THE SKINNER'S

THE SKINNER'S

Monday, March 16, 2009

Baby Schedules

So now you know, I'm a planner. Chances are if I know that I'm about to experience something, I've already bought a book about it. I'm not one to look too much information up on-line. I'd rather have my hands on a book that I can grab whenever I need to. So I found out I was having twins and the first thing I thought about was to find out everything that my cousin did......she had identical boys who were 6 or 7 at the time. I knew that she was very regimented and that it had worked, so whatever it was that she did I was going to do it. She gave me a book called Babywise. Have any of you heard of it?? I now view it as a close second to the Bible (not really, but seriously it was the best thing we could have used). We had those babies following a schedule starting at 2 weeks of life. We had no idea what we were doing, but we'd had my cousin and our friends as references, so we called them approximately 7 times/day just to make sure that the screams we heard coming from their room during "naptime" were normal. Chris rode around the house for the first 2 months of their lives with the book on his lap and a highlighter. I would panic and ask him 6 questions all at the same time (that's just how my mind works!), and he would look up the questions all day long until I'd have some sense of peace about what we were doing. It's so funny to look back on it now, I would panic about the smallest detail. I'm such a perfectionist that I wanted to make the right decisions from the very beginning, I'm not one to go by trial and error if at all possible (I may pretend to be ok with it and laid back, but I'm sooo not that way inside). So poor Chris had this hormonal, sleep-deprived, perfectionist to talk to while his 2 infants learned how to cry themselves to sleep in the next room. But I'll tell you what, by 13 weeks they were sleeping 11 hours/night and they never went back. Their naps were in-sync, they were hungry at the same time, they were awake at the same time, it was wonderful and so worth it. And they were such happy babies. They really had learned to sooth themselves to sleep. It was remarkable. I am so thankful that our babies were able to use this method to learn how to sleep. I'll definitely try it with any future children that we have, for sure!

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