Sleep training a one-year-old is not high on anyone’s bucket list, I’m sure. Did you know you can start gently babies before they are even four months old—and by the time they are four months, you can go full force?
I don’t have any qualifications to talk to anyone about motherhood or sleep training, which is what makes me so relatable. The twins should have been sleep trained months ago, but I had PTSD and there is not a wealth of information out there sleep training preemies with underdeveloped lungs and slow weight gain.
I finally asked our amazing gastroenterologist if it was ok for me to wean Margot of her middle of the night feed, he said, “that’s a tough one…a personal decision.” And after an hour and half of both babies screaming their heads off at 3am, I made a personal decision that they need to sleep through the night or none of us will make it to our next birthday.
In retrospect, a spontaneous 3am decision to sleep train was not the best, but it was the metaphorical straw metaphorically breaking the metaphorical camel’s back. I had read a little bit about sleep training and gotten the run down from my mom friends, so when they woke up at 3am, I just went for it.
Sometimes you just have to start.
When I decided to write about our experience sleep training, I originally wrote it as a Bridget Jones style diary.
Nap: 1
Minutes spent screaming head off (baby a): 32
Minutes spent screaming head off (baby b): 22
Alcohol units: 64
Just kidding about the alcohol units.
Lucky for you, I decided not to bore you with nap time and sleep time summaries. Instead, I’m going to answer my most frequently asked questions since I announced on Instagram that we were officially sleep training.
What is sleep training?
It’s a method by which you teach your kid how to sleep through the night. (Sleeping the night, by the way, is defined by most of the sleep training program as sleeping TWELVE HOURS—I was thinking 5 straight hours would be great, but no, we’re really going for it.)
There are a bunch of different approached (FEBER, Babywise, Moms on Call, Takin Cara Baby’s, Happiest Baby on the Block), we learned a little bit about all of them and decided we were going to simplify it down to this:
- Have regularly scheduled time to eat, nap, and go down for the night—make no exceptions to this schedule until the girls are sleeping through the night
- Create sleepy time cues by taking them into their dark nursery, turning on the sound machine, diffusing a gentle blend of grounding essential oils
- Put them in their cribs when they start to indicate they are sleepy
- Leave…even if they are losing their ever loving minds
- Only come back if they can’t seem to calm down or are a danger to themselves
Are you letting them cry it out?
Yes…sort of.
Most of the sleep training methods we read about are gentle cry-it-out approaches. If the baby (or babies) are screaming, you go in at certain intervals (the first night it might be ever 3 minutes, the next night every 10, and so on.)
However, we found that going in to comfort them makes it worse. The girls are older than the babies a lot of these books are written for, and going in just reminds them that they miss their mom and makes the crying worse. So we try not to go in unless they are not calming down at all.
Why are they waking up in the middle of the night?
Valid question. They are, after all, 14 months old. In their defense, they are only supposed to be 10 months old. And also in their defense, they spent the first 5 and 7 months of their lives (respectively) in a hospital.
Because they desperately needed to gain weight, sleeping through the night wasn’t an option or them for a long time, and because they have bronchopulmonary dysplasia and Margot was still on oxygen up until a month and a half ago, we were afraid of letting them get too worked up. So, we picked them up whenever they woke up crying.
Do you keep them in the same room?
Sometimes.
Since they are going to share a room, we want them to get used to sleeping in the same room. However, Margot is a way worse nighttime sleeper than Vivienne. So we put them to nap together during the day, but we separate them at night—Margot in our room and Vivienne in the nursery.
I am desperate to get Margot out of our room because I don’t think it’s good for her to know we are just a magical scream away, but this is the best we can do right now.
Is the sleep training working?
Yes…sort of.
We are on day four and we are down from about 45 minutes to an hour of screaming their heads off to about 15 minute of screaming their heads off, which according to my calculations means we should be going down in just a few minutes any day now.
Margot does still have a middle of the night feed that we’re trying to wean her of, so, that’s a whole mood.
How can you stand the crying?
I can’t.
I get myself as far away from it as possible, and I just check the monitor every 10 minutes or so.
Just before we started sleep training the twins, a friend of mine told me how helpful it was for her to be reminded that sleep training her babies was something good. It would teach them how to soothe themselves and get a better night’s sleep and the whole family would be rested as a result.
You have to look at the long game.
Please comment…
Leave your experience with sleep training in the comments.
Ask questions or answer mine…
Will the babies ever stop crying?
Will I ever sleep again?
Will I ever not be tired?
How does one get anywhere on time after kids?
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