How to Go Out At Night When Your Baby’s Bedtime Is 5 or 6 PM: Real, Low-Fuss Parent Tips
My phone pinged at 2pm on a Tuesday last month, and the text from my best friend Lila made me snort half-sipped coffee out my nose. “Birthday dinner for Mark just got upgraded to a 7pm slot. My 9-month-old’s bedtime is 5:45. Am I just supposed to cancel? Is that what new parents do? Cancel all plans after 6pm forever?”
I got it. When my oldest was that age, his pediatrician had us lock in a 5:15pm bedtime after months of overtired, 4am wakeups. For a while there, I turned down every invite that started after 6pm, convinced any deviation from that schedule would send us right back to sleep training hell. It took a handful of trial and error to figure out you don’t have to become a night-time hermit just because your baby’s off to bed before most people finish work.
The first time I tested this was for my cousin’s wedding, a 7pm ceremony an hour outside of town. I spent a week panicking about what to do, before a more experienced mom friend tossed out the car nap hack that’s now my go-to. Here’s how it works: you do your entire normal bedtime routine at your normal time, right at home. That means pajamas, sleep sack, feed, the same board book you read every night, everything exactly the way you do it when you’re putting them down for the night at home. Then you strap them into their car seat and drive toward your event.
Most babies who are used to crashing at 5 or 6pm will be tired enough to conk out in the car right away, even with the motion. For our wedding trip, my son slept the entire 45 minute drive, and once we got to the venue, my husband and I took turns sitting in the parked car with him for another hour while he napped through cocktail hour. He woke up right as the ceremony started, happy, and we passed him around to relatives for an hour before we headed home. No screaming, no overtired meltdown, and he was back to his normal 5:15 bedtime the next night.
That works great for events that aren’t too far, but if you’re going somewhere local, an at-home early bedtime with a sitter is even less disruptive. When our next-door neighbors invited us to a 6pm birthday barbecue last summer, we did our full routine, got our son down in his own crib at 5:20pm, and my younger sister sat on our couch scrolling Netflix while he slept. We walked five minutes down the block, ate burgers, had a couple beers, and were back home by 8:15 before he even stirred. The only downside was that sister ate all our leftover ice cream while she waited, but that’s a small price to pay for two hours of adult conversation.
If you don’t have space for a sitter at home, or your event is near a friend or family member’s place, you can do the same routine at their house. That’s what Lila ended up doing for Mark’s birthday. Her sister lives 10 minutes from the restaurant, so Lila showed up at 5pm, did the full bedtime routine there, put the baby down in a pack n play in the quiet guest room, and her sister stayed behind with the monitor. Lila and Mark got their three hour birthday dinner, the baby only stirred once, and sister got a free night of watching whatever she wanted on TV. Everyone won.
What if you don’t have a quiet space nearby, and you need to have baby up with you for the whole event? If you’ve got a week or so before your plans, you can gradually shift bedtime a little later without messing up their long-term routine. The trick I learned the hard way is to only shift 15 minutes later each day, not an hour all at once. I tried jumping straight from 5:15 to 6:15 once for a dinner out, and my son was so overtired he screamed for an hour before falling asleep on the restaurant floor. But shifting 15 minutes a day gets you to an hour later in four days, and once your event is over, you shift back 15 minutes a day to get to your original routine. It’s slow, but it doesn’t cause fussing or long-term sleep disruptions.
The biggest myth I had to unlearn was that one off night will ruin all your good sleep habits. I’ve been doing this for four years now, and I can count on one hand the number of times a late night messed up our routine for more than a day. Most of the time, babies bounce right back. They might sleep a little later the next morning, which is actually a nice bonus for you, and then go right back to their normal schedule that night.
Of course, it doesn’t always work. Last summer we tried to bring our then-11-month-old to an outdoor movie night, thinking he’d sleep in his stroller after his early bedtime routine. He was teething, the wind was too loud, and he screamed for 20 minutes straight before we packed up and drove home, defeated. Some nights it’s just not worth the hassle, and canceling is fine. There’s no rule that says you have to force yourself out if it feels like too much work.
But it’s nice to have options. You don’t have to automatically say no just because your baby’s bedtime is earlier than your plans. Lila sent me a photo a few days after her dinner, of her and Mark covered in birthday cake crumbs, with a blurry background shot of her baby sleeping in the guest room, a clean sweatshirt (she forgot his favorite lovey, so sister improvised) tucked under his arm. It wasn’t perfect, it took a little extra planning, but it worked. That’s most of parenting, right? You don’t need a perfect solution, just one that gets you a couple hours of time off every once in a while.
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