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Rock-A-Bye Babies
Getting Your Multiples to Sleep
By Carol Sjostrom Miller
It's a fact of life: Babies wake up in the middle of the night. During the early months, these night wakings are necessary since "babies need that nighttime feeding in order to grow and thrive," says Douglas. However, you can minimize the number of times you are up during the night by, once again, coordinating your babies' feedings, and waking a sleeping baby when his twin is ready to eat.
As Lambert discovered, if you don't feed your babies at the same time, you could easily find yourself feeding someone around the clock. "I woke the second baby for feedings in the middle of the night until my babies turned 4 months old," she says. "This maintained their schedule so that they would be more likely to sleep at the same time. And, quite frankly, I would not have been able to function well if I had been nursing all night long."
After a few months, though, many babies no longer need the nighttime feeding and many parents stop waking the second baby. "By 3 months, you really want those babies sleeping through the night," says Christi Gillentine of Tulsa, Okla., who gave birth to twins when her firstborn was only 11 months old. "Waking one up because histwin is hungry isn't going to help do that."
Gillentine's son continued to wake for a 4 a.m. feeding for several weeks after his twin sister started sleeping through the night. At that point, Gillentine let her daughter sleep while she fed her son.
Lambert stopped waking the second baby when her twins were 4 months old, but she could never be sure which twin was going to wake during the night. "For the last month of night feedings, they seemed to switch who slept through the night," she says.
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