Am I the only mom-of-twins sleeping in shifts?
Tonight we tried an experiment and it did not work out as planned. For the first time since the twins have been home (a month ago now), Mark and I have been sleeping in shifts. This is what our routine has been...
He gets home from work at 5:30 PM. We eat dinner together, and then I go to bed at 8 PM. He watches the twins while I sleep until 12:00 AM. Then I get up and he goes to sleep. I try to get a few cat naps during the day, but that rarely works out well since one or the other twin is up. Then I go to sleep again at 8 PM, and on and on. Mark is getting 8 hours of sleep, and I am getting 4 hours. Many times he will get overwhelmed when both twins are crying at the same time, and then he will come get me during my 4-hour sleep session. Ugh.
Anyway, tonight we decided to try doing it the way I thought it would be like all along...
We ate dinner. We watched The Sopranos and Entourage. We gave the twins a bath and fed them. We put them down to sleep, and then we went to sleep. I figured I would have to get up once or maybe twice in the night for feedings, but that I would still be able to get several hours of consecutive sleep. I was wrong. I was very wrong.
The twins have been restless and hungry. We have not be able to keep them down for more than an hour at a stretch. UGH. So now we will both be exhausted, and I don't even have my nanny to look forward to on Tuesday. I had to cancel her for Tuesday morning because the twins have a morning appointment with a pedi eye doc (follow-up from NICU exam).
I guess the twins aren't ready yet, but I am definitely ready to a normal sleep pattern (i.e., sleeping in my bed with Mark during normal sleeping hours).
So how do ya'll do it? Does everyone with twins start out sleeping in shifts like this?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
We never did shifts because I'm nursing so I usually need to feed them. Most of the time, my husband gets them and if he can't settle him/her, brings them to me. We end up having a baby in our bed a lot, because they sleep longer that way. And we end up being very, very tired much of the time. It was worse when they were younger, then it got a bit better for a while around 3 to 4 months, and now it's pretty bad again. I know we probably need to do some type of sleep training, we just don't even have the energy to make a plan (no cry? CIO?).
I'm waiting to find someone who has found a wonderful solution to share with the rest of us!
Also nursing, so no shifts here. And a sleep-deprived memory, so it's all somewhat hazy. Here's the brief version (though I might expand on this on my blog soon, since I hate that I'm forgettng it all):
Around 2 months (with my 37 weekers) we'd diaper and swaddle and nurse to sleep, then put them down together in a minicrib next to our bed and have a bit of grown-up time (TV, dinner, whatever) before going to bed. I would nurse whomever woke first (on good nights it was a 4 or 5 hour stretch), then wake the other to nurse right after (in the hopes of consolidating sleep). For a long time, they spent most of the rest of the night in sleep wedge/positioners in our bed, so we could reach out and pat and soothe them without being UP all the way. If they both woke at the same time, I'd have to get J to help me set up to tandem nurse.
They also sometimes slept in their swings, and later in their bouncy chairs. M has reflux, so we were always working out propped up positions.
Because I was nursing (well, pumping at first) we weren't able to do sleeping in shifts. In addition, my husband is useless at night. He means well, but he is just not helpful. So...I haven't had more than 5 hours of sleep in a row in, well, over a year. And that would be a good night. Usually I get about 3 at a time. However, I don't feel sleep deprived any more most days, though whether that is because I have just adapted I don't know. Maybe it is because they nap at the same time now (at least a few days a week) so I can get a few extra hours that way.
It has gotten better (ususally) and co-sleeping saves my sanity on nights when one baby (always James, sigh) decides to get up every freaking hour.
I can remember (vaguely) the first 4 months passing in a haze of fatigue. I think premmies are especially difficult as they continue to develop outside of the womb (our PICU nurses thankfully warned us about the weird noises that they make.
We really struggled with the whole routine thing until we introduced the evening bath/bottle/cuddle thing. It took about a week to get them used to it (the fussed a LOT in the beginning) but more often than not they'll now sleep from 7pm - 10:30pm, have a bottle and then sleep again until morning (around 6am).
it isn't perfect, sometimes we have to settle them in the middle of the night and I would LOVE it if they slept a little longer in the morning but it does mean that we're getting a decent amount of sleep over the week.
I feel for you and wish that I could offer some more practical advice other than the usual a$$vice but hang in there chicken, there is light at the end of it all!
A
Have you survived the last few nights hun?
Hope that you're feeling a little better (or that you've now reached that point where life becomes surreal and amusing due to the sleep deprivation).
I was nursing AND sleeping in shifts in the beginning. I would just pump before sleeping and nurse right after I woke up. I clearly remember the misery of living life in 3-hour increments. We were just talking about how that was the only way to do it in the beginning. If you want sleep, you gotta take shifts. Once they get better about sleeping and/or nursing lying down in bed, the whole world gets better. I promise it all gets better at around 4 months.
Post a Comment