Most new parents think their exhaustion problem is a bedtime routine problem. It's not.

The routine is fine. Bath, bottle, book, bed — you've got that down. The problem is the 90 minutes before the routine starts.

Between 6pm and 8pm, two adults are home with a baby, and neither one of them knows who's "on." One starts warming the bottle. The other also starts warming a bottle. Someone checks the monitor. Someone re-checks. One parent picks up the baby, the other was about to. Nobody said "I've got the next hour" — so both of you are half-on, half-watching, half-exhausted, and fully awake at 9pm wondering why bedtime felt harder than it needed to.

The fix isn't a better bedtime routine. It's a better handoff.

Three things that change immediately when you fix the handoff:

1. One person is on, one person is off. Not "helping." Not "available." Actually off-duty for a defined window.

1. The bath doesn't start until a 30-second check-in happens. Who's lead tonight? What's the bottle situation? Is anything different from last night? That's it.

1. When something goes sideways, there's a script. Not a discussion. Not a "can you just..." moment. A pre-agreed reset move that doesn't restart the whole evening.

I wrote an ebook that walks through this in 7 chapters. It's built for parents in the first year who already have a routine but keep losing sleep because the handoff between caregivers is inconsistent.

If your evenings feel tense and nobody's sleeping enough, the evening map might be the thing you're missing.

Here's what nobody tells you when you become a parent:

The hard part of the evening isn't getting your kid to sleep. It's the 90 minutes before that.

Between 5:30 and 7:00 p.m., someone walks in the door. Maybe it's you. Maybe it's your partner. Either way, the next 20 minutes determine everything.

If the handoff is clear — who's on point, who gets a minute to decompress, what's already handled — bedtime is just bedtime. Predictable. Boring. Fine.

If the handoff is unclear — both parents half-doing everything, nobody fully in charge, decisions getting made while someone's hungry and a toddler is melting down — you're fighting three fires before 7 p.m. even arrives.

Most parenting advice skips this part entirely. They jump straight to "create a consistent bedtime routine" as if the problem starts at 7:30.

It doesn't. It starts at the front door.

I wrote a short ebook called Evening Handoff for Better Parent Sleep that breaks down exactly where the evening slips and gives you a framework for the first 20 minutes. It's free.

The only thing it asks you to do tonight: decide who owns the first 20 minutes before the house gets busy.

That's it. One decision. Made before anyone is tired.