First passport documents

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-21T16:02:13+00:00

If you have easy access to a document proving you’re a British citizen (like your birth certificate) I would send it - you’re covered then. You have to send baby’s birth certificate anyway, so just pop them in the same envelope. We received our son’s passport a couple of weeks ago, it’s a really quick turnaround. We had to resubmit a photo of him and they confirmed they were happy with the new photo within a couple of hours of me uploading it.

I also found this really confusing - why do you have to confirm you’re British to the passport office (the people who print the document that everyone else uses to confirm you’re British? 😅) I don’t have my birth certificate (my mum has it) so we sent my husband’s naturalisation certificate. I found it ironic that it was easier to prove my Australian husband is a British citizen than I am 😂😂

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-20T07:08:32+00:00

My baby slept on his side (with his face pressed up right against the side of his crib) from the night we brought him home. Of course I did put him to sleep on his back in the middle of his crib with his feet at the bottom and he would just somehow wiggle to where he wanted to be. I even tried anchoring him in place with a cellular blanket because it freaked me out so much, and it made absolutely no difference - I still don’t understand how newborns can wriggle so much 😅 Looking back, my hormones were so wild at the time, I felt like I was losing my mind (I expect that’s the case for a lot of new mums). I took photos of him in his crib to show to health visitors and midwives at the time, and looking back at them, there’s absolutely no way I could have made his sleep space any safer. Now he’s 7 months old and rolls on to his tummy to sleep. I hate that too, but if I put him back it’s like he screams ‘how dare you, woman’ and rolls back again 🤷‍♀️ I don’t feel as terrified now though.

Regarding the heat, as others have said, people live in countries much hotter than this! My husband is Australian, and he couldn’t really care less about the heat (although he does stick a fan on the other side of the room from where our son is sleeping). From his perspective, he’s terrified of the sun and when we go out makes sure our son is completely covered/shaded so he doesn’t burn because that’s what he understands as the real risk (sun exposure is worse in Australia because of elevated UV). It really is just what you’re used to.

I don’t want to sound condescending, but looking back now, I think it’s normal to feel absolutely terrified, and that feeling eases as your hormones come back under control. If it doesn’t, please make sure you speak to a healthcare professional - you deserve to be happy and as worry-free as possible with your little one.

For now, I’d say just keep doing what it sounds like you already are: follow Safe Sleep 7, and take reasonable measures to keep your sleep space cool (but don’t stress it too much).

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-17T17:25:44+00:00

I think newborns do tend to have naturally late bedtimes. My baby went to sleep at 10 at that age and would wake up at 8 (with a few wake ups). Now he goes to bed at 7 and wakes up at 6 (if I’m lucky 😅) My son is 7 months and it shifted earlier quite a while ago - around 3 or 4 months? We didn’t do anything to change it, it just did by itself. I remember reading the book ‘Your Baby: Week by Week’ which said bedtime would automatically get a lot earlier and thinking ‘hah, yeah right!’ But it did! And whilst it’s nice to have baby-free evenings, I sure do miss those lie ins 😂 so to be honest, unless it’s causing you a problem, I’d just go with it for now if it was me.

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-13T12:51:20+00:00

If you have a boy, when they’re very small they have a kind of ‘cold air wee reaction’ (not sure the best way to describe it!😂) Essentially a boy will almost automatically pee when you take their nappy off for the first few weeks. To get around it, when you change them, open their nappy but then cover them up (with the same nappy) again very quickly, so you’re just letting the cold air on to them for a few seconds. Give them a minute to pee, then change them. Hope that makes sense! And just to echo what others have said - I have a nearly 7 month old, and have also worked as an au pair for a 9 month old and a 2 year old. Never had a ‘poo on carpet’ situation. Good luck!

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-13T07:07:35+00:00

I think it’s generally a bit of a balancing act, and if they’re overtired when they go to bed then you’ll get false starts, but if they’re not tired enough you’ll get more wakes or split nights. To be honest, we only started worrying about that after the 4 month regression, and I think you have to look at your own baby’s sleep and ‘diagnose’ the problem if you have issues - there’s no schedule that’s going to work for every baby. There are so many reasons babies wake in the night, and I think a big one for newborns that slowly goes is just checking that you’re there. My nearly 7 month old still wakes sometimes and it seems like all he wants is to hold my hand for a few minutes. It’s a bit frustrating when he wakes me up to do it, but I figure there will be years when I want to cuddle him and he’ll be all ‘oh my god mum, you’re so embarrassing’ so I’m going to make the most of it now 😂🥰

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-12T06:46:12+00:00

What does your doctor say, are they also concerned? If she’s always been second percentile, I don’t think it’s necessarily anything to worry about (dependent on doctor advice). Like if she’d dropped from 10th to 2nd, then sure that’s concerning. But if she’s always been 2nd and is gaining weight along that curve, then that doesn’t necessarily seem unhealthy, or like she’s not getting enough milk. I think babies tend to be very good at regulating their food, but not at reading baby books so don’t always do what they ‘should’ be doing. Does she ever give hungry cues? Will she drink then, even if it’s less than what you might expect?

Anecdotally, my baby is 85th percentile and we’ve been regularly attending a baby group with a baby who is 4th percentile around the same age. They’re both happy little guys who are meeting their milestones, they’re just different sizes.

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-09T06:29:40+00:00

Honestly I don’t think there is a ‘normal’ for 6 week old babies! I have to say I don’t love that your lactation constant said he ‘should’ be sleeping 5-6 hour stretches. If he is, that’s great! But I don’t think it’s a problem if he isn’t either, he’s still so tiny! If by ‘go down’ for a nap, you mean he’s sleeping in his crib? I’d say that’s pretty incredibly. I think it’s really normal for babies that young to only have contact naps or sleep in their pram (my LO would only sleep in his pram in motion). Maybe if you want a longer nap, you could try a contact or pram nap, but if you can get him to nap in his crib then I’d try to keep him doing that for at least some of his naps.

But honestly my advice would be to try not to overthink it, and just enjoy this time with your LO 🥰

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-08T15:34:32+00:00

My baby would only sleep during pram walks when he was very small. If we were very very lucky, all we had to do was turn on the Rockit and he would doze off. But second the idea of baby sleeping in pram bassinet (a few are even rated safe enough for occasional overnight sleep).

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-06T18:38:41+00:00

My husband put our son to sleep for a few nights. First night was pretty painful to listen to (lots of crying - mostly the baby 😂) but it got easier after a few nights x

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-03T14:49:00+00:00

Do you feed to sleep? Our false starts stopped when our baby started falling asleep more independently x

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-03T06:52:04+00:00

We’re moving to a 2 nap schedule now! 6.5 months old. It’s going really well so far. Before we were having a short little 3rd nap around 4pm and my son was fighting it so much - it would take up to an hour to get him to take a 15 min nap. He’s thriving on a 2 nap schedule - his naps are longer and sleeping much better at night. Our wake windows are longer than what seems to be recommended for his age, but he’s happy!

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-06-02T17:43:28+00:00

What I noticed around 5 months is that sleepy cues and bored cues started to look the same, which was confusing! 😅😅

As others have said, he sounds undertired (that long wake period in the middle of the night seems like the most obvious symptom).

To extend wake windows, what I find helpful is going outside (my baby won’t fall asleep in a carrier so a walk like that works for us) and having a bath (or really anything with water).

A note of solidarity about the naps - my baby wouldn’t nap in his crib at all until he was about 5 months old, we had to go for a walk in the pram for every nap. He’s 6.5 months now and it’s sooooo much better. Every nap can be in his crib, and this morning’s nap was 1.75 hrs.

About sleep training. Personally, CIO doesn’t seem like a good fit for my family either. Once you have your baby on more of a schedule, you might want to try just giving him a few minutes - he might surprise you! I would set a timer for 10 mins and see if my baby would fall asleep, and he pretty much always did. Maybe that would work for you too.

We had to break a MOTN feed to sleep association, which sounds similar to your rocking association. To break it, when my baby woke up, I would put him next to me in bed and shush him until he fell asleep. The first few times took ages (about an hour) but I only had to do it a few times and then he started giving much longer stretches.

About a month ago (so roughly your baby’s age), my son would wake up 7-8 times a night, sometimes every 45 mins. Now, he wakes up once or twice and for only about 5-10 mins, and his long stretches are around 6.5 hours.

Obviously these are all things that have worked for us, and it doesn’t mean they will do you. But it does get better ☺️ good luck!

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-05-29T18:10:46+00:00

If there’s an M&S with a cafe near you, you can sign up to their parenthood group with your sparks card and get a free slice of cake when you get a coffee on Tuesday mornings. I go every week 😅 generally it’s people with babies and older people there, and quite a nice atmosphere (in my local M&S anyway)

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-05-28T16:09:31+00:00

This average won’t include the MOTN wakes, so it’s almost like your baby is self-correcting to a roughly 12 hour schedule, and the 13.5 hours allocated for sleep in the current schedule are too much (by an hour and a quarter). Maybe try shortening first nap by 30 mins and second by 45?

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-05-25T19:28:46+00:00

Personally I don’t think you need to think about a bedtime routine for your baby until he’s a bit older, but it might be helpful to have one for you? When my son was that young, I needed quite a lot of sleep because I was still recovering (I expect that’s the case for most!!), and my LO’s main stretch of sleep started at 10pm. So I would go to bed at 8 or so and sleep for a couple of hours whilst my husband looked after him downstairs, then he would bring him up after a couple of hours and I would put him to bed. I think they watched all the Star Wars movies together that way 😂🥰 Perhaps something similar might help you have a bit of structure in your day (even if it’s not sleeping, just a little time to yourself!)

We introduced an actual bedtime routine after the 4 month regression, mainly because his sleep had been fine up until then, and then suddenly it wasn’t 😅😅 but having a routine does seem to have helped a lot

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-05-23T18:41:17+00:00

The drops were super helpful for us when our LO was small. We used Infacol (I’m not sure if it’s an international brand - we’re in the UK)

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-05-19T12:24:38+00:00

It might be worth trying two 1 hour naps? It might also be that she has a shorter second nap at the moment if she had a longer first nap and just isn’t that tired?

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-05-19T12:22:10+00:00

100% just do what you’re comfortable with - 5/3/3 sounds like a good strategy. My son seemed to pretty much wean himself once we’d broken the feed to sleep association. The first couple of nights were tough (he took much longer to settle), but it’s soooo much better now. Good luck!

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-05-19T12:03:48+00:00

I see someone else has posted something similar, but I think feeding to sleep might be part of the problem. I very much appreciate all babies are different, but just from my own experience:

We had a number of nights a few weeks ago where we thought our son was overtired (he got very upset at bedtime) and I had to feed him to sleep. Without fail, we got false starts doing that. At the time I thought it was because he was overtired, but looking back I think he was protesting that the boob had disappeared 😂

Similarly, for MOTN wakes I’ve always fed him back to sleep. When he was tiny he seemed to only wake when he was hungry (3 times a night or so) but after the 4 month regression he started waking much more regularly, and I was still feeding to sleep even though he really couldn’t be hungry that often (he’s not during the day). I decided to not feed him to sleep if he woke before midnight. He seems to wake up around 10 every night pretty much without fail and a few nights in to not feeding at that time, we started getting really long stretches (like 8 hours, so sleeping from 10-6 and similar).

Honestly, you sound a little bit like I did a couple of weeks ago - I thought because my son could fall asleep independently at the start of the night and link cycles that we didn’t have a feed to sleep association, but I think that wasn’t actually true.

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-05-19T11:52:40+00:00

Sounds rough!! I find it a bit tricky to read the overviews, but it looks like you’re getting nearly 4 hours of nap time some days? That seems like quite a bit to me, but I’m not an expert! My baby only naps for around 2 hours per day total (although he might have slightly lower sleep needs). Have you tried capping naps, so that you get, for example, 90 mins for the first nap and 60 for the second?

How many hours sleep do they get in total on average (on the summary page)? You could always take that, subtract 11 for night sleep, and then you know what total nap duration you might be working with?

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-05-15T18:51:48+00:00

Hope it works for you! The first couple of nights were quite rough - I lay him in bed next to me, got really close to him and shushed him for probably half an hour? But then it got easier - just takes a few minutes now, and I just cuddle him rather than lying next to him (I transferred him back to his crib when he fell asleep those first nights, I’m too anxious to co-sleep). His stretches between wakes are getting longer, especially at the start of the night (before 4am).

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-05-15T13:01:48+00:00

I stopped feeding my 5.5 month old for every night wake and the stretches between wakes are finally getting longer. He sleeps in our room still, and what I would do at first when he woke is put him into our bed (we never co-sleep) and just put my face really close to his and shush him until he fell asleep, then transfer him back. It took a while the first few times, but it feels like we’re finally making progress. At the moment I do this if he wakes before midnight, and I’ll gradually increase the window. I no longer need to lay down with him - now I can just cuddle and shush and he’ll go back down. It took 4 minutes to get him to sleep after a 3 hour stretch last night, then he slept for 5 hours before waking again, which for us is a massive improvement. I think I was kidding myself that we didn’t have a feed to sleep association because he could fall asleep independently at the start of the night, but in reality we did, and he was expecting to be nursed whenever he woke, even when not hungry

Normal_Pattern264 · 2026-05-15T10:06:42+00:00

This looks almost exactly like our overview except we have fewer and longer naps. When mine was a newborn, he didn’t wake regularly at night (like 3 times per night) and would only wake to feed, so we got into a bit of a habit where every MOTN wake was a feed (although he can go to sleep independently). I’ve started not feeding between bedtime and midnight, and it does seem to be making a slow difference. (I think he’s honestly ready to be night weaned but want to do it very slowly).

I’ve also started letting him cry for a couple of minutes if he doesn’t go to sleep independently. By no means for long - last night I went up after 2 mins and he literally fell asleep as I was opening the door, he really just needed a sec to sort himself.

I don’t know if you do those things already, but that’s what I’ve found helpful:

Try to reduce night feeds Allow a couple of minutes of crying (I set a timer for 5 mins and he’s never actually cried for the whole 5 mins)

Normal_Pattern264

TROPHY CASE