My husband and I have spent the last six weeks trying to figure out our nighttime routine with the twins.
[As an aside, he really needs a name on this blog. But he's a bit of a stickler for internet privacy, so I know he wouldn't want me to use his actual name. Henceforth, he will be referred to as "M," if for no other reason than it's easy for me to remember. Moving on.]
Anyways, we’ve always been on different body clocks. I’m much more of a morning person, and “sleeping in” has always been defined for me by dozing past 8AM. I wasn’t particularly adept at the all-nighter in college, and though I’ve gotten worse since then, it’s not like I was ever all that functional after 1 in the morning (now it’s more like 10PM). M is quite the opposite. For him, it’s considered “early” if he gets up before noon on the weekends. He’s much more comfortable at night and in the early morning hours, in particular cherishing being awake and reading or playing World of Warcraft while the rest of the world is asleep (except the 2 million people playing Warcraft, of course). Nighttime is rejuvenating for him. This difference caused no small amount of conflict in our early relationship, and still sometimes flares up, but mostly we work with it.
Now comes the ultimate test of a person and their (strained) relationship with sleep: newborns. Ours have been on a more-or-less three hour rotation of feeding since day 1 or 2. Round the clock, they are ready to eat at 8, 11, 2, 5… or whatever that day’s particular hours are. The first week, when they were truly only waking up to eat and then immediately passing out again, we never managed to put them down anywhere other than the Pack n Play in our office. But as my eyes were being held open by toothpicks, beloved M insisted that I go up to bed, and he’d keep an eye and ear on the babies. And so our routine began, while he was home on paternity leave. We’d sort of take 8-hour shifts. He would insist I go to bed around 10, I’d sleep until 6, get up and send him to bed until 2. We’d overlap in the afternoon and evening. While sleeping that long was nice (and it was never really that long, since I’d wake up a couple of times, soaked through, and need to pump), it did not seem like a viable long-term solution. After all, in a few weeks, he needed to go back to work.
I tried bringing them upstairs to their crib a couple of times, maybe around 3 or 4 in the morning, but it usually involved me dozing in the glider and bringing them back down by 8 or 9AM. But I kept insisting that we try that more. Gallant as it was for M to insist I get some sleep, he’s the one who needs to go to work in the morning. I can afford to be a zombie in my pajamas during the day, if necessary. But he fought it, claiming he slept too badly when he heard all of their noises upstairs. Better to just take a shift being awake.
Last night, he finally gave in. We brought the babies up around 11PM and attempted to go to bed.
Let me pause and say that our twins are generally a lot fussier at night, for whatever reason. It has gotten better recently, especially since we started Daniel’s reflux meds, but still. Now that they are spending more time awake, overall, they are much harder to put to sleep after eating. Swaddles, pacifiers, etc… they still sometimes fight going down.
Last night, they decided to really show it off. I think they knew a certain amount of righteous pride was on the line for me. I slept about two hours, total. M, genuinely misunderstanding my intentions, stayed in bed all night.
Neither baby had any interest in falling asleep after eating. Nor did they have any interest in at least resting quietly with their eyes open, as they occasionally do during the day. Nope, they were fidgety and fussy and grunting and screeching, all night long. I tried to avoid the pacifier, even though it would calm them down (Daniel, especially), because once it goes in, you’re a slave to it. Daniel, in particular, loves the pacifier, but has such a strange/awful sucking motion that it’s out within seconds. At which point he screams as if stabbed in the heart. So once it goes in, you’ve committed to essentially standing over him and plugging it back in every time it falls out.
Anyways, suffice it to say that last night was a failed experiment. So here I am, blogging at 4:00 in the morning, having slept from 10pm to 3am (on the upside, I got up and pumped over 3.5oz! A new record!). M will sleep until probably 9:30, when I tell him for the third time that it’s getting late and he really should get up and go to work. I still maintain that this is not a workable long-term solution, but M seems to feel it’s the best we’ve got until they start sleeping better/longer stretches at night.
Any suggestions out there? I know six weeks is a bit early still to talk about sleep training and things like that, but it sure would be nice if they would pass out a little more easily at night. I wouldn’t mind getting up to feed them every 3-4 hours if they actually slept reliably in between!
On the upside, I did make an apple pie at 5AM the other day.
Once I went back to work, the schedule was I would do the baby’s 9PM bottle, then sleep until her 4AM feeding. My wife would do the 12AM bottle, and then the 7AM. Once she goes back to work though, we’re going to try and get the baby to eat at 8, 11, 3, 6. That way we all get a stretch of sleep and can both get ready in the morning, since our schedule is staggered. Good luck!
No advice here, but I can tell you how we did it at our house. The babies slept in their crib at night from day one, (swaddled and side by side) and napped in the pac-n-play, swing, papasan thing, etc. during the day. On night #2 I told my husband to “shut that dumb thing off!” meaning the monitor. We were sleeping in the guestroom, and the kids were in the room next door. I knew I would hear them if they really needed me, but all the little wimpers and grunts that newborns make were making me anxious and crazy. So, we had to do the whole pacifier madness thing too, like you do with Daniel. We kept the room dark, ran an air purifier that was a gift and works very well as white noise, used our mobile when needed, swaddled and stopped changing diapers each and every time they were up to eat. It just woke them up too much. Now they go for an 11 hour strech with the same diaper, and their skin integrity is fine. We started giving them an 8:30 bedtime for our sanity. It was really straining our marriage to be “on” all waking hours (and non-waking). At least we knew if the kids were in bed at 8:30, we had a reasonable chance of getting some things done that weren’t feeding, holding, or rocking a baby before the 11pm feed. My husband was usually working on the computer (or playing video games) and would constantly turn on the mobile, replace the pacifiers, etc. Eventually, they got less and less attached to these things, and now go down quite well. I didn’t read any books about specifics on sleep, etc. I just tried to do the things that would help our household to be more balanced, and we have been blessed with a fair amount of success.
Good luck, it sounds like you are doing great with your little one.
An early bedtime has saved our marriage. From early on, we put the kids to bed around 7 p.m. Then, right before we both went to bed at 10:30 p.m., we’d wake them, change them, feed them and put them back down (together – one of the benefits of bottle feeding).
When one awoke in the middle of the night, we’d BOTH get up, wake the sleeping child, change them both, feed them both, and put them both back down. Repeat around 6 a.m. the next morning. That way, we were only up once (maybe twice in the really early days).
Two adults getting about 6 hours of sleep each is WAY better than one getting a few hours of sleep and the other getting most of the sleep.
Ok no advice (my little ones are only a little over a week old)…but I sleep propped up with the girls on a twin nursing pillow. I have everything right next to the bed so I sit up to change them before each feeding and then lean back attach each to a boob and we all fall back asleep for 2 or 3 hours and repeat. We have a bed rail and got a new huge bed (Calking)so no worries of any one falling or getting smooshed. It’s been pretty awesome. But I also co-slept with both my single boys so I feel pretty comfortable with co-sleeping. You’d think they would want to be held all day too but they sleep together in the pack n play during the day.