Twins Blog: Sleep Schedule
February 22, 2011, By Josh Katzowitz 1 comment
In the first month after our twins came home from the hospital, life, as I could have expected, was filled with lots of feeding, lots of diaper-changing and lots of caffeine-guzzling. And not much sleep.
This, of course, does not make us unique. Parents of singletons don’t get sleep, parents of triplets don’t get sleep, we don’t get sleep.
But you adjust. You drink your coffee, you force your eyes open while working and you grab a cat-nap whenever you can. In your car on your lunch break. On this very chair in front of this very keyboard. After a while, you can live on four hours of sleep a night. Sure, every once in a while, the thought hits you like a grenade to the temple where you groggily discover, “Holy smokes, I’m tired.” And sure no sleep equals no fun, but this is one plank nearly every parent has to walk.
With twins, though, we needed a plan. We needed to find a way to keep them on the same feeding and sleeping schedules. Ask any twin parent for advice about how to raise them as infants, and this is likely the first thing they’ll say: KEEP THEM ON THE SAME SCHEDULE, NO MATTER WHAT.
For the first five months of Noah and Stella’s lives, we’ve mostly been successful with that. Since the kids were nearly three months premature, their adjusted age at this point is more like two and a half months. We’ve taken them out to four-star restaurants, and they’ve slept through the entire meal without a peep uttered.
Now, they’re beginning to need a little less sleep, and unfortunately, their sleep schedules – and their feeding schedules, for that matter – have gone a little off-kilter lately.
It’s not just unfortunate. It’s ungodly.
Which may explain why my eyelids are beginning to droop more often than I’d like, why I trip over nothing on my hardwood floor and why I always feel bathed in a light sheen of perspiration. To save our sanity, we needed to implement a sleep schedule, and we needed to implement it three days ago.
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