Sleepless nights no more

Now that the kids are almost 11 months old, I am surprised that people keep asking:

Are you getting much sleep?
Are the kids sleeping through the night?

I'm surprised because it has been almost seven months since we got them to sleep through the night.

Now, to be clear, those first four months were anything but easy, and every night without sleep was spent longing for the night when we could go to bed and not have to get up until morning.

It was a long road. It started with the schedule. It started with knowing that attachment parenting really wasn't practical with twins. Oh, sure, there are three or four paragraphs in Dr. Sears' book that talk about it, the most comical being the suggestion that one wears one baby in a sling while holding the other baby in one's arms (sure, and then what? stand around for a few hours?). It also started with the experience of friends who gave us a copy of Babywise and said they had their daughter sleeping through the night at six and a half weeks using that method.

Babywise is controversial. First off, it is backed by Fundies, and that's enough for some people to forget about it right there (in fact, when my mother pointed this fact out to me, I read to her the table of contents as "Feeding Philosophies, Babies and Sleep, Facts on Feeding, Your Baby and our savior Jesus Christ, Monitoring your Baby's growth" -- the Jesus reference was a joke.) But the main criticism is how sharply it contrasts with the notions central to attachment parenting.

With the foundation of a schedule and a full, quality feeding philosophy, it wasn't too inconsistent for us to consider the basic pattern they suggested:

• Baby wakes up
• Feed Baby/Change Baby
• Playtime (during the day)
• Wind down ritual
• Put Baby down awake but drowsy

This last point is part of the controversy, but also very practical for parents of twins. If your preference is to nurse your baby to sleep, you would always need a second pair of hands to allow you move one baby to the crib while the other is still nursing or also asleep. One can more easily handle one baby at a time if it involves some rocking and reading and then putting them down.

Initially, this worked pretty well, and they both napped well. At some point, however, E decided that she would rather be held than sleep during the scant hour and a half we had to prepare and eat dinner for ourselves, and then we decided that we were conditioning her to fuss and cry by attending to her in that way when she should be napping, so we tried letting her cry during that nap so we could eat. Within a few days, she was back to sleeping, but a) this is controversial, and b) there is nothing harder for me in this world than to listen to my daughter (or son) cry and not do anything about it.

However, this method did not get us to "sleeping through the night" in 6 weeks, nor in 10 weeks (as the Babywise authors attest is the average for Babywise adherents). Something else must be tried.

Part two will address how we got from here to nighttime sleeping bliss.

Feeding the monster(s)

No, the kids aren't monsters, not at all.

The next most frequent question we got, as some of our peer-new-parents found the new mom's going back to work and wanting to switch their children to the bottle, was:

How did you get your kids to take the bottle?

This goes to the question of feeding, and as I mentioned in the previous post, we had a terrific lactation consultant to get us on that path. The 8-feedings per day schedule that BG had drawn up suggested, right up front, that we would feed one baby by bottle and one by breast, starting as early as the second week. BG's intent here was to make sure that both mother and child had a quality feeding, undistracted with excellent bonding. By only having 8 feedings per day, the baby would certainly be hungry, and would certainly be getting a full feeding. This was important nutritionally: the first milk to be let down during a feeding is the foremilk (mostly watery) and is followed by the hind-milk (richer, with more calories). Hence, the long, quality feeding would assure a healthy diet.

However, the baby not being fed by breast would be fed by bottle, and with JM's commitment to breast milk, that meant that right away, JM would hook herself up to a breast-pump after every feeding, and pump whatever was left out of the breast the baby fed on and whatever was present in the other breast.

BG also taught us (both) bottle feeding technique. When she had first told us about this approach, I had done just enough reading to learn the term "nipple confusion". Her reply was that it is a matter of technique. In Great Britain (where she is from), no one talks about nipple confusion because they know how to feed a baby by bottle. In short, don't just jam it in her mouth and expect results. Initially, you wet the baby's lips with a little milk from the bottle and wait for her to open her mouth. If she doesn't open her mouth, don't force the bottle in there. Once she opens, insert gently, pointing the bottle at the roof of her mouth so she has to engage her tongue upwards to suck, more similar to how she has to work at the breast. Done.

So we didn't really have advice for parents who wanted to introduce a bottle, especially a formula one, at any point later than we did, because from our perspective, we had to introduce a bottle right away, we chose to go with pumped breast milk, and they both took it without a problem. At this point, they still do and always have, and they are almost eleven months old.

Truly, JM's commitment to breast feeding is unusual. She has been diligent with the pump, and has always produced enough milk to feed both our children. It didn't look possible for a while, especially during some initial growth spurts, but eventually, a pattern emerged. She's going to go a whole year providing all of their milk herself. Quite an accomplishment!