Obviously no two babies are the same. My twins are different from each other in almost every way. They have their similarities. They both think the changing table is hilarious. They look up at the wall words and shadows on the wall and laugh it up. Oh to see through their eyes for one day! They are also the same in they they seem to fall into my schedule and routine easily.
We haven't actually started the steps I shared from the book in my last post. I am still working up to 4 hours in between feedings. We are at 3.5 hours now, but just to get myself used to some of the procedures, for lack of a better word, I have started following many "rules" from the book.
Here is one challenge we've already encountered with both twins: What to do if they wake up too early? The transition schedule, the schedule I came up with for five, 3.5 hour feedings, begins at 7-7:30am. Friday morning one of the twins began crying around 5am. We waited a couple minutes and when she hadn't stopped we went into the nursery to see if we could pacify her and get her back to sleep. Here's where their differences come in. It seems that she can deal with hunger a lot better than her brother. Obviously at 5am it's been 8 hours or so since she's eaten and if we got her up she'd take a bottle no problem. But she's also still sleepy, and with her, on this morning, sleep won. We put her pacifier in her mouth and patted her for a couple minutes and she began to go back to sleep she woke up one more time, but was again pacified and didn't wake up again until we woke both of them to eat later that morning. So what would we have done if she hadn't been pacified? That is answered by what happened with the other twin the following night, in which he woke up, I believe because of a wet diaper. On any other night this wouldn't have been a problem, but we had a babysitter on this night who we neglected to tell to put disposables on the twins before putting them to bed for the night. They wear cloth diapers during the day, which aren't absorbent enough to last all night (a topic for another blog). He woke up with wet pajamas at 5:30am. Even if we hadn't had to wake him up more by changing his diaper and PJs I still don't think he would have been satisfied to suck on the pacifier. When he would wake up in the night weeks prior to this incident he would be almost hysterical until the bottle was put in his mouth, and this morning was no different. What can I say, he loves his food! So we had to give him something to get him back to sleep until the scheduled feeding. Taking the advice of the book I gave him a "snack." Two ounces to tide him over a couple more hours. He took the two ounces easily and went back to sleep. Success! Obviously we want to be able to get him back asleep without feeding him, but this was a special situation. He probably wouldn't have been up if he hadn't had wet PJs.
If he had been doing this constantly for any other reason we would follow the books' advice and slowly decrease the amount of "snack" each night and try to get him to last a little longer each night using the pacifier until he made it to the scheduled time. And by the way, don't you know he still pretty much ate his whole 6 ounce bottle I would normally feed him without the snack later that morning. That boy is going to be moving up those percentiles quickly!
I'm pretty confident that once we actually begin the steps toward 12 hours' sleep at night we will have success. Naps will be another issue, although those are getting better every day!
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