STTN

We are tring to encourage sttn. My ds is 2lbs. heavier than my dd ....we have them on the same schedule
eating every 4 hours and the same time all day from the time they wake and they have one feeding in the middle of the night (ususally around 3-4am dd wakes sometimes they both do but we wake the other when this happens). I think ds may sleep longer if we let him but i'm afraid to have them start on different schedules come morning into the next day. just wondering what others have done. i know if i do this that they will eventually get back into the same schedule maybe when they are both sttn, i'm just torn on keeping things they way they are doing everything at the same time or letting them go at night....i don't want my ds to have a hard time sttn because i keep waking him when he might keep sleeping and feeding him.

 

We never woke our kids to eat. We figured if they were hungry and needed to eat, they would wake up and we would feed them. My DS cut out his early a.m. feeing (3 ish) about a month sooner than my DD. DD would still wake up between 3-4 a.m. to eat and she gradually pushed that feeding up till she was getting up around 6 a.m. and eating the same time DS did.

While DD was still getting up, it seemed like they always adjusted themselves the next day and ended up back on the same schedule. I never understood why they did that, but one would usually get cranky and want to be fed early or one would take a little bit longer nap and they would be back on schedule.

 

My DS is breastfed and weighs 3 lbs less than DD. He sleeps through the night and she does not. She is formula fed. I do not wake him ever to feed her. Once in a blue moon he will wake to eat. She still gets up sometimes three times a night to eat so I feed her. I figure she is hungry b/c I have tried offering her her passy. She also eats the same amount that she eats during the day.

 

DS slept through the night about 2-3 weeks sooner than DD. SHe is about 3 lbs less than him and has been since he passed her shortly after birth. I would not bother waking him or at least attempt it one night and see what happens. Good luck...

 

I was afraid to let one sleep for that very reason! My schedule was too important! But, I did end up letting Emma go around 4 months, and she slept all the way through! You could always give whoever wasn't hungry for a full bottle, a smaller, snack bottle in the am, to get them both back on the same schedule.

 

How old are your babies? I continued to wake one when the other got up to feed up through about 3-3.5 months. I tested it every now and then with Lauren, some nights she would sleep through, others I had an off schedule by morning. I stopped it completely when we did CIO at 4.5 months.

 

I found that the few times i did wake one after one had eaten, she usually wouldn't take much and i'd be up in another hour or whenever she would have woken anyway, so i stopped doing it after a few time. I totally get wanting to keep a schedule, but my personal feeling (and this is not a criticism of any of you who are disciplined enough to have a schedule, i'm sure it make a lot of thngs much easier), is that even though they are identical twins, they're not the same, and I dont' want to mess with their natural sleep cycles.

To this day, at 9 months, sometimes they go three hours, sometimes six, sometimes seven, sometimes five....and it's rarely the same two nights in a row and rarely at the same time.

 

My boys started sttn around 2- 2.5 months... They would wake up at like 3am, and we started putting them in bed with us, rather than immediately offering them a bottle. I thought they were just used to sleeping a few hours at time and they were "programmed" to wake up at least once. After about 3 weeks of doing that, we finally got rid of the bassinets and put them in a crib in our room, where they never wake up at night now!! If they do wake up though, its funny, they will lay there and talk to eachother for like 5-10 minutes, then fall asleep on their own.

Shannon