r/parentsofmultiples • u/Valuable-Character-9 • 22h ago
advice needed Sleep Questions
FTM, pregnant with twins. A lot of parents have been giving my husband and I the advice to do shifts at night so the other person can sleep (7pm -12am, 12am-5am, etc.).
How does this work when the babies are sleeping in the same room those first few months? Don't both parents wake up when they hear crying? Doesn't one baby crying wake up the other?
I'd love to hear what worked for everyone. Thanks!
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u/giantroastpan 22h ago
My husband and I get so exhausted that when our brains know the other parent has the babies, we knock TF out lol
As for waking each other, our boys don’t tend to wake each other if we can quiet them quickly.
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u/Standard-Advice-5447 21h ago
Yep we all slept in same room and I frequently slept completely through feedings with screaming 2 feet from my head because I was so tired.
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u/oldladywhisperinhush 22h ago
Someone sleeps in a different room. The babies don’t really wake each other up unless you take too long to pick up the crying one.
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u/Valuable-Character-9 22h ago
Like the person not "on call" sleeps in the other room?
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u/oldladywhisperinhush 22h ago
Whoever’s turn it is to sleep sleeps in a different room from the babies
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u/Significant_Tap_4396 22h ago
Yeah, we slept on a matress on the floor of our twins' nursery. Around 2 am we switched beds.
We also kept the babies synced up, but we formula fed, which probably helps. So we would feed the one that just woke up and then immediately after woke up the second one and fed them.
We started this when they were about 3 weeks old. The first 3 weeks we just woke up together. I had a c-section, so I couldn't do it on my own at first
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u/Valuable-Character-9 21h ago
Great point, hadn't considered syncing them up
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u/Succulant-111111 18h ago
It’s easier to sync when they’re identical (similar sleep needs, etc). But we kept our identical boys synced. We would feed the baby that woke up early from a nap an extra oz to go back to sleep maybe very other day, rather than wake a baby from a nap. It’s hard to sync but harder if they’re waking up at all hours.
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u/MangoSorbet695 21h ago
We put a bed in the babies’ nursery instead of putting the babies in our room. Whoever was on shift, slept in the babies room, the other person would sleep in the master. At 2 AM we would switch.
Those days were hard. I missed sleeping with my husband so much! But we made it through, and you will to. You got this.
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u/OrangeCatEnergy24 20h ago
The “off” parent sleeps in another room. For us, we moved their bassinets to the living room when we did shifts.
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u/Dear_Excitement_5109 18h ago
Same. Except here we are a year later, with the twins still in our downstairs living room, and us permanently in separate rooms. We discovered that we all sleep better separately. We talk about going back to the same bed but then we remember both poking each other awake for snoring 5 times overnight, and we stay separated.
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u/1sp00kylady 22h ago edited 22h ago
When they first came home we did 9-3 and 3-9. I had to wake up and pump anyway, so we would swap out at that time. Our twins were in their nursery from the beginning and we had a bed in there for the “on duty” parent. The “off duty” parent slept in our bedroom. Once my husband went back to work and they were about 3 months old, we started trading off entire nights in the nursery. They were sleeping better and pretty soon after that they cleared to wean off night feeds. So it got pretty manageable for one parent to take the entire night. Around 8 months old (6 adjusted) we went back to our bedroom and have traded off nights with the monitor ever since.
An fyi if you do shifts, I wish I had taken the earlier “on” shift because our twins slept a lot more during the first half of the night, and I was juggling pumping on top of it (when my husband wasn’t). Once we switched to full nights, I realized how much easier he had been having it taking the earlier night shift…
Waking each other up is an inevitability at various times, but they get very used to each other’s noise and soon it didn’t phase them. I think mine were used to a lot of noise from the NICU, anyway.
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u/DirtGirl32 21h ago
I slept in the living room with the babies in their bassinets. I chose this. It worked well
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u/floridasquirrel 11h ago
We didn’t keep them in our bedroom until they were 2+ months old. Their twin bassinet was in our living room by the kitchen until they stopped overnight feeds. For the first month the on shift person didn’t get any sleep, during month 2 I would nap on the couch in between wake ups.
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u/bgkh20 21h ago
They spent 2 and 3 weeks in the NICU. For the first 4 weeks after that I would wake up by 10 am, my husband would go to bed between 4-5pm, I would wake him up around 2am at which point he took the boys and I went to sleep.
When we moved them into our bedroom at 7 weeks we were each "in charge" of one baby each night and would swap every night. They started sleeping 5 hours pretty quickly when I started a "top-off" bottle. Gradually whichever baby I had would sleep 7-8 hours and whoever my husband had would wake up every 4 😅.
ETA
We just kept the boys in the family room for a while. We would turn off most of the lights, but they were very scheduled from the NICU, so we just ran it like that for the first few weeks at home.
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u/whydoyouflask 20h ago
We set up couch cushions on the floor of the bby room and the om shift parent slept there. You still get some sleep and the other person gets better sleep. White noise machine helped to keep one babies from waking eachother. But we called on eachother when it became a two man job.
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u/DreamingEvergreen 17h ago
We found that shifts really didn’t work for us. For the first few months we all slept in the living room. When the first baby would wake up I’d make the bottle, my husband would change the diaper, and then I’d try to pump while he fed that baby. If the other baby woke up before first baby was done, I’d feed that baby. My husband would transfer the first baby after they’d been held upright long enough, and then take the second baby I’d fed to hold them upright while I pumped.
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u/Ill-Emotion-5019 5h ago
We did this with my son- the baby and “on” parent slept in the living room and the “off” parent slept in the bedroom. With our twins we plan to do this again, but we will have an extra bedroom instead of the living room.
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u/Actual-Lettuce-8543 3h ago
The person off duty sleeps in a separate room. For a while we had both babies sleeping in the living room and the parent on duty slept on the couch (if they got any sleep). The person off duty is in bedroom with earplugs. It doesn’t work if you’re all in the same room.
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