(don't) bounce with me

Tonight is night three of our new sleep routine for the monkey, and so far, I'm not sure how it's going.

A little backstory: when the monkey was very small, we determined that bouncing her on an exercise ball was the easiest and most reliable way to put her to sleep at night. Since it seemed foolhardy to change something that worked so well, I've spent anywhere from 5 to 95 minutes pretty much every night since bouncing her on an exercise ball to put her to sleep. (The 95 minute nights were entirely due to stomach problems or illness - she's generally a pretty easy baby to put to sleep.)

Lately, however, I've been noticing that my burgeoning belly (and boy, is it big for 23 weeks!) is making the bedtime bouncing more difficult. I'm shorter of breath, and it's been taking longer at night to get her to sleep. (This was actually due to an ear infection that was practically asymptomatic, and now that she's on antibiotics for it, it's much better.) I also realized that if my labour with this pregnancy goes anything like the last one did, it would be several weeks before I'd be able to bounce her to sleep. Given that everyone I've spoken to about having two babies under two has stressed the importance of routine for the older child, I decided that we'd be better off changing her bedtime routine NOW, while we still have four months to make it stick.

Our old routine looked like this: change into jammies with mommy, bedtime stories with daddy (and she was free to run around and sit on the floor with us during this part), night-night to the toys and the outside world with mommy, bottle of formula with mommy, bedtime songs and bouncing on the ball with mommy until asleep, and then into bed.

The main problem with this routine is that it's never given the monkey any mechanism to go from wide awake to drowsy on her own. She just doesn't know how to do it. I learned too late that babies work out how to do that between 3 and 6 months, so by the time we were ready to start sleep training, she was much too old - once your baby can get out of bed on her own, there's just no keeping her there short of duct tape, and that's just inhumane. Anyway.

We're reworking her bedtime routine with two goals in mind:

1) In a few weeks, Andrew will be taking over her bedtime routine, in order to prepare for the few weeks post-labour when I'm just not up to it. We'd rather this not be a big shock for her.

2) We'd really like for her to learn how to put herself to sleep on her own, or with minimal assistance from us.

To that end, this is what our current arrangement looks like: jammies with mommy, night-night to the toys and outside world with mommy and daddy, bedtime stories with mommy and daddy ONLY if the monkey is lying down in her bed, bottle of formula in bed with mommy lying down beside her, bedtime songs with mommy. If, once the songs are happening she asks more than 3 times to be bounced on the ball, I do it, because if I outright refuse her, she'll get so worked up over it that we lose any sleepiness we've gained in the preceding steps.

Tonight was night 3, and while she still asked to be bounced on the ball, she was much much better at staying in bed during stories - she only tried to stand up 3 times, and it was during a boring story. This is a definite improvement over the last two nights, where it was a real struggle to keep her in bed at all. I've also found that, while I do still have to bounce her to sleep, it's taken much much less time than it was before. My hope is that over the next few weeks, the time we can get her to stay in her bed will extend, while the time on the ball gets shorter, until she falls asleep in bed on her own.

What do you think? Is this totally off-base? Are we crazy to think that this will work? Andrew's aware that he may very well have to bounce her himself once he takes over, but we'd both rather he not have to do that. Any tips or tricks? HELP!!