nighttime bottle feedings & paci's w/ my newborns...

hey guys!

So my little girls are totally off schedule at only 2 weeks & nighttime is a nightmare! I am soo exhausted that I feel like I am loosing my mind ~

Feedings are taking almost 1 hour per baby, then I have about 15 minutes after i put one down before the other gets up.

We are doing formula bottle feeding & they are eating anywhere from 2 to 4 oz at night, every 2 to 3 hours.

if they aren't finished with eating after a half an hour or so what do you do? just wait it out & continue to feed till they fall asleep? put them back to bed w/ their little eyes open? I feel like if I wait till they actually fall asleep then I will never get to bed?

Also, when did you introduce paci's to your babies?

any tips would be GREAT!!!!

~tamara

 

QUOTE(tamaras @ Jan 14 2008, 07:27 PM) [snapback]572438[/snapback]
hey guys!

So my little girls are totally off schedule at only 2 weeks & nighttime is a nightmare! I am soo exhausted that I feel like I am loosing my mind ~

Feedings are taking almost 1 hour per baby, then I have about 15 minutes after i put one down before the other gets up.

We are doing formula bottle feeding & they are eating anywhere from 2 to 4 oz at night, every 2 to 3 hours.

if they aren't finished with eating after a half an hour or so what do you do? just wait it out & continue to feed till they fall asleep? put them back to bed w/ their little eyes open? I feel like if I wait till they actually fall asleep then I will never get to bed?

Also, when did you introduce paci's to your babies?

any tips would be GREAT!!!!

~tamara

 

:itwins: Nobody ever said it would be easy. Hang in there and trust it will get much better. I was a walking zoombie for the first two months, now they are sleeping 6 hours thru the night but, I found out that they sleep better with each other then apart. I also have to limit sleep time during the day or they get day and night confused. We now have a bed time routine. 9:30 prepare for their bath (Lavander is calming to them, so I use the baby bath) and then after their bath they get a baby rub down. By then it is around 10:30 and they get a bottle which takes about 35 minutes each then off to sleep for about 6 hours. I run to my bedroom and pull the covers over head and sleep. For a control freak like me the twins have taught me a very valuable lesson! DO NOT SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF!

 

Welcome to the world of twinfants!!

My days were like that with the boys for about the first 4 months. Nothing was consistent, and they were all over the place sleep wise. It finally starting getting better when we started solids, and they began sleeping through the night, which helped me get them on a consistent nap routine through the day.

Hang in there!

 

They will turn things around soon, at first their days and nights are confused. I would definitely try just feeding them both at the same time. If I was bottle feeding I would usually just lay them on pillows on either side of me and feed them at the same time, then halfway through burp one and then the other. That way when I was done I was done and it seemed to get me a little more sleep. I was feeding them one at a time until I realized that it was guaranteed that the other was going to wake up with in a few minutes of the other anyway.

 

At this age - DH and I each "took a baby" at night -- it helped some with the sleep deprivation -- some others take "shifts" (i.e. DH is "on from 8-1am -- you are "on" from 1-6am etc. It was really hard the first month - 2 months -- at about 2 1/2 months things got better...and at 3 months we were getting a regular 6-7 hour sleep out of each of them. Hang on -- it will get better soon!

Oh, and we introduced paci's the day we left the hospital!