Jenny McQueen

Sleep (or lack of it) was our number one challenge when it came to having twins. The level of exhaustion was unlike anything I have ever experienced, and it felt relentless. Parents of multiples know exactly what I mean; they seemed to take turns being awake, almost like they agreed to some secret night watch to keep Mom and Dad up. It didn’t help that one had reflux and couldn’t sleep more than 90 minutes.

A few weeks in, we realized that getting them to sleep long stretches wasn’t happening anytime soon, and the deprivation was really starting to effect us. We needed a survival plan.

We knew to keep going we would have to have at least each have some guaranteed sleep instead of just winging it. So we wrote out the schedule for the entire day in one hour segments. All 24 of them. It was pretty brutal to see it on paper, because the reality was there wasn’t any opportunity for actual rest. The first version of the schedule we created looked like this:

7-10 am I slept while Rome doubled up on baby duty and work. Thankfully he worked from home, so we had a little flexibility. This meant praying to the baby gods that they wouldn’t need much beyond a bottle and a diaper change during this stretch. This phase didn’t last long as they started to sleep less, but it did get me a little rest in the early days. When we eventually hired help two mornings a week, this is the window we had her with the twins.

10am-4pm Rome worked while I was on baby duty.

430-730 Rome slept. I’m forever grateful he was willing to go to bed this early, because no matter how tired I am, I struggle with sleeping outside of typical bedtime hours. During this stretch I would attempt to have everything prepped for the babies so he could wake up to bottles made, etc.

730pm-1am: I slept while Rome was on night watch. We slept the twins in bassinets in our livingroom with the lights out; there was no point in the nursery if someone was always awake with them.

1:00am-7:00 am Rome sleeps while I attempt to get them sleeping longer stretches. I would pump twice and have a late night snack, usually scrolling on my phone between wake-ups.

Rinse and repeat every day, even weekends!

This was pretty much our system until the twins were about 7 months old. I’ll be honest, it was pretty brutal. I had to factor in pumping right before and right after my sleep shifts, and this didn’t really leave us much time for things like showers. We didn’t get to spend any time together, snuggle at night, or have any time to ourselves without sacrificing sleep. But it kept us going, and that’s a win in my book.

Once the twins hit about seven months and started sleeping in *slightly* longer stretches, we brought them back into our room and each took a baby. It was a relief to finally be sleeping in the same room together, and we were able to slowly get back on a typical sleep schedule. We did this for about two months and then started slowly shifting them into their cribs. This was a long transition as well and tbh the details are foggy, but by the time they hit a year, one twin waking up once and one was waking up twice. That wasn’t ideal but it felt manageable between the two of us, and I finally felt like we were seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.

I know it might be discouraging to hear about babies taking this long to start sleeping, but my expectations were that it would happen around 3-4 months, and I felt so defeated when that didn’t happen. Since I refused to sleep train, I felt like I might be the problem, but the truth is babies develop on their own timeline and sometimes there’s nothing you can do about that. Babies who don’t sleep well are more normal than the internet would have us believe, so I’d you have one or two of those, just hang in there. It does eventually get better!