There may be people out there who can handle twins without getting them on a schedule. I am not one of them. It is true that I am a smidge anal- in the tenth grade, I looked up whether anal-retentive is supposed to include a hyphen when a friend teasingly asked me how to spell it.
I don’t do well with chaos and need order to function. Because of this, I was determined to get my twin girls on a schedule. It was not so much a desire as it was a survival mechanism. Although my husband is not, shall we say, as orderly as I am, he was fully on board with trying to set an eating and a sleeping schedule for the girls. We worked hard at it and had good results. By the time they were two months, they were only getting up once a night. By three months they were sleeping through the night.
Although some books suggest that you start training the babies from birth and others say wait until six weeks or even later, we started at about two to three weeks. Before that time, my husband and I fed the girls when it seemed like they were hungry and let them sleep whenever they fell asleep.
At about the two week mark, I realized something had to be done. I read a few of the sleep method books, namely Baby Wise by Gary Ezzo, M.A. and Robert Bucknam, M.D. and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child by Marc Weissbluth, M.D. Other twin moms I know have said time and time again that the information in these two books was what helped them get their babies on the same schedule. I took what I liked from both books and ended up with something that worked for us.
Instead of letting the babies sleep until they woke up and then feeding them individually, we started waking them up at the same time. We would wake them up, change and feed them, and then try to keep them up for a little bit before putting them back to sleep.
The goal was to have three hours between the start of one feeding and the beginning of the next. If they woke up screaming for food and it had only been two hours, it is not like we starved them. We fed them when they woke up and were hungry in between the scheduled time. We were so consistent with the schedule that it got to the point where the twins would wake up at the three hour mark almost to the minute.
In the early weeks, we would usually go pick them up if they cried after we put them down to sleep. On some nights I slept on the couch with a baby on my chest because she would not sleep any other way. Once I even slept with both of them. Other nights we let them sleep in their swings.
We did whatever it took to get them to sleep and to stay that way. After about five to six weeks, we started to let them cry for about 5 minutes after we put them down. If they didn’t go to sleep, we would go in and pick them up for a little bit. As they got older, we let the time it took for us to respond to get longer and longer.
When the girls started to get bigger and to take more ounces of formula per feeding, we were able to drop off feedings at night. We still stuck with the three hour schedule during the day, but started letting them go as long as they could at night.
Right around two months came the magical night when I woke to daylight. It was my husband’s turn to take the first feeding, and they only woke up the one time. They started doing that fairly consistently- waking up at one or two and not again until morning. Then at the three months, they started waking up later until they slept to sometime between five and seven in the morning. They still cried when we put them down for naps but rarely cried at night. At that point, I was fine dealing with crying during the day if I was getting a good night’s sleep.
You might think that we just have good babies. In a way we do. One of the girls was only slightly colicky and the other exhibited virtually no signs of the dreaded condition. They were also only mildly fussy at the witching hour for babies, early evening.
Sometimes they cried through their feedings, but they always managed to eat. They were pretty standard babies, but even so it still took a lot of work to get them on the schedule. However, getting the babies on the schedule was worth all the effort it took. I would recommend it to all twin parents. You may be miserable for a few months, but all your suffering pays off when you wake up that first morning on your own and not to your babies’ cries.
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