Training your twins or triplets or more how to sleep is one of the most biggest challenges for new parents. So while I was going through our blog archives I found this great little blog post from one or our past guest bloggers, Rebecca. This is something I definitely resonated with. Enjoy!

Ah, sleep…the endless question that has no answer.

Do they sleep through the night?
Do they nap well?
Do they wake each other up?
Did you try swaddling?
Do you have a noise machine?
Do they sleep in your room?

Where do they sleep?  The crib?  A bassinet?  The swing?  The car seat (no, never the car seat…bad Mommy)?  The glider thing?  On you?  On your husband?

These questions seem endless for a certain amount of time.  Then they stop.  No one asks about sleep at some point.  No one cares anymore.  They’re tired of asking and tired of hearing the truth.

Because the truth sucks.

Thankfully for you guys, I’m not tired of talking about sleep because there are times, yes, even now, at almost 4-years old, that I get terrible sleep.

And no one wants to hear about it.

But you do, don’t you…admit it…you do.

Here are our stages of sleep:

No sleep – Birth through “you don’t have to wake to feed anymore”

  • Wake to feed (a phrase that I only heard after giving birth…what a “lovely” surprise).
  • Wake one up because the other one is up and you’ll be damned if you’re going to wake up again in an hour to feed the other one.
  • Randomly spitting binks out throughout the night.
  • Dirty diapers.
  • Wet diapers.
  • Diapers that babies think are wet/dirty, but actually have nothing in them.
  • Feeding.
  • Feeding.
  • Feeding.
  • Rocking.
  • Rocking.
  • Rocking.

More sleep – “you don’t have to wake to feed anymore” through sleep regressions

  • You don’t have to set an alarm for 3 AM anymore.
  • You are surprised when you get more than 5 hours in a row.
  • Someone tells you that a baby sleeping through the night is official when they’ve hit 6 hours in a row…doesn’t matter that it could be from 7 PM to 1 AM.  If it’s 6 hours, they’ve slept through the night.
  • Naps start to regulate.
  • You can sleep train if you so choose (trust me, I’m not getting into that debate, but Ferber is my friend).
  • You drop from 3 naps to 2 naps, but you don’t really mind.
  • Going to bed at 8:30 no longer seems absolutely ridiculous.
  • Sometimes you can get up, change a diaper, and put them back to bed without feeding them.
  • Sometimes you can give them back their binks (50,000,000 times in a row) without feeding them.
  • You’re no longer familiar with the neighborhood noises at 4 AM like you were a few weeks ago.

Less sleep – Ummmmm…sleep regressions?  NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT THESE!!!

  • Your babies stop sleeping…for.no.good.reason.
  • They won’t nap.
  • They won’t sleep more than 1.5 hours at night (if you’re lucky).
  • You lament about this on your blog or FB and people talk about these sleep regressions like they’re TOTALLY NORMAL!  Well, they’re not, my friends…they’re ridiculous.
  • There is no rhyme or reason.
  • No matter what you do, it doesn’t matter.
  • Feed them.
  • Rock them.
  • Give them massages.
  • Swaddle them.
  • Swing them.
  • Ignore them.
  • It doesn’t matter until they pass out from pure exhaustion…and you’re not far behind.

Different sleep – sometime around two and a half through forever!!

  • So, there they were, sleeping through the nap, down to one nap…things were finally regulating.
  • Then Girl-Crazy didn’t want to nap anymore and thought it was absolutely hysterical to keep Boy-Crazy (who really needs his naps) awake.
  • She was wrong.  Whenever she kept him awake at nap time, not only did I spend that time in cold sweats, barging up and down the stairs like a psycho, and wishing that she’d just stop, but then the night terrors started.
  • Have you ever heard of night terrors?  They’re just lovely…whenever a sleep pattern is interrupted, a child will have night terrors which consist of horrific screaming and thrashing around in the middle of the night.  Oh, and you’re not supposed to wake the child or even touch him because that could make it worse.
  • Then, you look over at the child who caused this chaos and she’s peacefully sleeping through the entire episode.
  • Then you decide that it’s time for separate rooms.  Boy-Crazy needs to sleep, the night terrors need to end, Girl Crazy is evil.
  • So different sleep calls for different sleeping spaces.  You decide to split them up.
  • People ask if you’re sure.
  • People ask if they’ll be lonely.
  • People ask if you’re sure.
  • Then you realize you didn’t purchase the rails for the toddler bed.
  • Then you realize that moving beds is hard.
  • Then you realize that you need to buy sheets…and a mattress…and comforters…and you’re broke.
  • However, it is totally worth it because for the first time in a while, you get good quiet naps and children sleeping through the night.

So, what happens in your house?  Are they finally on the same sleep schedule?  Have you hit the dreaded regressions?  Have you split them up yet?

For more on How to Sleep Train Twins check out our review here

Facebook-Twitter-Sleep-Train-Twins

This book was written for the sleep-deprived parents of twin babies—and if you are the parents of twins, you exactly what it’s like. You wander through your day, but you’re not quite “with it.”

You think about sleep, but it seems to be some fabulous, foreign thing you may never get to experience again! Once you finally manage to get both babies to sleep at the same time, one loses his pacifier or wets his nappy, wakes crying, thus waking the previously slumbering sibling, and the cycle restarts. Author Nina Garcia has created a wonderful sleep-training system that I believe is guaranteed to work!

Through her tried and true method, she has sleep trained single babies, one at a time, and has brought a similar method, modified to accommodate sets of two. After only a week, she had her twins sleeping 12 hours at a time—all the way through the night! Not only does this invaluable book teach you how to sleep train for nighttime slumber, but also naps. It also comes with a sleep-tracker to record the progress and an invitation to join her private Facebook group—or group therapy for sleepy parents who are now on the road to getting their nights and their good mood and good health back through a good night’s sleep!