So, You’re Having Twins… The Book You Must Read So Everyone Can Sleep! (Guest Post)
Today our guest blogger giving us tips and advice on getting sleep once your twins are born is Hope, who has beautiful twin girls. She is here to tell us about the book that brought her sleep… and everyone in the house for that matter. Love it! Info on her and links to her direct blogs are included in her bio at the end. Enjoy!
My journey to getting a healthy night’s sleep has been slow but steady. I’m not sure that I ever slept more than two hours straight those first two months. For whatever reason it wasn’t until I was able to get a four hour stretch that I realized how drained I was in those early months.
Once the girls were two months old, I set out to get them on a realistic schedule and out of my room (they slept together in a bassinet in our room for the first 2 months) because I knew that I would have to go back to work at the three month mark. Right around their 2nd month birthday, Dr. Marc Weissbluth – author of Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child released his latest book Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Twins: A Step-by-Step Program for Sleep-Training Your Multiples. Oh boy did this change our lives! I recommend this book to any mother of multiples. I won’t say that we followed it to the tee, but the high points including watching for sleep cues and laying them down before they fall asleep, setting scheduled naps and early bedtimes are things that we really didn’t waver on until they were very much established.
Today, a year later, our girls still have the same bed time, 7:30 p.m. and naps are largely scheduled the same just shorter as they don’t require as much sleep during the day. The original schedule was really set based on the natural cues that they gave us. Setting the early bedtime has been the best thing for the sanity of the rest of the family. While I do at times feel cheated by not being able to spend as much time with them in the evenings after work, I know it is what is best for them and they are generally happy when awake versus being cranky because they are overtired! I try to maximize our time together and double up on just about every part of our night-time routine: tandem nursing, shared bath times and dinner times (I even use the same spoons – one bite for you\”¦one bite for you).
Throughout this journey, we’ve also been pretty consistent in one-down both down, but not as much consistent about one-up both up. For me, this is usually an opportunity to bond with them individually, and in general, the second one is soon to follow anyway. By around three months, one baby slept pretty consistently through the night, but her sister woke up at least 1 – 2 times through the night until around 11 months. Always and consistently, I nursed and put her back in her bed to rest, praying along the way that we wouldn’t wake the other! In those cases where the other baby did awaken, I laid the first baby down and simply followed the same routine for the second baby. No games\”¦no talking. Nurse and back down!
I feel pretty lucky that the girls have pretty good sleep habits, but again, I credit Dr. Marc Weissbluth’s book and honestly wish it had been released sooner because I think there is a lot that could have been incorporated from Day 1. Additionally, it helped me to have my husband there who was usually able to bring the babies back and forth from our room to theirs, especially once I went back to work. I found that when he was gone or \”pretended\” to not hear them, I was much more exhausted by having to nurse and get off my tail.
Finally, since 11 months, we are all happily sleeping through the night without interruptions. There is absolutely nothing like good sleep\”¦simply no substitute. We did what I think worked best for us, perhaps not for everyone, but for us it did!
