about a billion times more flexible than dd1 was at birth.
For sleep, my favorite book by far is Mary Kurcinka's Sleepless in America. I actually paid for a sleep consultation with dd1 because things got so bad. She's not pro-CIO, and she's very sensitive to individual kid's temperaments.
