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Rock-A-Bye Babies

Getting Your Multiples to Sleep

By Carol Sjostrom Miller

A baby's cry pierces the middle of the night silence. You check the clock, see that it's 2 in the morning and stagger down the hall to the nursery. An hour later – after feeding, changing, rocking and soothing your baby back to sleep – you collapse back into bed at last.

Ten minutes later, your other baby's cry pierces the middle of the night silence.

When you have more than one baby, you can expect to have lots of challenges, lots of work and lots of fun. What you can't expect is to get lots of sleep, and this can lead to lots of problems. While this is the case for most sleep-deprived new parents, it is especially true for parents of twins, triplets or more. "Parents of multiples have more physical demands on them," says Trina Lambert, a mother of twins from Englewood, Colo. "If they don't take care of themselves, they are at risk of burning out."

For parents of multiples, a big part of taking care of themselves is getting as much sleep as possible. An important thing parents can do to get the sleep they need is to establish a sleeping routine for their babies. "The benefit of a sleeping routine is that parents can get more sleep and thus be better able to keep up with all they need to do in their daily lives," says Lambert.

Ann Douglas, author of The Mother of All Pregnancy Books: The Ultimate Guide to Conception, Birth, and Everything in Between (Hungry Minds 2002) and The Mother of All Baby Books: The Ultimate Guide to Your Baby's First Year (Hungry Minds 2002) agrees. "The key benefit of establishing a sleep routine is to maximize the amount of sleep that the parents are able to squeeze in," she says. "Caring for one newborn can be exhausting. Caring for two or more babies can be totally overwhelming if you're not getting the sleep you need."

Want to see more?

• Breastfeeding Twins Series
• Crying Baby, Sleepless Nights: Why Your Baby Is Crying and What You Can Do About It
• Sleepy-Time Stress: Reviewing Sleep Strategies
• Talk about it!

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