Travel!

Ah, to travel. To experience relaxation in the warmth of a tropical sun. To sit:




thusly...

Notice something missing from that picture? Yes! No children!

We took a glorious four-night vacation to Mexico last week, and didn't take the kids. We pushed the limits of their grandparents' generosity and escaped by ourselves.

Not that we didn't imagine what it would have been like to have the kids along, but again, I feel like having more than one made it the hard part. A couple of factors:

• Sleep is vital: Our rituals to get the kids fed and to bed start each evening by 5:45pm, and it is nearly impossible to feed both us and them at such an early hour and then get them to bed before one or more of them overloads. In fact, we have yet to take our kids to dinner with us at a restaurant. However, with just one, we might be more willing to take some risks with sleep patterns, and more able to feed one child while eating dinner at a restaurant ourselves.
• Moving two kids around is work: Our main mode of transportation while we were in Mexico was walking, and the road between our hotel and town was rough and unpaved. I can't imagine our double stroller (which isn't one of those ultra-big-wheeled-sport-utility-jobbies) navigating that road even once. And having each of us constantly carrying a 24+ pound baby around, well, that's just not my idea of a vacation.

That said, we saw plenty of parents with kids, just not kids the age of our kids (pre-walking but post one year). We even saw parents with twins (aged just five months), but those twins barely even turned over, so they mostly lay them on a chaise lounge next to them and let them nap. So while we may return there with them, it won't be until they are older.

Sharing is fun! It just involves a lot of crying.

When N learned to crawl, he would often crawl over to his sister and take whatever she was holding out of her hands, probably because whatever object is moving is the most attractive. Sometimes, this would mean that his head was in her lap, N not having figured out that he was capable of a grab-n-go. Hence, N's head became the moving object, and E would grab fistfuls of N's hair. Let the screaming begin!

Now, E has learned how to take things back from N, something she does from time to time. N has yet to make this into an opportunity to learn about tug-o-war: he just cries in reaction.

Hence, learning to share.

Yesterday morning, E was holding a giant blueberry toy (about the size of a medium tomato). N took the blueberry, E took it back, and N started crying. JM saw this as an opportunity to teach sharing, which involves the parent shuttling the contested toy back and forth between the children, explaining what is happening, and counting out loud the time of the sharing interval. It sounds like this:

• (N is crying because E has taken the blueberry)
• "E, it is N's turn."
• (E immediately starts to cry as JM takes the blueberry and hands it to N).
• "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Now it is E's turn."
• (N immediately starts to cry as JM returns the blueberry to E. E continues to cry for a few seconds once regaining possession.)
• Repeat over an over again until B goes mad.

I don't imagine this is common for parents of two children of different ages. If that's the case, I would imagine that the older of the two children has learned a bit about sharing (perhaps a similar exercise), and can be verbally encouraged to share with the less comprehending younger sibling. Having two children who do not understand sharing seems a bit of a challenge.

Comparisons, comparisons

JM and I were watching our home movie of the day our kids were born recently, and I'm always struck by the words the nurse said while attending to N in the nursery, weighing, measuring, and cleaning N. The nurse, after noting that she was born a twin at just three pounds and seeing what size both N and E were, said:

He's bigger! Yep, he's bigger. But, never compare them. Never compare.

I laugh about the contrast: first, she compares them, then, she exhorts me to never do just that.

Of course, there is no resisting comparing them, and at this stage and age, so long as it is without judgment, it seems harmless enough. It is fascinating because it reinforces for us how they are different -- their environment and how we treat them is virtually the same, so any differences we observe are specific to who they are, and largely driven by biology!

• N has sensitive skin, while E does not
  
• N outweighed E until he started to be much more physically active, and then E caught up and outweighed N, until their most recent checkup: N is now heavier than E again
• E was the first to "talk"
• N was the first to crawl, and E would crawl three months later
• E, most times, seems to be the "easy baby"
• E sleeps more
• N stands in his crib and jumps up and down when I enter the nursery in the morning, while E is usually slower to become active
• N seems more emotionally sensitive at this point

I suppose that parents of two children are always tempted to make comparisons, but unless those children are twins, the comparison is usually based upon memory, and so not as obvious and right in front of you, all the time. It provides a little lab of observation, and it is a lot of fun.

Part Two: Sleepless Nights no more

I left off when kids were 10 or so weeks old.

Just to recap the factors in the previous post:

• Schedule
• Full Feeding philosophy
• Routine

Our occasional nighttime help suggested a couple of techniques:

1. The Dream Feed: before we go to bed, gently pick up baby and feed him or her and them put them right back down (no diaper change, no burping)
   
2. The Hold Off: when baby wakes up, soothe, but don't feed him or her until 30 minutes or baby goes back to sleep.

Neither of these things worked one bit. Oh, sure, E would sometimes sleep four or five hours, which was quite a bit longer than N, but eventually, this began to wear upon us, because we were getting less sleep than before. And, I took our logs of the sleep patterns and ran some statistics which proved that any perceived difference between before we tried these techniques and after were imagined or based upon discarding non-conforming evidence.

So, we started to read Dr. Weisbluth's seminal work, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. Again, a controversial figure, in that the advice to use the "extinction" method (what a word for it!) involves letting your baby cry. (I've linked above to the Amazon.com reviews since there are detractors and supporters there). This advice, plus the general wisdom that your baby must be 12 pounds and four months old before they are ready for this, had as waiting for the day they turned four months old.

"Sleep Training" via "Cry it out"

I will say right off: the buildup was worse than the actual experience. We were convinced that it would be torture, that they'd cry and cry and cry and every night would be a nightmare for us. We asked our doctor if this was going to harm them (he said no). We set up in advance the number of days we'd try this before giving up (5). We queued up bad movies on TiVo since we were pretty sure we couldn't sleep through the crying. We shared our anxiety with each other. We fretted about it for an entire month.

Friday, the day we started.

To this point, E and N had shared a crib. We had discovered in the hospital, on the first day, that when they were next to each other in the bassinet, they calmed down quickly. We thought that if we weren't going to come in and pick up the crying baby, eventually, the crying baby would wake his or her sibling. So we decided to give E, the better nighttime sleeper, the harder assignment: we put her in a pack-n-play in a different room. We gave them the Dream Feed, went to bed, and hoped for peace.

2:00 am: N cried for about five minutes

2:30 am: E started to cry.

3:30 am: E was still crying, and N joined in. We got up and started watching a bad movie.

3:45 am: N stopped crying.

4:30 am: E stopped crying. We went back to bed.

6:00 am: N woke up.

Saturday.

We felt like Friday wasn't as bad as we had expected. First of all, N only cried for 5 minutes one time and 15 minutes a second time, and we were convinced he would be the tougher one to get to sleep. E sure did work her lungs, and two hours seemed like forever, but she showed no ill effects the next day and the experience didn't drive us crazy after all. I think we were too tired to get too worked up.

2:45 am: N cried for five minutes.

4:15 am: E cried for five minutes.

4:30 am: N cried for five minutes.

5:40 am: N started crying.

6:00 am: E started crying, and we picked them up for breakfast time.

This felt like immediate improvement. No crying lasting more than 5 minutes, and we made it through the night without getting out of bed.

Sunday.

After putting them to bed and the dream feeds, we hoped for the best.

2:00 am: N cried for five minutes.

We awoke in the morning surprised. We hadn't heard E cry at all! N barely cried! Holy cow, we had a full night's rest!

By the end of the week, we had returned them both to the same crib, dropped the Dream Feed, and suddenly, we had lives again. We were putting the kids down at 7 pm, having dinner, relaxing, going to bed, and sleeping all night! We became vigilant: no going into the nursery after we put them to bed! Sometimes, one of them might cry within the first hour or so, but not for very long.

Since then, we've had only four nights where they didn't sleep through:

1. An extremely hot night (for San Francisco)
2. N rolled over and pinned E, causing her to wake up and cry
3. The next night, same thing. We countered by setting up the second crib and putting them in different cribs from then on.
4. (I forget the fourth one...)

All told, it now feels like a very long time ago, and we feel very fortunate that we have developed a solid enough routine that the kids seem to know what to expect. From time to time, they won't fall asleep right away, or wake up crying for a bit, but we've reached the point where we no longer even note the passage of those few minutes. The calculus is like this:

If we go in there, pick up our child, soothe our child, calm the child, get the child drowsy again and put them back down, he or she may very well cry again when we leave the nursery, and it'll be about twenty five minutes before they fall back asleep.

If, however, we leave them be, they'll be back asleep in about five minutes.

So there you have it. Two sleeping babies, one family life that has advanced into the next stage.

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.