Hey there fellow mamas! I am super excited to put words on paper today while writing this blog post on SLEEP. This has been easily the most requested topic for me to write about. So, without further ado, this is OUR experience with all things sleep related with the twins.
Encouraging Independent Sleepers:
Let’s talk about sleep associations, and how to encourage “Positive” sleep associations to help your baby(ies) be independent sleepers. A sleep association is basically any action that helps your baby fall asleep. There are two main categorizes of sleep associations, Negative and Positive. Negative sleep associations require somebody to do something for the baby, such as nursing or rocking your baby to sleep. On the other hand, Positive sleep associations are things that babies can do on their own to “self-soothe.”
The problem with NSA is if/when your baby wakes up in the middle of the night they can’t figure out how to get back to sleep without the NSA (AKA without you nursing/rocking them back to sleep). Here are some examples of Negative and Positive sleep associations.
Negative Sleep Associations
Nursing/bottle feeding your baby to sleep
Rocking your baby to sleep
Letting your baby sleep in your arms/bed with you
Using the car/stroller to help your baby fall sleep
Positive Sleep Associations (Self-soothing)
Sucking on their thumb or fingers
Rocking themselves side to side
Kicking their legs up in the fetal position
Humming/singing to themselves
If something in the Negative sleep association list ticked a box for you, don’t worry, it’s never too late to address a NSA (it just may be a longer process as time goes on.) In fact, you don’t even really have to worry about sleep associations for the first 3 months, but by the time they hit the 3 to 4-month mark, they are able to do some, if not all, of the PSA listed above, and are therefore capable of independent sleeping.
For AJ and I, we had done our research and heard all about P/NSA and wanted to lay the foundation to help the twins be independent sleepers from day one. Even though you don’t have to worry about NSA until 3+m, we didn’t want to make it OUR habit of letting our baby sleep on us/in our arms, while feeding, or while rocking. So, from the time we brought them home from the hospital we had the babies sleep in their separate bassinets for bedtime AND naps, and we always put them down awake. We also followed an Eat, Play, Sleep schedule so that the twins wouldn’t nurse right before naps and associate nursing with sleep.
Sleep Training
Okay, so now we know about Positive and Negative sleep associations, but how do we stop Negative sleep associations (parent intervention,) and encourage positive ones (self-soothing)?
The term Sleep Training is popular these days. Personally, I hate the term, because it makes me think of letting a baby cry for hours on end. But, sleep training does not have to mean letting your baby cry for extended periods of time, in fact, I hope this is not the case for you!
What sleep training IS is helping your baby discover their own Positive Sleep Associations and learn how to self soothe. In our household, we never let the twins cry for longer than 5-10 minutes before we go in and soothe them. We try our best to NOT pick up the twins. Instead, we gently pat their chests, “shh” them, tell them it’s going to be okay, sing a lullaby etc.
They say once NSA are taken out of the picture, you’ll notice your baby naturally develop their own PSA. For us, we didn’t have many NSA tendencies to quit doing on a regular basis, but we DID notice the twins start to develop their own PSA at around 3 months of age. Duncan’s PSA are sucking on his hand and turning on his side, Delaney’s PSA are singing to herself, sucking on her palm while covering the rest of her face with her hand/fingers, and kicking her legs up into the fetal position.
I KNOW one of the main reasons the babies are good sleepers and sleep through the night is because when they do wake in the middle of the night between REM cycles, they can use their PSA to soothe themselves back to sleep. They don’t need AJ or I to come help them get back to sleep.
Wake Windows and Naps:
Apart from encouraging the twins to be independent sleepers and being educated on P/NSA, we also are careful to follow the twin’s age-appropriate “wake windows”. Wake windows are the time the babies are awake between naps. Here are general guidelines based upon your baby's age:
Birth to 12 weeks: 60 to 90 minutes
3 to 4 Months: 75 to 120 minutes
5 to 6 Months: 2 to 3 hours
7 to 14 Months: 3 to 4 hours
14 to 24 Months: 5 to 6 hours
If your baby is showing sleepy cues before it is time for their next nap, I encourage you to try and keep your baby awake for a little longer past their first signs of getting tired. For us, when the twins start to get fussy before their wake window is over, we go outside and look at the trees. This always holds them over an extra 15-20 minutes before nap time.
Normally, if your baby is fighting taking a nap, they haven’t been up long enough, and they will be 1. hard to put down and 2. their nap will be SHORT. Ideally, we need to find the sweet spot between being tired enough to take a good nap, but not so OVER tired that nap time turns into World War III. So, it helps to know your baby’s age appropriate wake window, and use that as a guide for your baby’s nap schedule, and then adjust as needed.
For us, the twins just turned 5 months, so we are keeping them up around 2 hours at a time between naps. They currently have a short catnap (maybe 30 minutes) on our morning walk in the stroller, two afternoon naps (about one hour each) and one little catnap in the evening to hold them over before bedtime between 7:30-8:00PM. The last little catnap is a STRUGGLE, but the twins need this catnap to make it to bedtime, otherwise they get overtired and our bedtime routine turns into a bucket of tears (mine included). Eventually, we will try to push their afternoon nap a little later and cut this catnap before bedtime out completely. Our nap schedule looks something like this:
8AM wake up
9:30-10:00 catnap in stroller
12:00-1:00 nap
3:00-4:00 nap
6:00-6:30 catnap
Between 7:30-8:00pm bedtime
Sleep Time Line/Transitions:
Twin Bassinets
From 0-3 months the twins slept in separate side-by-side bassinets that are part of the Baby Trend Twin Nursery Center. This nursery center was set up in AJ’s and my room at the end of our bed.
Transition to Cribs
When the twins were mostly sleeping through the night, at around 3 months, we decided to transition them out of their bassinets and into their own room, in their own separate cribs. At this point they were still waking for a “snooze button” feed around 5AM, and they would go back down until 7:30-8:00AM.
To transition them from bassinets to sleeping in their own room in cribs, we started by taking the bassinets out of the pack-n-play that they clip into, and setting the bassinets IN their cribs. We let them sleep like this for 1-2 days before taking the bassinets out in the morning and letting them sleep directly in their crib for all their naps that day. They did well sleeping in their cribs for naps, so we let them sleep directly in their cribs overnight from that day on, and they did great with the transition!
Transition Out of Swaddles
After we got through the leap from their bassinets to their cribs, it was time to tackle another transition -- the transition out of their swaddles and into their sleepsacks. Check out more about how we handled this transition in my blog post: Transitioning out of the Swaddle.
Bedtime Routine
Bath
Diaper
Dim Light
Nurse
Lullaby music/singing
Lotion
Pajamas
Sound Machine
Rock for a minute or two
Bed
Note: We always put our babies down awake
NOTE:
Pacifiers: We never use pacifiers for sleep. I know there is a lot of debate about pacifiers actually being a SIDS preventer, but I haven’t done enough research on this to side one way or the other on this topic. But, for us, we didn’t want a pacifier to be a “crutch” and, our babies were (are!) terrible about keeping a pacifier in their mouths, so when we attempted this technique a couple times in ended up just being a hassle.
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