Creating healthy and predictable routines and schedules for our baby has been a complete game changer to my experience as a parent. In the first few months before we established a healthy routine, my days felt completely out of control. Scattered. Frantic. Anxious. I’m pretty sure implementing routines and loosely following Babywise schedules is one of the best decisions I’ve made as a parent. Call me crazy. But I really believe it. We have a 12 month old baby schedule to follow, but our daily feeding and sleeping routine is so well established by now that meals, bottles, naps and nighttime sleep are all second nature. Good thing, huh? Good god, it only took a year.
It’s such a relief to no longer stress over an occasional short nap, or a string of nighttime wakings. I’m not counting the minutes from when she last woke up, and I’ll break from our schedule (slightly) to accommodate something fun for our family.
We transitioned from a two nap baby schedule to one nap shortly before our daughter turned one year old. So our 12 month old baby schedule now consist of 1 nap, 3 meals, milk 2x a day, and 2 snacks (as needed). And since browsing different schedules was a huge help to us over the last year, I’m here again to share our 12 month old baby schedule in case it feels like a good fit for your little one.
Take a Look at Our 12 Month Old Baby Schedule
- 7:00 get Gemma out of crib
- 7-7:30 first bottle (8oz)
- 8:00 breakfast
- Snack if needed, flexible on timing
- 11:30 lunch
- 12:00-2/3 nap
- Snack if needed, flexible on timing
- 5:30 dinner
- 6:30 last bottle (8oz)
- 7:00 in crib for night
What’s Changed Between 9 and 12 Months
- I completely stopped tracking. Somewhere between 6-9 months I eased way up on how obsessively I tracked eating and sleeping in my favorite baby tracking app: Glow Baby. Around 9 months I was still consistently tracking naps because I knew it would be helpful to identify signs of readiness for the one nap transition. However since we are successfully over the one nap transition, I’ve completely stopped. How insane am I for even sticking with it for so long? Seriously…
- We dropped 2 bottles. At 9 months we still offered 4x 8oz bottles each day. We dropped the late afternoon bottle first, and then just before a year dropped her lunchtime bottle as well. Now we offer water with each meal and throughout the day, and are consistent with 2x oz bottles of milk each day.
- We switched to cows milk! Turning one year old means lots of things to new moms, and a few of those things are: honey is allowed, yay! No more formula. Drop the bottles. Wait, what? We did transition to cows milk… both quickly and very easily, but we haven’t yet dropped the physical bottles. Since we are down to milk 2x a day, I’m going to hold out on bottles for another month or so before moving morning milk and bedtime milk to straw cups. Baby steps, friends!
- We have 3 meals every day. At 9 months we had long since started our daughter on solids, and we were trying to inch towards regular meals each day. Now, we offer 3 legitimate meals every day, just as we do for ourselves. We eat breakfast and lunch together, and whether we eat dinner as a family is hit or miss depending on my husband’s work schedule. We do our best to offer what we are eating (or some paired down version of it), but definitely give on occasion when she refuses our meals. It’s one thing if she’s not hungry or telling us she’s all done. It’s a different story when she is clearly hungry but not digging our dinner. Work in progress here. For sure.
- Snacks are pretty regular now. I’m honestly not sure if this is out of hunger, or just a bad habit I helped create, but somewhere along the way we established a regular snack time, twice each day. Our daughter usually has a light snack around 10am, about halfway between her breakfast and lunch. We also offer a second snack when she wakes up from her nap. Are we crazy here? I do find that she eats way better at mealtime on the days that we skip snacks. But the other side to that coin is that we go into full blown hangry meltdown usually for the last 45-60 minutes leading up to a meal.
- We transitioned to one nap! It wasn’t the easiest transition we’ve implemented, that’s for sure. But I thought our daughter was ready to drop her morning nap. She had started to flat out refuse her second nap time, and time, and time again. I didn’t count exactly how many times she refused her nap over exactly how many weeks, but as the mom who dealt with this on many days, I kind of reached a breaking point and just pulled the trigger. One day I decided to stretch her from her 7AM wake time until 11:30AM. It worked. We slowly pushed that nap time back until 12 or 12:30PM, and here we are. Surviving! There were a few weeks of iffy naps, and the occasional afternoon cat nap on desperate days. But we came out the other end and we’re LOVING the one day a nap routine!
And there you have it. Our 12 month old baby schedule that consists of 1 nap, 2 bottles, 3 meals, and 2 snacks. Questions about how we reached this schedule, or how it’s working for us? Ask away! And if your little one isn’t yet a year, be sure to check out our 6 month old baby schedule and 9 month old baby schedule posts as well.
