Sleep-training the Twins

My son turns four tomorrow. Four! It’s incredible, how the time has flied.

Our daughters — we have two of them, twins — are just about four months old. Four months! Time flies…

Collectively, we’ve lost years of sleep between all these kids. That’s to be expected — it comes with the territory. When the boy was born, a co-worker congratulated me and said: You know, having kids is God’s way of saying you’ve had enough sleep. Little did I know that it’d be about two years before he slept through the night on a regular basis. We screwed up. We tried the cry-it-out thing, albeit half-assedly. I’ve slept on his floor, more times than I can count. We’ve kept doors open, lights on, responded to binkies flying across the room, wails of “Maaawwwmy…” coming down the hall.

And now, two girls. It’s starting all over again.

So a confluence of events has told us that it’s time to get control of this whole lack-of-sleep situation, not the least of which is being tired. Keeping the girls on the same schedule is crucial. They need to sleep together, eat together, and play together. Otherwise, we’d be on a round-the-clock mission to keep them fed, changed, playing and sleeping.

Enter, sleep training.

After consultations and reviews of a couple of different kinds of sleep therapists (yes, there are a few), we settled on one who didn’t cost an arm and a leg, yet seemed to have a pretty good system and a legion of devoted, well-rested parents. Vivian Sonnenberg came highly recommended through various twins club parent groups, and so we met with her a week ago.

She came and met with us for a couple of hours, evaluating every aspect of how we were raising our babies. She looked at how we put them to bed, how the crib was arranged, how much we were feeding them, how cold the room was, our bedtime ritual. The net result has been a complete revamp of our day-to-day routine, and setting up a pretty rigorous schedule that we’re to adhere to based on some time-tested rules.

So now, the babies eat at fairly regular intervals. They nap predictably three or four times a day. They get a couple of sessions of decent play time. They go to bed by 6:30pm. Best of all, they’re starting to sleep through the night.

Prior to all this sleep therapy, we had a pretty (we thought) decent routine. Wake up around 7am, feed the babies in the morning. They’d nap (restlessly) around 10am, wake up for lunch and play, nap again in the early afternoon for a while, then be awake til around 7pm when we’d put them to bed. Looking back on this, they were often fussy when eating, hard to put down for naps, and generally over-tired. Vivian noticed this right away. In fact, one of the babies had been diagnosed with acid-reflux and we had been giving her some Zantac because of her feeding fussiness. That seemed to work but since we’ve been on the changed routine and more sleep, the “reflux” seems to have mostly stopped. At night, they’d wake up and we’d feed them at around 11pm, 2am, and 5am, changing diapers each time. Binkies would fall out and we’d rush to pop them back in, stretching the feedings out an hour or so if lucky.

The new routine so far looks like this: No binkies. We don’t swaddle them in tight blankets, but rather bundle them up in sleep sacks and with a space heater in the room. Vivian told us the babies like to have their hands free and move their knees up while positioned on their sides, so that’s how they go to bed now, and they seem to like it. They wake up around 6am. We feed the babies, and put them down for a nap just an hour after they’ve gotten up. Then they basically get about three more naps throughout the day, plus a detailed regimen of feeding and play time. They’re in bed for the night by 6:30pm, after a nice quiet feeding in their room with pajamas on.

This also gives us a nice amount of evening time with our son, and time to ourselves. We even watched a movie the other night.

Here’s the downside. The babies alternately wake up during the night and scream and cry. The deal is that we let them “cry hard” for 20-25 minutes before going in and picking them up (and feeding them). We give them up to 45 minutes of off-and-on crying before picking them up to feed. On Friday night, they woke up and cried once but put themselves back to sleep pretty quickly, and we had a really nice sleep. Last night, they were awake and crying off and on between 1:30-3:30am, and then they woke up at 6am. I don’t even really remember what happened between all those hours. Jo got up and fed one of the babies, and I got up early to feed the other.

So, we’re not out of the woods yet, but we’ve been told to give this adjustment period about 12 days to kick in. Already we’re seeing signs of progress, but we’re a week in and are already seeing some benefits. The routine also makes “cry-it-out” a little more palpable, because the crying doesn’t just tear at your soul. The babies are only a few months old, so they’re not smart enough yet to be such manipulators, the way our son was when we pathetically attempted (and failed with) cry-it-out when he was about 18-months old.

I’m pretty sure we’re on the right track. Ask me again in another week to see how we’re doing…