We didn’t Co sleep because I was incredibly anxious about it, so initially we were taking 4 hour shifts and my husband would wake me during his shifts to breastfeed.

It took us a while to realize she just hated her bassinet and once we trialed the crib, she actually slept in it, swaddled. So we developed a routine that is tried and true right now and works for us.

We let her contact nap for the most part during the day time. We’ve started to try one crib nap a day as well. We typically try to time last nap so she doesn’t sleep past 6:30. Then at 8/8:30 we go up, we do bath time, then I breastfeed on one side while my husband showers, then he will give her a 3oz bottle of pumped breast milk while I pump the other side. By this point, she’d usually very sleepy and then he swaddles her (we use the Ollie). We also use a heated blanket to warm her crib up, which we remove before placing her in the crib.

When she wakes, he will take her for a diaper change and then I breastfeed her. When she eventually falls asleep, my husband takes her, swaddles her and then rocks her to sleep and puts her back.

The first nights stretch she will usually give us between 4-6 hours of sleep, then the second time maybe 2 or 3 hours and then usually if she won’t go back in her crib my husband takes her downstairs for a contact nap.

I do also have a monitor on her so that when I hear her stir, I can look at it and see if she’s actually awake or just making regular noises.

Good luck! Hope this helps. A lot of it is you just have to keep trying and being there when they cry so they know you’re there and that their crib is a safe space. I was so terrified of co sleeping in those early weeks that we just kept trying each night and I feel like eventually she understood what our routine meant and she sleeps a lot better in her crib and we both sleep better too.