Sleeping

A lot of people would smartly ask me "Are you getting any sleep?" when I told them I had recently had triplets. I think I always answer the same way, "A bit here and there." But this little exchange cannot truly convey the horrible, awful instincts that babies have concerning sleep, and how my sons deal with sleep in particular. To be honest, I'm no expert about babies and their sleeping. But given the large amount of educated opinion I've gotten from doctors, books, and former mothers about sleep habits of babies I feel like I can make a bit of a generalization on the first point.

For those without experience, I will share my observations with you. Babies sleep a lot, and evidently can't tolerate more than an hour or two of waking before becoming tired enough that they need a nap or a longer bout of sleep we call bedtime. In the beginning of the triplet experience Sharry and I were given some general rules to try to help the babies get the sleep they need to grow, as they started very small and needed to catch up.

Rule #1 was never to wake a sleeping baby. Any sleep time was good time. We've discarded this rule sometimes at night for reasons I will shortly explain.

Rule #2 was that if the baby is showing you that they are tired, you already suck. Babies for no good reason that I can determine fall asleep best before they start rubbing their eyes, get fussier than normal, etc. Books recommend watching carefully for a quiet state staring off into the distance as the magic moment when they will just plop down to sleep.

Being new parents, we tried very hard to follow these rules so we could do right by our children. The very large problem with both these seemingly simple rules is that they aren't for triplets. Or, they are for parents with much more money than I have to throw at the problem.

The triplets get 2 rooms in my house, one for daytime napping and (in the future) playing and a nursery with beds in it downstairs. As you can imagine, a screaming baby tends to keep up any other baby nearby it so we have to try and separate them out for naps and to put them to sleep at night so they can actually get to sleep. Because evidently the way a baby goes to sleep if you miss the magic window of opportunity is by screaming until they exhaust themselves into a stupor. With three babies, it's difficult to keep all under observation and even though I can see this glazed look come onto my child's face at times, it's usually when I'm feeding another one and can't really stop to catch the moment. So we do try to follow the 1-2 hours of wake time rule, but we don't get to do any kind of nap routine or book reading before naps or any of that. We've got to do it assembly line style, and sometimes this doesn't go down so well with babies.

As for the never wake a sleeping baby rule, this recently got tossed when Sharry noted that she woke up every 2 hours to feed a baby the last couple of nights, and this is with me doing half the feedings myself. If you let the baby set their own schedule, they will almost certainly not coincide with their brethren. And while not the worst thing in the world, it's difficult to go to work in a job that mostly involves thinking when you've had what amounts to four 1.5 hour naps during the night. Sharry and I were arguing and yelling at each other, Sharry was scared about work, it was just terrible. We worked out that if one baby woke up yelling for food/changing during the night that both of us would get up and (gently) wake up the other two for the same treatment. The thought process here is that they're going to do it in 30-45 minutes anyways, why not just cut out that fitful 20 minutes of sleep I see them go through before lurching awake yelling about their empty tummy? Now we get much nicer chunks of sleep, but probably about the same amount or a little less. The thing that really irks me is that the doctors and nurses that have set the wise rule now recant completely when Sharry and I tell them what we've determined to do. They say that everyone does what we're doing and that it can't really be done any other way. It makes me doubt some of the other rules that we've been told about.

Anyways, this has been on my mind a lot lately, as Sharry's just about had it with the 2-3 wake up times that we still endure from 11-7 am. I can empathize, but being on leave makes me have to exercise as much brain power as pudding and she doesn't buy it.