If there’s anything close to a sure thing when it comes to having more kids, it’s that you will be forced to reconsider something you knew to be 100% right and true the first time around. Among the things Ellie has caused me to … moderate my views on, the biggest is my entire concept of sleep schedules.
Oh, was I a nut for schedules when my big kids were babies and toddlers. Naptime is naptime, come hell or high water. I would schedule everything around naptime, nothing would be permitted to interfere. I carefully crafted the transition from two naps to one, and hung onto the morning nap for as long as I possibly could. It was literally YEARS before I knowingly and purposefully allowed them to skip the afternoon nap. They would both go to bed for a nap, together, at the same time each and every day.
And, in my defense, it worked for us. My kids did well with the predictability, were well-rested and happy when they got that sleep every day. And frankly, with twins, I think it’s a matter of survival to have that kind of synchronization.
And then came Ellie.
Truth be told, she has nearly always been a very good sleeper. With the exception of the few weeks of to-swaddle-or-not limbo, she has required virtually zero intervention to get to sleep, and slept through the night consistently and of her own volition as soon as we got over the swaddle nonsense at 3.5 months. Yes, I am well aware of how lucky we are.
But she has completely defied my previous notions of what a nap schedule should look like at any age. She really never went through that phase of needing a third nap (big kids took a third catnap with some regularity until 8 months). She always took a late and short morning nap (I had always thought that first nap was relatively early in the morning and quite reliable). At 13-14 months, she pretty abruptly and decisively dropped the morning nap altogether (big kids did it at 17 months with a long and protracted transition). And as if that weren’t enough, she is already at that point where, if her afternoon nap goes longer than 1.5-2 hours, she’ll be awake until nearly 10PM (a trick my big kids didn’t pull until after age 4).
More than anything, I find myself more relaxed and willing to follow her lead than I was with the big kids. Ellie, herself, is much more flexible than they were at this age, whether by temperament or by virtue of being the third kid, I don’t know. But if she seems tired earlier than usual? Sure, put her down early! Too-short nap today? Oh well, we’ll survive. The fact that she already seems like she’ll drop the nap a few YEARS earlier than her brother and sister did? Whatevs.
So, the crazy nap lady is eating some of her own words these days. The way Ellie sleeps is nothing short of shocking to the Me of three years ago. But I guess that’s how it goes. Think you know EVERYTHING about being a parent? Go ahead, have another kid. I dare you.
Great post, and love the pics. JTC stopped napping when he turned 2 and never really looked back. At almost 4, I can still get AJC to nap 75% of the time. Whatevs, I’ll TAKE IT!
My twins are also still napping at 3.5. But they do go on until past 9 pm if nap lasts much longer than one hour or goes much past 3 pm. Their usual bedtime is ideally somewhere around 8:30, later than I would like it to be, but I can’t seem to make it earlier consistently. They are definitely not ready to drop nap, though they can skip it for one day without much fuss if there is plenty of activity in the afternoon. However, the next day they are begging to go to sleep right after (or during) lunch. I kind of wished they’d get done with it already.
Ha ha ha!! Lots of nods over here but for me it wasn’t having another kid that made me throw the conventional nap stuff away – it was having a kid that didn’t nap to start with! She would have an hour after lunch and we had to stop that when she turned 2 (or she was up at 11pm and I was in bed!!) but in her massive defence? She slept through the night 12 straight hours EVERY night by the time she was 8 weeks old. Naps are for wimps when you get that much sleep per night!
And can I say I cannot BELIEVE how big Rebecca and Daniel are getting! They were wee teeny toddlers when I first knew you (at the beginning of the Scraptastic Bee) and look at them now! Never mind that poppet, Ellie. What a wee dolly she is!
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I also wonder how much of the nap craziness is the twin versus singleton thing. Missed naps with twins means there is always someone awake, which leads to insanity. One baby? Not so much.
That last picture is just PERFECT.
Ellie sounds a lot like Audrey regarding naps. Audrey has always been a great nighttime sleeper, but she has always been very unpredictable with naps. Part of it is that her schedule at daycare four days a week is quite different from what we like to do at home, so she doesn’t have a set daily routine. I like that she’s learning to adapt, though, and frankly, as long as she sleeps well at night I can deal with her being awake more during the day.
The photo of Ellie looking through the window is amazing. She is an angel baby. Mazel tov.
For us, I think it’s more of a twin thing. With Michael, we never had a schedule unless he was at daycare. I tried to maintain it at home, but we were just not that consistent (he’s also never been a good sleeper and still isn’t). He didn’t sleep through the night til age 3 when we stopped diary, and gave up naps at 2. The twins on the other hand were great sleepers from the beginning. Because they were 4.5 pounds we were told to let them sleep as much as they would and I did and it worked. Then I joined the twins group and got a really good schedule and it worked. They are still better sleepers, but I think it’s more to do with who they are than schedule. I think twins make you need a schedule. It must be so different to go from having two to having only one that you need to schedule.
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I was exactly the same! Nap and routine obsessed! But hey, lets face it, it is the only way to survive twins and get a little order in the chaos, routine, routine, routine. I desperatey want a third because I know I’ll experience a new side to parenting, just as you have, and what a treat to relax and enjoy one small child…. Well done, it seems you have done a great job so far!
Hello, I read your bio and was delighted to find out that your twins were born on my birthday while our own were born the day after my birthday of this year. They were born at 38 weeks and just turned 5 mo. We definitely live and breath routine, and the toughest sleep challenge for us is sleep transitions, when they wake early into a nap (35-45 min), which happens to coincide with the sleep phase change. I was surprised to see how little support was in literature on how to tackle these. I think I have concluded that one must live through them. One of your posts (the one on dropping the morning nap) mentioned consulting Dr Weissbluth, and I wonder if you know what his position may be on those? We consistently take not two 1.5 naps, but two naps that are broken into two 35-45 min increments, and Dr Weissbluth’s sleep consolidation is out the window. Will they outgrow this with brain maturation? They sleep well through the night…