Change of perspective on the sleep thing

Thank you all so much for your comments the last time I had a moan about the sleep.

Rebecca, it was something you said that started shifting my thinking.

That, plus chats to two real life friends.

Rebecca said there is always someone jealous of you, the same way you envy someone else's situation.

Which to me talks about perspective.

LauraC also said that you have to think of sleep in terms of the good nights AND the bad nights, and look at the average. True!

As I've said before, I always thank God first of all that I have babies and that my babies are healthy and don't have any health problems despite being born so early.

My friend's child, M, had to have additional brain scans and her results have now been sent to the top children's hospital in South Africa. We spoke today and she told me she's scared out of her mind.

That's when I think, "so what if we have to get up a couple of times a night?"

Now here's the real AHA moment.

My friend with the good sleepers told me her twin babies wake around 5 - 5:30.

Another friend told me that's when both of hers used to wake too (not twins, but two years apart) and it "might be unreasonable" of me to expect mine to sleep from 5 - 5:30 pm to 7 am.

Don't you love tactful people?!

(By the way, this is an old, old primary school friend who found me on Facebook. We haven't seen each other since we were 12, which is 23 years ago. When I worked it out I felt really, really old)

OH MY WORD

It suddenly dawned on me.

I'm expecting these babies to sleep a stretch of 14 hours - I am a crazy woman!

Now 5 am still doesn't suit our lifestyle (!) especially on weekends but I will settle for 6 am.

And when I went back through The Notebook to analyse it in light of this revelation, I noticed that the last wake-up is normally around 5:30 - 6 am.

So if I adjusted my expectations to 6 am instead of 7 am, the babies wake up one time less 95% of the time.

Where I've been saying Kendra's waking up 3 - 4 times, it's actually 2 - 3 times, and Connor mostly only wakes up once.

Wow. Sometimes I'm really slow.

To answer some of your questions:

• We do have a fan in their room because it is summer in Jhb and we have extremely hot, dry summers here. So most nights they go to sleep with the fan's white noise which does help.
• They now have a bedtime routine. We bath them earlier but I do have a routine - close curtains, change nappy, put on leggings, offer bottles (C won't even have 5 ml if he's not hungry - he got that self-control from his father; K will often have a whole extra bottle), put on music (Majors for Minors), kiss and put in cots, tuck in with blankets, I love you's and then we leave the room.
• Connor is the better sleeper, during the day and at night. He sleeps about 5 hours during the day and Kendra about 4 hours. There's usually one two-hour nap and then shorter ones. I classify the day as between 7 and 7.
• They sleep in separate cots but in the same room and yes, Kendra disturbs Connor. We RUN to their room (as fast as our old bones will take us) when we hear her cry out because we don't want him to wake. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
• With the onset of summer, we found they were waking early (4:30) so we now attach blankets to their curtains every night and that keeps them sleeping longer too.
• One morning Connor woke at 5:30, I distracted him with a water bottle and change of nappy successfully for another hour and then was very happy to start his day and feed him. Felt very proud of myself :)

So where do we go from here?

1. I am a girl who loves a plan so the plan is to CIO with one baby at a time. What I'm really scared of is this: what if they're really hungry and I deprive them of food?


2. I can't wait for my mother to leave (!) so I can try this "crying it out" business. She thinks we're cruel if we leave the kids to cry a bit - I'm of the opinion that a bit of crying doesn't harm anybody. Also, I want to use two bedrooms so I need my guest bedroom back. I think two babies crying at the same time will be way too traumatic for me.


3. I will not ask anybody how their kids are sleeping unless they bring it up in conversation and it'll be rude to do otherwise. It just makes me crazy and I don't need more crazy in my life.


4. I will believe the best of my children - I'm sure they're doing their very best, poor things, and they don't need any more pressure put on them.


5. I will stop obsessing about what I'm doing or not doing - evidence shows me I can do the exact same thing and one will sleep better than the other - and really try not to be hard on myself :)

All that said, I do hope and pray that the sleep fairy visits so that our kids find their sleep groove soon.

Any sleep tips and comments are always very welcome so if you think something you do works well for your child/ren, please share. I've now started getting emails behind the scenes from other moms about the sleep issues. Of course I know nothing so I depend on all your wisdom :)

P.S. This is my post for the 30-minute blog challenge