Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Twins by Marc Weissbluth M.D

Author:Marc Weissbluth, M.D. [Weissbluth, M.D., Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-51481-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE SLEEP LOG: A KEY TEAMWORK TOOL

I’ve never known parents of newborns—singletons or multiples—to be absolutely consistent about sleep training right from the start. The truth is that some parents swing back and forth between firmness and permissiveness often, and they cannot make even their best intentions stick for any period of time. Don’t beat yourself up if this describes you. It’s natural to want to be there for your twins, and you may have worries—about colic, GERD, or prematurity—that will make it harder for you to resist stepping in to soothe one or both of them. Of course, there will also be situations, such as when one or both twins are sick, when frequent soothing will be necessary. In these cases, don’t worry that you’re derailing your sleep-training efforts. You can pick up the trail again when the twins are feeling better.

Very often, however, it is not your willpower that is the problem but rather your own sleep deprivation that clouds your perspective. You might confuse your twins’ sleep patterns: just as you can forget which twin you breast-fed first at the last feeding, you can easily forget which one slept longer at the last nap and even which one prefers rocking and which one needs swaddling. Or wishful thinking—that they are sleeping better than they really are—muddles your thinking about each child’s actual behavior.

Many parents of twins use feeding charts to help them keep track of how often and how well each twin is nursing or eating. Some hospitals or pediatricians can supply you with handy charts to do just this (see Resources for other suggested products). The corollary for keeping track of sleep is a simple chart called a sleep log. A sleep log can be an important tool in helping you document what you are really doing and how your child is really responding.

Creating and maintaining sleep logs for your twins is easy; all you need is two notebooks of plain or graphed paper. The logs should be made up of a series of bar graphs showing on each day when your child was awake, asleep, quiet in the crib (or bed, down the line), and crying in the crib. On the horizontal axis, show the day of the week and on the vertical axis, the time of day. A more detailed written diary can often make it hard to see the forest for the trees, but with a sleep log each bar represents a twenty-four-hour snapshot of a day and the graphic view of all the bars allows you to quickly and clearly see trends in sleeping patterns for each twin.

I recommend keeping your twins’ sleep logs in the rooms where they sleep (perhaps taped individually over their cribs if they are sleeping separately), so that the logs are always on hand when you are thinking about recording the sleep your twins have just had or the time in their cribs awake (or crying) as you go in to get them up. Have your helpers—your

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