Sleep Training!

At the suggestion of my friend Yvette, who has twins, I ordered this book about sleep training twins. I'm not about crying it out or anything nuts, I just wanted to restore some sanity to our nights and help the boys sleep better. I read it yesterday during the boys' morning nap (it's a quick read and I'm hyper on steroids) and we implemented it last night. With great success! The basic and simple premise is that it doesn't really matter what sleep training philosophy you have, it's more important that you implement it with consistency. The other main premise is that babies should be put down awake but drowsy, so they get used to putting themselves to sleep rather than nursing to sleep or being rocked to sleep and then ever so carefully being deposited in bed. So what I have chosen to try is a variation of graduated extinction, which means that if there is any fussing (usually in our case it's better called moaning or chirping) you wait five minutes before going in, then go in and calm the baby however (sticking a pacifier in a mouth, rocking, hand on belly, rocking in the crib or out), and then leave when the baby is calm again. If the fussing starts again, you wait 10 minutes before going back in and repeating the calming performance. If it happens again, you wait 15 minutes before going back in. The goal is that at some point the baby falls asleep while waiting for you to come back in. You do the same thing at naps as at nighttime. The tricky thing about the twins is that of course one could wake the other up during the wait time, but the book says that after a few nights there will both be fewer wakeups in general and fewer wakeups of one twin by the other.

The book also has some great information about baby sleep in general, and how much babies should sleep at different ages, and at what times of the day. It surprised me that we were already doing what the book says is ideal for babies of 4-6 months (adjusted--the book is big on taking the babies' gestational age into account), which is one hour nap from 9-10am and then a 1.5-2 hour nap in the early afternoon, like 1-3pm or 2-4pm.

Our nights have been hellish since I got back to the hospital, with us generally feeding both babies at least a few ounces of milk each night sometime before 1am (with milk I have pumped from earlier in the day). I'm always anxious about whether we have enough pumped milk and whether it's really hunger or something else that's waking them up, plus I'm worried that one will wake up the other so we usually rush in there when there's any noise. The stress is because I can't nurse from whenever I take the steroids until 5-6 hours afterwards, so I run to take them after I nurse them before bedtime and then count the minutes until usually around 1am when I can nurse again.

Last night was our first night and I can't say whether we just had a lucky night or whether the book worked its magic but it was a good night. The boys were tired and went to bed with absolutely no fuss whatsoever at about 6:30pm. They both ate well before they went to sleep and I decided that they could go at least six hours without eating, so I would treat any wakeups as non-hunger-related. They slept solidly without a wakeup or peep until about 10pm, when I heard a mere moan from Beck and stuck a pacifier in his mouth and he went back to sleep. Jeff did some baby calming and waiting between fussing periods around midnight but then no one stirred again until about 2am, when Beck ate. Theo didn't wake up to eat until 3:30am, and then they both pretty much slept until 7am. I hope it keeps getting better with fewer and fewer wakeups but I'll take this as a start! I feel better rested than I have in at least a week and probably since I went to the hospital. We'll let you know how it goes!