We have the best babies, EVAH!
Okay, now that I’ve got THAT out of the way, here’s the latest on my sleeping beauties.
We usually put the boys to bed at around 7 p.m. Much to our delight, they’ve started sleeping SOLID through the night. No more waking up at 11 p.m., then 11:45 p.m., 12:45 a.m., 1:00 a.m… you get the picture. They’re sleeping soundly. And they keep going. And going. And going, ’til 7 a.m., 8 a.m…. even 9 a.m. on occasion. Yep, 9 A.M.! I actually wake up before them without an alarm! It’s just nuts.
Then, I put them down for their morning nap two hours later and they sleep for almost 2 more hours! Up for lunch – a couple of hours – and WHAM-O! they go back down for another 1 1/2 hours / 2 hours.
It’s just nuts! These guys sleep better than Rip Van Winkle on Ambian.
It’s so fantatsic and I don’t want to sound ungrateful but the trouble with all this great snooziness is that we don’t ever get out of the bloody house. Two hours between naps is just enough time to get out of bed, nurse, play a little on the floor, eat some solid food and get back into bed. They live the lives of welfare bums, for cripe’s sake.
I’m not going to complain though. Really I’m not, because I know that I’ve got it good. Very good. And it will change. It ALWAYS changes. And then I’ll be wistfully thinking back to the time when they used to sleep and how life was perfect then.
In other news, they’ve graduated from napping in their swings to napping in their cribs. Yes, I have to confess that at 9 and a half months they were STILL taking all of their naps in their swings. They were perfectly okay sleeping nights in the cribs (or the co-sleeper) but for some reason napping required that little breeze through their hair and the clickety clack of a .003 horsepower motor churning away. The only way they would nap more than half an hour was to be rocking in their swings.
When they were about 2 months old, I read Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child at the recommendation of someone “who should know” in the Marin Parents of Multiples Club. The book, while widely hailed, simply made me feel totally inept. It made the whole notion of sleeping babies seem like an insurmountable feat with rigid rules that should not be messed with lest your children grow up to be serial killers or high school drop outs. Seriously, there were so many rules that I thought of creating a cheat sheet just so I could remember them all.
The first thing I did was try to make the babies nap in their cribs because the venerable Dr. Weissbluth said my children would be miserable if they slept in motion. I spent 3 or 4 days crying right along side them every time I would put them down. They HATED being left in their cribs at nap time. If I was lucky, they slept 30 minutes and then all hell would break loose. And it goes without saying that if one tiny baby starts to scream his soft little head off, another tiny baby will soon follow suit. It was hell. But I kept thinking: “the doctor says…”. Unfotunatly, what the the venerable Doctor failed to address was the question of whether it is better to get NO rest as opposed to rest in motion.
Well, then I got another book: The No-Cry Nap Solution. By this point, I was feeling desperately inadequate. The babies were tired and I felt like a failure. I wasn’t really in the mood for more advice but, frankly, this book just told me what I wanted to hear: do whatever it takes to make your babies sleep. If that means swinging, then swing away. And so began their lifelong (albeit short lifelong) swing habit. We would go into their darkened room and plop them into their respective swings and with a push of a button and a little shove, they’d be off into the arms of Orpheus. It worked like a charm. To the point that they would get excited when we put them in the swings. Excited to nap! Beat that, you #$*&%-ing experts!
Well, no more. A couple of weeks ago, for the first time since they were, I dunno, 3 months old, I put them in their cribs to nap. And they were happy! No fussing. No crying. Just a nice smile and off they went rolling over to sleep on their sides. For hours and hours.
After ALL my worrying about how I would ever transition them out of there, they just did it… they took it lying down.
PS: And how amazing is it that both boys made the transition at the same time?? BEST BABIES, EVAHHHH, I tell ya!
