Sleeping Through the Night, More or Less

Two months ago, I wrote about how we were still dealing with two nighttime feedings for each of the girls. Since then, there have been quite a few changes in their sleeping and eating schedule. The two nighttime feedings became just one feeding–unfortunately, that one feeding tended to be sometime between 1 to 3 am. We did a brief experiment of waking them up and feeding them at 11 pm to try to circumvent the 1 to 3 am feeding, which worked some of the time. Often, however, they wouldn’t be awake enough to eat, and it seemed kind of mean to drag them out of bed and force a bottle into their mouths. Then, we noticed that Miranda didn’t need the middle-of-the-night feeding anymore, and we would only get Eleanor up to eat. By this point, the eating schedule consisted of a bottle at 6 am, 11 am, and 4 pm for both of them, the fourth bottle at 7pm for Miranda, and sometime around midnight for Eleanor. The strange timing of the fourth bottle had to do with when they woke up after the 4 pm feeding. Miranda would sleep briefly from about 5:30 pm until 7 pm, but Eleanor would often sleep until we dragged her out of bed at midnight. When we let her wake up on her own, she would often wake up at 3 am or so, which means she was going without a bottle from 4 pm until 3 am. At this point, we realized that she should be able to go from 7 pm until 6 am like Miranda.

So, we started to keep them awake after 4 pm until their bath and bedtime bottle at about 7 pm, and success! They adjusted to a 7:30 pm bedtime and 6 am waking time. We’ve been on this schedule for a few weeks now, and overall, it’s been going pretty well. Unfortunately, there are times when they get up too early, like 4:30 am, so I’ve been getting up, but not going to them until 5:45 am or so. I don’t want them getting used to getting attention from me before 5 am. When they do get up at 4:30 am, they’re not crying, just making noise, with the occasional “why aren’t you picking me up?” yell. Unfortunately this means my day starts at 4:30 am, since after I feed them, it’s time for me to get ready for work. By the evening, I’m keeling over at 8:30 pm or so, and Bernard has been making fun of my 9 pm bedtime. He’s often up until 1 am or later, so our sleeping schedule is now shifted by 4-5 hours from each other.

The other new thing is that they love rolling over in their cribs, and have now taken to sleeping on their stomachs. We were extremely strict about always putting them to sleep on their backs, to the point where there was some conflict between Bernard and my mother. (She would say, “But Agnes always slept on her stomach, and she didn’t suffocate.”) Now that they’re rolling over so easily though, making them sleep on their backs would involve us going into their room every 5 minutes to flip them back over. So, stomach sleeping it is.

This is a picture of Miranda sleeping on her stomach.