My babies, are good babies. And I’m not just saying that b/c they are mine.
They are good in the way that they are easy. Comparably easy. It’s strange actually.
Of all the mothers I know in this newborn twins group I am a member of, none of them have colicy babies. We are all very lucky, b/c I’m sure anyone out there with a singleton that is colicy would be cursing us all right now.
1 colicy baby is worse than having multiples. I can’t even imagine!
In the beginning, my focus was on having the girls get into their cribs as soon as possible. No co-sleeping. And going to sleep on a schedule.
That didn’t all happen though – go figure. As first time parents we were completely paranoid over every little sound that they made.
There was nothing that could’ve prepared me for the feeling of being a first time parent. While you’re pregnant you think how exciting it’s going to be and then once they arrive … you get no instruction. The babies are yours. You take them home and their lives are in your hands. Gasp!
We wound up putting one of their cribs in our room and let them share it. Everytime they sneezed, yawned or passed gas I was at the side of the crib soooo fast looking over them to make sure they were still alive.
We were told that it was mandatory we wake the girls every 2 hours to feed once we brought them home. That meant waking them even if they were in a peaceful sleep. And man, newborns really love to sleep. We hated waking them, but they needed to eat and gain weight. After about 2 weeks of this hell we had succeeded in upping their weight enough for them to feed whenever they were hungry and letting them sleep as long as they wanted to.
Unfortunately for us, they never got used to sleeping for long due to our previous interruptions and it was not easy getting them to stay asleep for longer than 3 hours at a time.
I am lucky in that the company my husband works for allows him some flexibility. He was able to work from home everyday in the beginning (and still does 2 days a week). He would even help me in the evening, when he should be getting his sleep. It is not easy to feed 2 cranky newborns at the same time. No sir.
I don’t know how single parents of multiples do it. And honestly, I don’t really know how we did it. We just did… with the hopes that things would get better with time. because that’s what everyone had been telling us.
I swore they were lying when they told us that once they reach 9-10lbs they’d start sleeping through the night. LIARS!!! i swore But they were RIGHT. As soon as one of them hit that weight, she slept 12 hours. The other one didn’t, but hell, feeding one baby is a lot easier than feeding 2.
During this time my husband and I played around with different routines for ourselves. Adjusting our sleep-schedules. It started out that I would sleep from 7pm-12am and he would sleep from 12am to 6am then I would sleep from 6am-9am.
Yeah, that didn’t work too well. Going to bed at 7pm is just tooo damn early. Then I pushed it out to 9pm keeping all the other times the same. That was no good either.
So then we switched it up again, to the schedule that has been in place for the majority of the time now and it really seems to be working. For me at least. I am responsible for the girls from 9:30p – 3:00am, then TH is responsible for the girls from 3:00am – 8:00am. I wound up just staying up until 3am everyday. Damn that is HELLA hard. Then it got easier. 1 would sleep through the night and I would only have to wake for 15 minutes at a time to feed the other. Bing bang boom.
Now both of the girls pretty much sleep through the night and sometimes one or both of them will wake around 3am (during TH’s watch-time). That is great b/c I don’t have to get up. I can sleep ALL night. I know that doesn’t sound fair to TH, but I also have to be alone with the girls ALL day too. Yeah he works…but it’s nothing compared to taking care of newborn multiples. If the girls do happen to wake before 3am, I usually just adjust their blankies or rock them a little and put them back down. It’s amazing how that works.
The key to keeping them sleeping, I believe, is not giving them a bottle to feed on during the night. In the beginning you kinda have to. B/C newborns need to eat when they need to eat. But as they get older, they can adjust their habits. By taking away a bottle at night they learn to cluster feed. Which means the period before their ‘overnight’ sleep time, they eat lots and lots and feed almost every hour or multiple times an hour. They try to fill themselves up enough to make sure they don’t get hungry overnight.
The cluster feeding thing was new to us. I remember someone in our twins group describing what it was and I knew that that was what my girls were doing too. I was glad, b/c I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t understand why they were so hungry from 4pm-7pm, eating non-stop, being cranky and fussing and crying unless I fed them. No joke, it’s INSANE feeding 2 babies when they are hungry for 3 hours straight. Especially when the babies can’t sit up yet and they can barely hold their heads up on their own, so sitting in high-chairs is out. You have to HOLD them and feed them. It’s insane. But you make it work.
If you get to that cluster feeding stage and you are like WTF?! don’t fret — just keep up with them and good things will coming your way!
I read online that sleeping through the night is at least 5 hours of sleeping. We got that. We’re good. If I can get that 12 hour stint back that we had when they hit 10lbs, I’d be one happy chica. But I’ll take what I can get for now.
The girls made up their own sleeping and feeding schedule. I guess we’re lucky, b/c we had been tracking every little thing for weeks, trying to pick up on some sort of pattern. We never had enough time to figure it out, and then they just started this routine.
It works for us and they both seem to be on the SAME schedule. How does that happen?!?
Maybe they just know that mommy and daddy’s brains are fried and figured it out for us.
See, I told you we had good babies. 
