Sleep Guide 9-12 Months: The Final Stretch of the First Year
Your baby just learned to stand in the cot and now uses it exclusively at 1am. If your 9 month old sleep schedule has collapsed under crawling, cruising, and sudden nap strikes, this guide carries you through the last, most mobile months of the first year with your nights intact.
Written by the SleepBaker team behind our Sydney consultations
What's Inside
Between 9 and 12 months your baby learns to move, object, and negotiate. Sleep has to survive all three.
Age-by-Age Schedules
Daily rhythms for your 9 month old, 10 month old, and 11 month old on two naps: wake windows that stretch with development, nap placement that protects bedtime, and how to adjust when a nap gets skipped.
Standing, Cruising & Cot Gymnastics
New motor skills get practised at sleep time, always. What to do when your baby stands in the cot and cannot get down, how to handle the party at 4am, and why this phase passes faster when you respond calmly and consistently.
Nap Refusal & Early Rising
The classic 9-12 month traps: a baby who fights the second nap but genuinely still needs it, and mornings that creep toward 5am. The guide shows you how to hold the two-nap structure and push mornings back to civilised.
Night Feeds Approaching One
Where night feeds fit as your baby nears twelve months: how to tell hunger from habit, gentle ways to reduce night waking around feeds, and how meals and milk across the day support solid nights.
Who This Guide Is For
This guide is for the parent whose baby treats the cot like gym equipment, whose second nap has become a daily standoff, and whose mornings now start before the birds. It is for the family searching 10 month old sleep schedule after a week of 4:50am starts, wondering whether this is a phase or the new normal. It is usually a phase, but only if you respond to it the right way, and that is exactly what this guide teaches.
It also suits parents arriving late to routines. Plenty of families reach nine or ten months having survived on feeding to sleep, contact naps, or a rotating roster of resettles, and that is nothing to apologise for. Babies this age are highly capable of learning independent sleep, and the guide provides a gentle, realistic path to get there before toddlerhood raises the stakes.
Closer to the birthday, the questions change again. An 11 month old sleep schedule has to survive a baby who may be taking first steps, testing every boundary, and flirting with dropping a nap they absolutely still need. The guide covers this final stretch in detail, including how to tell a genuine nap transition from a temporary strike, so you do not dismantle a two-nap day your baby will want back next week.
As with every SleepBaker guide, the approach mirrors what our consultants use with Sydney families every week: responsive, practical, and built around your actual baby rather than a textbook one.
How It Arrives
The guide arrives in your inbox the moment checkout completes, ready to read on any device or print for the fridge, and it is yours to keep with no subscription or expiry. If your baby is a little younger, the 6-9 month guide covers the stage before this one with the same approach, so the two read as one continuous plan. And once your baby turns one, the foundations you build now are precisely what makes toddler sleep so much easier.
Want the Whole First Year?
The Ultimate Sleep Bundle includes this guide plus the 3-6 and 6-9 month guides, covering every schedule, transition, and regression from 3 to 12 months, and saving you $38 versus buying separately.
Get the Guide
Two solid naps, settled nights, and mornings that start after 6am. The last stretch of the first year, fully mapped by the SleepBaker team.