Pushing Our Luck

Tate and Ellie have slept through the night since 8 weeks. They usually sleep from about 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM. I know I am blessed beyond measure and I know that would make a lot of people want to take a hammer to their baby monitors. Tate wakes up a few times at some point between 3 AM and 6 AM with gas pains and most of the time doesn’t even open his eyes, just going all washboard and screaming for a minute then going back to sleep. (Not complaining, I know some people would kill for this kind of sleep with two month old twins.) Ellie sleeps like a rock anytime, anywhere, anyplace.

I have been doing a lot of research on routines because my obsession topic of the month is daytime playtime vs. naptime plus working in some me time (which means cooking dinner, doing laundry, cleaning etc.) and some Trey time. I remembered I’d bought a book called “The Baby Whisperer” that had some timetables in it for different age groups. I had applied some of the principals from the time I brought the babies home such as creating a bed time routine including swaddling, having some activity after all the daytime feeds so they separated day and night and didn’t associate eating with going to sleep and some others. I picked it up and started re-reading today focusing on the sections that talked about babies older than 6 weeks.

There were a couple of things that stood out. The first is that I already have them on a pretty good schedule; I just need to be a little more consistent with setting the stage for their naps. The second was to keep all of their naps under 2 hours. Today they didn’t ever sleep longer than two hours so I got really excited about the third. For their nighttime feed the routine is: feed, bath, swaddle, bed and instead of doing what we had been doing which I was calling a night time feed where I kept them up (they would sleep most of it anyway) in their bouncy seats downstairs while I would cook dinner or whatever, do a dream feed at 10 or 11 PM. A dream feed was described as keeping the babies swaddled and the lights low. Picking them up, feeding them, no talking and putting them straight back down unless they are dirty. We are trying it tonight and it is so nice to be sitting downstairs with sleeping babies upstairs. I am a bit worried about how the middle of the night to the morning will go considering we all sleep in the same room so if they wake up bored we will probably wake up also but sleeping 12 hours with just a dream feed at 11 sounds pretty good!