routine...what routine?

You always hear people talking about getting into a routine with your baby. I'm not sure at what stage this is supposed to start, but we're not there yet. My day is more or less dictated by Jamie's hunger levels. I'm still breastfeeding at the moment, and as much as I'd like to have a say in his feeds--he pretty much needs to eat when he's hungry or there will be no peace in this house. I'm attempting to try to get him to eat, then have some awake/play time, then sleep. This does not always work. Several books recommend this method as the precursor to sleeping through the night eventually, but it's not always that easy. Sometimes it works beautifully, but usually only for one portion of the day. Other times he eats-plays-eats-sleeps or eats-sleeps-eats or this morning (at 5:30am!) he played-slept-played-slept-ate-played-slept. These are all in 2-4 hour cycles. During the night, he's supposed to eat-sleep-eat-sleep-eat-sleep and then eat-play-sleep at the start of the morning.

The past couple weeks, from about 6pm onwards he has been eating nearly every other hour until bed and then it takes a long time for him to actually get to sleep. I think he's overeating and then overtired, and using the feeds for comfort. We were probably 'bad' parents and held him too much while he napped when we should be putting him down in his Moses basket. So I've decided to try to be a little more strict (well try to anyway). It's very easy to just let him sleep on me during the day--I mean he's just so cute when he sleeps-and I've just about managed to work out how to position  him so I can still use the laptop and reach the remote at the same time. But I am vowing now to be more disciplined and make every attempt to try to get him to sleep in his basket. We're also going to introduce a new bedtime routine and make the last feed of the day an expressed bottle feed which Paul can do. We tried this last night for the first time and he did drink from the bottle (he had refused it the only other time I tried), but he didn't go down straight after-he needed a lot of holding/rocking/shushing, but once he did, he then slept for a solid 4 hours and then fed fairly quickly at 3:30 and went straight back to sleep, when usually it takes him 60-90 minutes of eating/dozing before he will go back to sleep. I am really hoping to establish some good habits before it gets too late and becomes really hard to break the bad habits. We will see. I've already let him break the pattern today as I couldn't keep him awake after his mid morning feed...

Guilty parents:

Happy baby: