Did day care help?

I am returning to work and putting the girls in day care on the 18th. For those of you who have put your twins in day care, did it help with sticking to a schedule and sleeping at night? They have no schedule right now and some nights they sleep great and others they don't. I'm ready for some consistency!

 

Daycare was a tremendous help getting my dd on a schedule. On the weekends, we stuck to what the daycare did- snack times, naps, etc. Good luck!

 

My twins go to the babysitter and kinda created their own schedule. It helps whn they get home to make a schedule they "play" for an hour then have a bath and stay up for another hour have abottle then it's bedtime and around 8
every night they are sleepy. Daycare is not as bad as I thought it would be. My sitter is excellent! Your twins will be fine Iwas afraid of the same thing.

 

I don't know if it helped with sleep schedules. I think it may have actually hurt as far as nap schedules go, because they didn't follow one. Also, they could never allow a baby to CIO. My girls were both pretty good night sleepers (at least after 4 months or so), but I don't know if it was because of daycare (they started at 8 weeks).

I think it did help us with having a consistent bedtime, because coming home from daycare was such a big transition. They'd be tired and hungry, and it was always a little rocky until we could get a bottle in their mouths, but then it went pretty smoothly into diapers, PJs, stories, and bed.

It was definitely helpful once we started solids, though. For one thing, they got most of their solids at school for the first couple of months, so I hardly ever had to do it. Then I basically just followed their schedule as far as when to have meals & snacks.

 

I agree with PP -- I think being in daycare has not really helped with daytime naps. We had just started trying to get some sort of schedule going before I had to go back to work. I gave the daycare a rough idea of what we had been doing at home, but in reality, they don't necessarily follow it. I know the babies don't have constant, undivided 1 on 1 attention while they are there -- it's just the nature of daycare. It took a week or two for them to get used to going, but now things are going well. When we get home, we have about an hour or more to play before they are tired and ready for bed. We've never really had any issues getting them to bed at night. They have started sleeping better at daycare lately, but it's still all over the place. I'm hoping that they will fall into a more regular nap schedule once they are a bit older -- maybe that's wishful thinking, but that's ,y hope, anyway.....

 

For us, it's actually interfered, unfortunately. When they are with me, they take 2 naps and are very scheduled. When at daycare, their naps are all over the place. They have a hard time settling down there, are overstimulated, plus the DCP isn't as regimented as I am about their schedule. They are usually very overtired, by the time they come home.

 

For us, daycare helped, but we worked with them to know that the girls needed to stay on the same schedule. They worked with us on that, and it really did help.