There is a very specific kind of tired that arrives with a newborn. It is not just physical. It is the tiredness of not knowing — not knowing whether the last nap was too long, whether bedtime should be 6pm or 8pm, whether the thing that happened last night was a problem or just Tuesday. I lived in that not-knowing for a long stretch of my daughter’s first year, and my response to it was to search.
I searched constantly. Tutorials, product roundups, accessory reviews, forum threads at 3am, videos that took eleven minutes to say nothing. I read a lot of confident advice that contradicted other confident advice. I compared charts that disagreed with each other. And the thing that eventually frustrated me most was not that the information did not exist — it was that it was scattered across a hundred places, wrapped in life stories, and almost never arranged so that a person holding a baby in one arm could actually use it.
So I built My Baby Sleep Schedule. It is a free site that does the boring arithmetic for you: how long your baby can comfortably be awake at their age, roughly how many naps that implies, what time that lands bedtime, and what the published guidance says about total sleep across 24 hours. No login, no email wall, no eleven-minute preamble.
What I actually am, and what I am not
I want this stated plainly and up front, because you deserve to know whose voice you are reading before you take anything on board.
I am a mom. That is the whole credential. I am not a pediatrician, not a nurse, not a midwife, not a lactation consultant, and not a certified sleep consultant. I have no clinical training. I have not treated anyone’s baby, including my own, in any professional sense.
What I do have is a genuine obsession with getting the source material right, and a lot of practice reading it. When this site tells you that babies of a certain age typically need a certain total amount of sleep, that number is not my opinion — it comes from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine’s pediatric sleep duration consensus statement, which the American Academy of Pediatrics endorses. When it touches anything about safe sleep surfaces or sleep position, I do not paraphrase and I do not summarize — I point you directly at the AAP’s own safe sleep guidance and at NICHD’s Safe to Sleep, because that is not a topic where a parent blogger should be standing between you and the people who study it.
If a page here ever reads like it is diagnosing your baby or telling you something is medically safe, I have failed and I want to hear about it. Tell me.
The one product I can honestly say I used
Sleep content on the internet has a credibility problem, and most of it comes from people claiming to have personally tested things they have never touched. I am not going to do that.
A sleep sack was the one piece of gear I genuinely used with my own daughter. That is the extent of my first-hand product experience, and it is the only thing I will ever describe that way. Sound machines, blackout curtains, monitors, bassinets, loveys, swings — I have researched them, I have read what pediatric sources say about them, and I can tell you what parents commonly report. But I will not tell you I tested them, because I did not, and you would have no way of knowing I was lying. That distinction matters more to me than sounding authoritative.
You will also never find an invented statistic here. No “73% of babies” anything. If there is a number on this site, there is a link next to it, and the link goes to the organization that produced the number.
What the site is trying to be
My goal is narrow and I would like to keep it that way: help new moms get through the transition into motherhood with information and equipment that actually work, so that babies sleep and so that the people caring for them sleep too.
In practice that means a few things. Every schedule on this site is built from age bands rather than from a philosophy — I am not selling you a method, and I do not care whether you room-share, contact-nap, use a crib, breastfeed, formula-feed, or some combination that changed twice this week. The math of how long a four-month-old can comfortably stay awake does not depend on which parenting camp you belong to.
It also means the tools have to be genuinely fast. If you are looking up a wake window, you are almost certainly doing it one-handed, in a dim room, with a baby who is about to lose patience. A page that makes you scroll past a personal essay to reach a number is a page that has forgotten who it is for.
Where the rest of my writing lives
Outside of this site, I make bedtime audio for babies on YouTube at Stories for Babies. It is the same instinct from a different angle: the hours around sleep are long, and a little help with them goes a long way.
How to hold anything you read here
Please treat every schedule on this site as a starting hypothesis, not a rule. Your baby has never read the AASM consensus statement. Some babies at six months are cheerfully awake for two and a half hours and some are melting down at ninety minutes, and both of those babies are fine. The charts exist to give you a reasonable place to begin experimenting, and a way to tell whether what you are seeing is broadly typical or worth raising with someone who actually examined your child.
That someone is your pediatrician. They know your baby’s weight curve, feeding history, and medical background. I know none of those things. If anything on this site conflicts with what they told you, they are right and I am wrong — please do not let a website you found at 3am override the person who has actually met your baby.
If you want to see exactly how these pages get researched, sourced, and corrected, I have written it all out on the editorial process page, including an honest disclosure of where AI assists the research. And if you have a question, a correction, or a schedule that did not work the way the chart implied, my inbox is open at sukielovesupport@gmail.com. I read everything, even when it takes me a while to reply — I am, after all, still parenting.