The Big Baby Sleep Post

I am at the office and I forgot my fucking glasses and right about now the laptop LCD is all spotty and giving me a royal headache. This is pissing me off as it’s happening on top of the fact that once again I got very little, broken up sleep.

And I am so frustrated about not sleeping. I swore when I had these kids I wouldn’t complain, I swore it. I wanted them so badly and had to wait so long I was going to savor every second but fuck all if I can bear this shit any longer with a smile. I can’t do it.

But you know what? My boys individually are not unreasonable in their sleeping, I think, and according to all that I read. They get up either once or twice a night to eat, and according to Weissbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, up until 9 months, that’s reasonable. (I’ve looked into a lot of different schools of thought on the whole sleeping thing, and I tend to go by Weissbluth because of all the stuff out there it seems the most grounded in research. I also have several friends who swear by it.)

It was with great anticipation I awaited the release of his latest work, Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Twins. I advanced ordered! I’m sorry to tell you, it was fairly disappointing. It omits most of the substantive work of the original Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child (which is definitely worth reading), boils down his sleep training ideas into a chapter, and then adds a long section on his surveys of parents of twins, that basically tells you that if you are a) 35 years old or older and b) got pregnant using Assisted Reproductive Technologies (and both would apply to me) that you are more likely to experience Postpartum Depression, have babies who don’t sleep well, and be more frustrated by the experience.  And I’m all like, knowing this helps me how, exactly?

Dr. Weissbluth, did you think I’d be all, hey, wow at least I know that most women in my boat are as fucked as I am? Well I might be thinking that, but you know what? That’s not helping. In fact, it makes me feel like somehow this is all my fault because of my age and my infertility. So, in the future, if you’re going to publish research in a book about helping your kids sleep, how about emphasizing the shit I CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT? Otherwise, I just feel like I’m fucked, and goodness knows that’s not helping my feelings of frustration, is it?

He might be right, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Here’s the deal with my kids’ sleep. Keep in mind they are 5 1/2 months old and were born 5 weeks early, so they’ll be 6 months on 7/22, but developmentally they’ll be 5 months on 7/25. Got that? Good.

Sleep Arrangements:

We have two cribs and a futon in the nursery. The boys sleep mostly in their cribs. Doot sleeps on a Tucker Wedge due to his GERD. If you’re dealing with baby GERD let me tell you, the wedge changed our lives.

One of us sleeps in the nursery, the other in our bedroom. We alternate who sleeps where, because whoever is in the nursery is getting shitty sleep, though nobody in our house is getting unbroken 8 hour sleep except the dog. Why do we do this? Because to prevent SIDS, The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents share a room with their babies for the first six months, but not a bed. We are not huge into bed sharing anyway because we just don’t sleep as well and they don’t sleep as well either, though the cuddling is super nice. But we are not hugely opposed to it, either.

Sleep Routine:

My boys go to sleep at 6:30 at night, and then they wake up once or twice a night to eat. Lately, Bing has been waking up almost exactly 30 minutes after he falls asleep. Then he cries, cries, cries until I come and lay down with him for awhile. I put him next to me on the futon, but mostly ignore him. We lay there in the dark quiet room and he sometimes babbles awhile at the ceiling, then either gets quiet and sleepy or just falls asleep. I try to put him back in his crib while he’s drowsy but still awake so he can learn to soothe himself to sleep. He almost always wakes up as soon as I pick him up to put him back in bed. Usually, he will go back to sleep for several hours then.

Last night Bing woke up at 11:30pm and had a bottle of breast milk, and again at 5:30am, at which point I nursed him and we both fell asleep together on the futon. But at that time in the morning he just doesn’t sleep well with me next to him. He wakes up every twenty minutes, rooting. If I put him back in bed, he cries. But if I leave him on the futon and leave the room for a few minutes, he crashes.

As for Doot, he usually wakes up once in the middle of the night, last night it was 2:30am. He eats, then sleeps until anywhere from 5:30-7:00 in the morning.

So if you look at it this way, they are not doing too badly. They go to bed fairly consistently around 6:30 at night. They each wake up once or twice in the night to eat. But with twins that has us waking up at 11:30, 2:30, 5:30 and then around 7am for their normal wake up time for the day.

Quite frankly, it sucks. Or maybe it’s just my attitude that now sucks. I don’t know anymore.

Yes, I’ve tried “one up, both up” meaning, when one wakes up to eat, wake the other up to eat. But this doesn’t work for us, because Bing is almost always the first one up and if you wake Doot up to feed him, he’ll start waking up every 3 hours. Otherwise Doot can sleep anywhere from 7-10 hours overnight. We get up less overall if we don’t wake the babies up. Period.

How about “Crying it Out” (CIO) versus attachment parenting, etc?

I will admit, we tried some crying it out with some mixed results.

First of all, Doot usually cries a little bit every time we put him down to sleep. But he cries for less than 5 minutes and then finds his thumb and falls sweetly, soundly asleep. I am certain he’s crying simply because he’s far too tired, and so help me jesus, I know exactly how the kid feels.

Bing is a different story. We were letting him cry it out, and he was crying about 30 minutes, then falling deeply asleep. It was very painful to let him cry for so long, but it seemed to be working so we stuck with it. Some nights he’d cry for 30 minutes, some nights not at all.

Then he got a little tooth poking through on the bottom, and he has been getting HYSTERICAL in the crib. Like I cannot bear. Like I could hear him coughing, gagging, sputtering from all the hysterical crying (though Doot, god love him, slumbers oblivious just four feet away).

So I go to him then, after about 30 minutes of unbearable torture for me, and I pick him up and he sees me and just gives me this wild, excited grin like I am Lady Madonna herself and I’m just like, kid, I love you so much it hurts.

We lay down on the futon, he babbles at the shadows for several minutes and I just relax, listening to him talk himself down.

Okay, I’m not complaining.