Sleeping Babies

My cousin Sara asked me to post a little about sleep-training the twins, so here goes. Disclaimer: I don't pretend to be an expert on these things, but I have felt impressed to do it this way for our kids.

Our main challenges to overcome have been

• Interrupted sleep patterns for the twins that have led to sleep deprivation--as you can imagine they wake each other up and keep each other awake
• Fatigue for the parents due to constant soothing of the twins
  
• Sleep deprivation for the parents, which was dangerous because D was out of paternity leave and I needed the sleep if I wanted to continue to nurse
  
• Inconsistency in giving J the attention a 4-year old needs

When I realized these were all tied to the twins' sleep patterns, I decided to start sleep-training. Another twin-mom encouraged me to do it as soon as I thought I could handle it--she had waited until her twins were eight or nine months and she thought the process would have been easier earlier. So the day that our reinforcements went home, the process began. The twins were about 6 weeks old developmentally, 8 weeks old by date--that's when pediatric sleep specialist Dr. Marc Weissbluth says you can start trying to train.

By the way, Sara, his book is called Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. I think it should be called Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Family! The thing I like most about his approach is that it is research-based--he's looked at thousands and thousands of kids to draw his conclusions. I also like that he maintains that there's no "one way" to do this. In a nutshell, he says "do what makes your family healthy physically and emotionally". (Listening to a baby cry for an hour might make a new mom crazy so that wouldn't be right for her obviously.) However, his book says "if you do it this way, this outcome A probably happen" and "if you do it that way, outcome B will probably happen." By the way, he has little to say about twins--ninety-nine percent of his book addresses sleep-training a singleton, Sara.

The main objective of sleep-training was to be able to put the babies in their crib awake so they could learn to go to sleep by themselves. At first I "checked and consoled" after 25 minutes. Then I checked and consoled after 30 minutes in week 2, and now I usually don't console them unless they've been fussing for 45 minutes because it usually means they have a messy diaper.

What happened to the twins: Well, the first week was simply horrible for them. The were exhausted by lots and lots of crying. Week two was much better at night (because they started going right back to sleep after eating rather than being awake and needing soothing), but sleep was still hard during the days. In week two we started to see that they were going to be very different types of sleepers, too--A is a better night sleeper and has a longer window for being put in bed.  By week three, their fuss time just after putting them down had dropped to 5 minutes on average. And now things are so much better. They are usally awake for an hour and then asleep for an hour through the day and they sleep through the night except to wake up for feedings.

What happened for J: He finally gets predictable Mom time. When the twins are nursing, he gets hardly any attention because I'm usually taking care of both babies at once--my hands are already full. But it's so nice to say "as soon as the twins are in bed I can do that with you."

And D and I are getting much more sleep. Phew! I also have time now to take a shower, make dinner, and post on our blog. Yay!