The general message we got from baby books like "Save our Sleep" and "The Contented Baby" was:
- If you ever help your child to sleep they will never learn to fall asleep by themselves and your lives will be ruined forever and ever,
- You can put a baby in bed and they will fall asleep after they cry for a bit - even at 2 weeks old,
- You can manipulate babies into feeding and sleeping when you decide they should, and
- If your child is not sleeping through the night by 6 months you have FAILED!
Why the baby book routines never EVER worked for my babies:
- They never ever woke up hungry. All of the routines assume that a baby will take a full feed upon waking if their last feed was around 3-4 hours earlier. This just simply was not the case for my girls.
- They got tired well before the scheduled nap time.
- They would wake well before the scheduled nap ending time.
- They never took a full feed once they got reflux at 8 weeks. We were lucky to get them to drink 50ml in one go.
- They were always sick and sick babies don’t eat or sleep very well.
Trying to put my babies on a routine resulted in many, many hours of crying....and the babies cried a lot too. We had this idea that having twins meant we had to have a strict routine but by trying to implement a routine we were making things worse. When we started to do what they wanted to do things drastically improved. We would offer food when they showed hunger signs and put them to bed when they showed tired signs. We also stopped waking them from their naps to try to feed them. I don't know why we didn't try the common sense method to begin with!!! ahhhhh....hindsight.
