How to Go Out at Night When Your Baby’s Bedtime Is 5 or 6 PM: Real Parenting Tips
I was folding Lila’s stained cotton onesies at the kitchen counter last month when my husband texted me a screenshot of his cousin’s birthday barbecue: 7 PM, backyard, 15 minutes from our house. I stared at the text for a minute, then glanced at the clock: 4:15 PM. Our 8-month-old’s bedtime is 5:30 PM. For the six months since she dropped her third nap, we’d turned down almost every evening invite. We’d heard over and over that early bedtimes prevent sleep regression, and the one time we kept her up late for a dinner out, she screamed through the entire main course and we drove home with her covered in spit-up, both of us not speaking. So we’d gotten used to our routine: Lila down by 6, we eat cold leftover pasta on the couch, watch one episode of whatever, fall asleep by 10. But this birthday was for someone we actually liked, and we didn’t want to miss it.
We tossed around options for a day. That first bad experience left me convinced any evening out would end in disaster, but turning down every invite started to feel stale after a while. I missed hanging out with people outside of pediatrician waiting rooms and playground snack breaks. I brought it up to our pediatrician at Lila’s 9-month checkup, actually. She told me something that stuck: Early bedtimes between 5 and 6 PM are totally normal for babies under a year, because they need 11 to 12 hours of overnight sleep, but most don’t sleep in until 7 or 8 AM. That doesn’t mean you have to never leave the house, it just means you have to work with their schedule, not against it. That clicked for me. We’d been trying to work our schedule around the event, instead of working the event around her sleep.
For the barbecue, we ended up going with the simplest option: We asked our regular sitter to come to our house. She’s a college student who doesn’t mind doing homework while baby sleeps, so she arrived at 4:45 PM. We did Lila’s full bedtime routine exactly like we always do: 5 PM bottle, quick bath, lullaby while we rocked her, then put her down in her crib awake at 5:30, just like normal. She fell asleep in 10 minutes, and we slipped out the door by 5:45. We got to the barbecue by 6, ate burgers, had a couple beers, caught up with people we hadn’t seen in a year, and were home by 10 PM, right before Lila usually wakes for her dream feed. She never stirred once. It was almost too easy, after months of assuming we couldn’t do it.
That’s the go-to option now when we can make it work. It doesn’t disrupt Lila’s routine at all, and the sitter gets a quiet night of getting paid to study, which most young sitters prefer over running around after a fussy baby at a party. It works for everything from date night to friend dinners within 30 minutes of our house. I’ve started suggesting this to other new parents who assume they can’t go out, and most don’t even think of it – they assume they have to bring baby with them, but leaving baby asleep in their own crib with a sitter is way lower stress for everyone.
Of course, it doesn’t work for everything. A few weeks before the barbecue, we had to go to my best friend’s wedding rehearsal dinner an hour away, and our sitter couldn’t stay overnight last minute, so we had to bring Lila with us. That’s where we learned the tricks for bringing her along, after that first bad dinner experience. Instead of keeping her up late to join the fun, we adjusted our plans to fit her bedtime. We kept her morning and afternoon naps exactly on schedule that day – I didn’t cut them short to tire her out, which is the mistake I made the first time. Overtired babies can’t fall asleep anywhere, no matter how tired they are. We packed her entire bedtime setup: her usual sleep sack, the white noise machine we use every night, her stuffed lamb lovey, and the small blackout cover that fits over our travel pack n play. When we got to the restaurant, we asked the manager if we could use the empty back office to get her down. It was small, but it was quiet, and we did her full routine right there at 5:25 PM, just five minutes off her usual time. We put her down, turned the white noise up all the way, closed the door, and went to the rehearsal dinner. She slept three and a half hours, right through speeches and dinner, and only woke up when we went to get her to drive home. It worked way better than I expected.
It’s not always perfect. Last weekend we tried to go to a late movie, and Lila woke up at 8 PM screaming with teething pain, and the sitter couldn’t get her settled. We left 20 minutes before the ending, and drove home with our popcorn half-eaten. Some nights it doesn’t work, and that’s okay. We still say no more often than we say yes, and most nights we’re still eating cold leftovers on the couch after Lila goes down.
But what I’ve learned is that an early baby bedtime doesn’t have to mean a complete end to going out at night. You don’t have to choose between your baby’s consistent sleep schedule and a little adult time. It just takes a little planning, and being willing to adjust your plans instead of expecting baby to adjust to yours. If you’re okay with leaving early if things go wrong, and you don’t expect every night to go perfectly, it’s totally doable. For now, this works for us. We’ll adjust when Lila shifts her bedtime later, whenever that ends up being.
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