Oh, that haze!

Okay, so we meant to get to this blog sooner. That's what it is like having kids, I guess.

I think the first topic I'd like to address is schedule. Fairly common questions from other parents:

Are they on a schedule?, or
How did you get them on a schedule?

I found the second one particularly amusing, because it usually came from a parent of a child, a singleton (child), who now wants to get their child on a schedule. And hence, an immediate differentiator between parents of multiples and parents of one (at a time).

First, can you even imagine what it would be like to have two infants who slept and ate at different times, unpredictably? No? Well, then try this: go to your local playground and pick two toddlers at random. Watch them. Both of them. At the same time. Never lose focus on either of them for a moment. Well, start counting to yourself the moments when you can only really watch one at a time. Do this for as long as it takes to realize, in some small part, how chaotic it is to have two living beings demanding your attention who are not coordinated in their requests.

So I think it is safe to say that we never considered the idea that we'd just play it by ear and see what would happen. Parents of one at a time probably have a choice in this, where I feel like it wasn't really much of a choice for us.

It is a fair question to ask how we got our kids on a schedule, and it starts about two months before they were born.

JM is a planner. JM believes on getting advice ahead of time. JM found a lactation consultant (BG) and spoke to her ahead of time. BG's advice was, on the whole, incredibly helpful, and it started with a suggested schedule. The schedule was for when the children were two to four weeks old, and worked on a 3-hour interval, coming up to 8 feedings a day. There is an important note here, in that in the hospital, we were told that we should aim for 10-12 feedings a day. Again, can you imagine feeding two babies 10-12 times a day?

(Part of parcel of the 8 feedings-a-day on a 3 hour interval plan is a philosophy around feeding, which will be the next post).

So, right from the start, probably starting in the afternoon after the kids were delivered, JM would feed them (initially, one then the other) every three hours. We'd wake them if it was time to eat, and we wouldn't nurse them in between.

And, poof: they were on a schedule.

This lasted, the 3 hour schedule, including wake-em-at-night, for at least 5 weeks, and then maintained a 3 hour daytime interval for another 5 or more weeks.

And it worked pretty well!