@ Mirella Prado – great comment! You’re absolutely right – thanks for sharing this viewpoint and balancing the article a bit. 🙂 Much appreciated!! Also – so glad we were able to help!!

@ Jennifer Klug – hmmm….is this normal for him, or is this a new problem? If it’s new, it might be the 8/9/10 month sleep regression. If this is a standard problem for him, then you might want to think about our Shifting Schedules e-book, which is available to our members, in our Members Area.

Hope these resources help, Jennifer! Hang in there – and best of luck to you and your family!

This article, about knowing when it’s time to wean from night feedings, may help you: https://www.babysleepsite.com/sleep-training/baby-night-wean-3-signs/

Of course, you can always download our free guide about helping your baby sleep thorough the night; that’ll be helpful, too! https://www.babysleepsite.com/baby-sleep-through-night-free-ebook/

Hope these resources help, Ingrid! And thanks for commenting. 🙂

@ Rene — I think your desire to get them on the same schedule makes sense; while it may be ideal to let each girl naturally develop her own unique schedule, it doesn’t sound very practical!

In terms of helping your problem sleeper – you definitely don’t want to keep her awake for longer period of the day in an effort to make her sleep better at night. That’s almost guaranteed to backfire – doing that will make her overtired, which in turn will make her sleep worse, not better. 1.25 – 1.75 hours of wake time is reasonable (and may actually be on the long side) for a 4 month old, so there’s nothing unusual there.

To get started with helping your daughter sleep better at night, you could download our free guide (if you haven’t already): https://www.babysleepsite.com/baby-sleep-through-night-free-ebook/ That’s a great place to start. You could also read through our article series on sleep training techniques (start with Part 1, here: https://www.babysleepsite.com/sleep-training/sleep-training-from-no-cry-to-cry-series-part-1/). You’ll want to use gentler methods at this point, since your baby is still very young.

Of course, if sleep training proves tough (and it often is, with multiples), you could consider a personalized consultation: https://www.babysleepsite.com/baby-toddler-sleep-consulting-services/ We’ve done a lot of work with families with multiples over the years.

Hope this helps, Rene! Thanks for reaching out, and don’t hesitate to ask more questions, if you have them. You can ask them here, via the comments, or you can e-mail them to contact (at) babysleepsite (dot) com.

@ Kari & Kendra — love this! Thanks for reaching out to and helping one another. Moms helping moms is a beautiful thing! 🙂

I think the patterns show up more, for me, visually. So I can zoom out and kind of see if things have been decreasing or increasing over time, or if there are certain days he doesn’t sleep well (for example, I just noticed that he has been pretty bad about napping at all on Saturdays. I’m wondering if it’s just because my husband is home and he doesn’t want to miss out on time with him, or if we need to take him out on Saturday mornings and wear him out more than usual…).

The color codes are Green = Sleep, Dark Blue = Awake, Teal = Soothing/Quiet In Bed, Red = Crying in Bed, Orange = Eating, Purple = TV time.

Down below the color graph I put in times for his sleep numbers that day, like Night Length, Nap Length, Latencies to Sleep, Wake Times, and then I average them for the week to get an idea of how much sleep he needs vs. how much he’s getting. His averages has been decreasing each week, this month, going from 12.11 hours in a 24 to 11.23. I don’t like that, but even though I’m trying to get him more, he just seems to need less. I’m hoping that as Fall gets closer he’ll start sleeping more again.

I hope that helps! Whether you use a spreadsheet or an app or just a pen and paper, I hope you can start making sense of your son’s erratic schedule. When my son was 13 months he was pretty erratic too, it seems they want to go to 1 nap on some days and others 2. Don’t worry, he’ll likely go back to 2 naps after a few weeks. It’s a pretty common thing.

They have both been sleeping through the night since about 10 weeks old with an eat-wake-sleep routine. One of the girls is a dream at night. We rarely hear a peep out of her. The other one, however, wakes 2-4 times per night. Most of the time, we just get up and give her a paci and she goes right back to sleep within 10 minutes. I can probably count on one hand the number of times we have had get up and feed her (both are formula fed since 2 months).

Because they are twins, we keep them on the same schedule for eating, wake time, and naps. Mainly for my own sanity when I am working alone. My husband sometimes travels overnight, and I have help from grandma 2 days a week. The rest of the time I’m on my own with them.

We would like to get the problem sleeper sleeping soundly through the night like her sister, but how do we make these types of adjustments without causing problems for the other one? Also, they only seem to be able to stay awake 1.5-1.75 hours at a stretch before they start getting cranky. If I do need to keep them awake longer during the day to sleep better at night, how is that possible without adding another nap? (Was hoping we could decrease soon. Not increase.) I have, on occasion, allowed them to be on different schedules, but it wipes me completely out by the end of the day. Can’t imagine dealing with new problems at night too.