For the last few weeks, we’ve been putting our girls on a sleeping and eating schedule according to some simple rules. See my blog entry Scheduling the Girls. Their “nighttime” sleep is a twelve-hour period from approximately 7pm to 7am. During this time they should be only getting up to be quickly fed and burped, i.e. no playing. And instead of eating every four hours, like during the daytime, we just let them sleep for however long they can. Well, a few patterns have emerged. Eleanor gets hungry sooner than Miranda, and usually needs a bottle at midnight and 4 am. Miranda can sleep for seven hours straight from 7pm until 2 am, and after eating at 2 am, she gets up to start her day at 6 am. All this is pretty normal for three month old babies, but there’s a huge problem. There’s a feeding going on in the house at 12 am, 2 am, 4 am, and 6 am. Needless to say, Bernard and I are barely functional at work the next day.

Two days ago, we decided to try something new. Our new plan is to wake them up at 11 pm, feed both of them, and then expect them to sleep until 6am. The first night, we woke them up, gave them baths, fed them, and put them back to bed. The baths are necessary because otherwise, they aren’t awake enough to eat. Well, Miranda woke up again at 3 am, but after fifteen minutes of crying, she fell back asleep. Eleanor woke up at 5 am, and started crying. And kept crying. And crying. And eventually woke up Miranda, so they were both crying. Well, we wanted to be firm with the 6 am wake up time, so Bernard and I tried not to go soothe them at all, but after 45 minutes, we couldn’t take it anymore, so we went in. Both of them were sweaty and had a lot of snot from the crying that we had to suction out. But they were happy to see us and stopped crying immediately. And after cleaning them up and changing their diapers, it was 6 am and thank goodness, time to eat.

Yesterday, Miranda actually slept the rest of the night after the 11 pm feeding. Eleanor woke up at 4:15 am. Bernard re-swaddled her and let her fuss for a little bit, then she fell back asleep until 6 am. So, there’s some progress. I think we’re going to continue with this plan for the next 1-2 weeks. The main problem is that waking them up to feed according to our schedule just doesn’t seem right. And, it might prevent them from actually sleeping through the night. However, after many weeks of doing multiple post-midnight feedings, we had to do something. I think our next plan will be to let them sleep for as long as they can again, but wake up both of them when the first one wakes up. We’ll let you know how it goes.