Forgive me for quoting Billy Joel songs, but what can I do, I am a product of the 1980s.
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This sleeping thing, it must change (for one thing it’s making me talk like yer man, Yoda). I read Minks’s thoughts on this the other day and I see what she means. It won’t be forever but, God, sometimes, it feels like forever. A typical evening proceeds as follows:
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8.30 – 3 children in bed, howling has subsided maybe even stopped.
Between 10.00 and 11.00 – We retire to bed.
Around midnight – Daniel starts flopping around in his cot like a landed fish. For about 5 minutes our dreams are filled with knocks on doors, stamping feet etc.
Five minutes later – Daniel starts to bellow, unimpressed by the slow response to the landed fish act. He is soothed back to sleep by whichever tired parent is on duty.
As Daniel is being put back in his cot – Michael wakes.
15-30Â minutes later – all is well and exhausted parent retires to own bed
About 4.00 am – Some baby wakes up. Parent far too exhausted to remember which one by morning. Parent falls asleep with contented baby in arms.
About 5.00 am – The other baby wakes up. Parent places first baby in cot and takes up howling baby begging it not to wake first baby. Parent falls asleep with different contented baby in arms.
About 6.00-6.30 am – Parent wakes up with a jerk and replaces sleeping baby in cot.  Other baby wakes. Parent crawls back to bed and prods other parent out to tend howling infant and face the day.
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And this is a good night because, you’ll notice, her highness didn’t wake up at all.
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To summarise “they ruled the night and the night seemed to last as long as six weeksâ€
I started to write a piece reminding you of your dreadful sleepless experiences a few months ago and it sounded rather like you should be grateful for having an uninterrupted 10 minutes – I decided that discretion may be the better part of not having people throw stones at me and didn’t bother to post it. As ever, I think that you and Mr Waffle are doing wonderfully and bring on more Billy Joel.
I wonder if there’s a sleep clinic specifically for twins. If not, you could set one up and get loads of great hints from other frazzled parents. Buy truly you have my sympathy. I usually read your blog during the midnight “dream feed” after which six or seven uninterrupted hours are common. But you didn’t need to hear that did you?
I regretted my coment last night in case it sounded smug. I regretted it even more at 5.30 this morning when baby no 2 woke, and even more at 6am when No 1 also woke. Damn natural justice!
… on Parris Island.
Hang in There ‘waf. They’ll be teenagers soon….
I keep thinking, maybe its a trade off. They are both healthy-ish, developing well, and quite pleasant during the day. Then I realise that other peoples children are also quite nice AND they sleep.
Don’t want to sound preachy (have just stumbled across website) but they will continue to wake up as long as they are attended to – they are getting serious results from waking up! I consider myself to be fairly soft when it comes to my kids but as my parenting skills were being severely compromised by sleep deprivation realised I had to do something. Basically I was a better mummy when I got sleep so it was in their interests for me to take a tough stance. It’s hard but it does work, start on a Friday (so you have the weekend to put new regime into practice), put them into different rooms, don’t pick them up at all, just reassure them and comfort them and then close the door. You will probably have to go into them to comfort them at frequent intervals. I found that going into too regularly had an inflamatory affect on my dd – gave her renewed energy so I let her cry it out for 40 mins (didn’t like doing it but it was necessary), after about 3 nights, she started sleeping through. Try giving them a drink of water first before settling them (after they wake up) on these hot nights so that you don’t need to worry about dehydration. Good luck!
Heather, this was a surprisingly comforting comment. It is better. I had forgotten.
CAD, hubris, hah.
JD, mmm…comforting?
Minks, too depressing.
Jules, I don’t know, you’re probably right, but I can’t face it…