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After my MIL stayed for a week while my husband was gone, my mother came to visit for a few days this week. I am glad that our visitors are over for a while now. My husband's next work trip is in 3 weeks, and I plan on doing it completely solo. I may just take a few days off of work during the week, but I think I can come out on the other side without having a mental breakdown (all bets are off if Sam and Anna are in the thick of teething, which is highly likely).
I signed our babies up for swimming lessons which start in a week, so I've gotten really excited for that! I have a friend enlisted for help during the week my husband is gone, since there needs to be an adult per baby at all times. Just yet another way life with twins is a little more involved than with a single baby- all four of us will be making swimming lessons a family event!
This probably belongs on my still-missing 7 month post, but in the last month we dropped a nap and went down to 2 naps a day, which magically improved the quality of their naps. We had been doing well on 3 naps a day and then they started to turn into short crapnaps again. I took that as a sign that they were ready to transition to 2 naps, and lo and behold- on two naps a day, the actual time asleep during naps ended up longer than they 3 crapnaps they had been having. Right now, Sam and Anna seem to have fallen into a nap around 9 am (usually 1 1/2 hours-2 hours) and a nap around 1 pm (usually 2 hours long, sometimes 2 1/2 hours). When switching to 2 naps, we lengthened our feeding schedule to 4ish hours between bottles, which has also helped them drink better each time.
In the last week, we also added in a third meal. With two meals, Sam had started drinking in the high 30's for ounces on top of the 2 solid meals, and one day even drank 41 oz (which puts too much strain on his little kidneys to process), so we added a meal in the hopes it would drop his formula consumption. I find it incredibly ironic that after our long issues of drinking too little and working so hard to get every little ounce in our babies, that our current problem was that they were drinking too much. Go figure. So Sam and Anna now get a breakfast, lunch, and dinner in between their bottles. They still drink around 6-9 ounces each bottle though. They aren't huge solid meal eaters- usually a little more than 2 oz before they get full/bored. (hard to tell, since we have homemade food and I split the food between the babies. It also depends on if the food is a fav or not.)
This is what our schedule looks like right now:
- 6:30 am wake and bottle (about 6 oz)
- 8:30 am ish breakfast meal: fruit+ cereal
- 9:00 am ish down for nap
- 10:30/11:00 am ish 2nd bottle (7-8 oz usually)
- 12:30 pm ish lunch meal: fruit and veggie (or 2 veggies if dinner is just a fruit)
- 1:00 pm ish 2nd nap
- 3:00/3:30 pm ish 3rd bottle (7-8 oz usually)
- 5:00 pm dinner meal: new food + sometimes something that goes well with it
- 6:30 pm bedtime bottle (9 oz)
6 comments:
Your kids sleep a lot! You are so lucky in that way.
Are they usually "in bed" shortly after 6:30pm? Do you find they sleep better with an earlier bed time?
I am trying to decide if we need to move bed time to earlier...right now they go down around 7:00pm. I feel like Luke could go to bed at 5:30pm!! He is a tired boy in the evening.
Our babies also like to start the day around 5am. Ugh. Too early for us! It also means they are often down for a nap around 7:30am, which is too early for a nap too! I am hoping as they get older they will "normal" out their patterns a bit...fingers crossed!
Very interesting to hear that you are down to 2 naps these days. I wonder if something similar is around the corner for us soon. There have been quite a few days recently where we haven't gotten the 3rd nap in, but it really depends on the length of the other 2 naps.
Wow, swim lessons! Impressive. I hadn't even thought about doing that. Hmm, maybe I'll look into that. What kind of lessons and where are they given?
How do you get them to nap for so long? Kara's more of a 35-45min nap kind of a girl, but I'd like to get her to two longer naps.
And how'd you make the switch from 3 to 2?
Oh man, what a brutal night for you! You should have posted THAT on your blog!!:) Are they waking each other up, or waking up on their own??
I feel your pain, Noah has become a crappy nighttime sleeper, too. One night this past week I was up with him no less than 15 times, and he only slept for a period of an hour ONCE the whole night. But he's also not a good napper, so he doesn't balance out that way.
It's so weird that Anna doesn't want to be soothed back to sleep and screams from that, but she would also continue to scream if you let her lie in her crib by herself. You just can't win in that situation!!!
I hope Sam and Anna figure out their nighttimes soon so you can get some rest. I would rather have a good nighttime sleeper and a crappy napper than the other way around.
Wow! My guys are 7 months as well, and are on almost the EXACT schedule. We've been doing bedtime bottle at 7 pm though the boys are really cranky by then so maybe I'll pull it back to 6:30 like you. It's good to know what other families are doing too.
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