Twin Sync

Like most sleep-deprived parents of newborns, Kathy and I bought all those books about how to train your baby to sleep longer at night. Of course, we immediately turned to the chapter about the first three months, because that's all we cared about at the time. Imagine our disappointment when we found that the advice in all the books basically amounted to: "put your babies to sleep when they're tired, and feed them when they cry -- there's nothing you can do to make them sleep longer because they're too young". Yeah, thanks a lot, we could've figured that out without forking over thirty bucks to Amazon.com.

Then after three months, the gods smiled upon us, and the twins suddenly transformed into darn good nighttime sleepers. After four months, they were pretty much sleeping 11 or 12 hours through the night without much intervention from mommy and daddy. The books sat mostly unread on our coffee table. Amazon, you're welcome.

One other obvious thing I remember seeing in the books somewhere was the old adage "never wake a sleeping baby". I always thought that seemed like pretty obvious and easy-to-follow advice, but that was before I had twins. During the early months, we were constantly waking up our sleeping babies. Basically, whenever one baby woke up from a nap, we would wake the other one up so that Leah and Riley would stay on the same schedule. Otherwise, they would be on alternating schedules, meaning that at least one of them would always be awake, meaning that the parents would get no rest. Because it's generally considered bad form for parents to go to sleep and let the wakeful baby fend for herself. Alas.

Nowadays, we don't usually wake the babies because they do the job for us. Or Riley does the job for us. After every nap, Riley wakes up and starts babbling in an elevated voice that she knows is just loud enough to wake her sister from her slumber. So Leah wakes up, and just like that, Leah and Riley start babbling in unison in a song that says "Come and pay attention to us, mommy and daddy, or we'll start screaming, and you'll be sorry". Or at least that's what I think they're saying. Gotta check my Baby-to-English dictionary.

So generally, Leah and Riley are pretty much on the same schedule. Except for this past weekend, when Leah was a little out of sorts and somehow ended up an hour off-schedule from Riley. For the rest of the day, Leah and Riley were on alternating schedules. It was sort of like having only one baby, except it was one crazy insomniac baby who never sleeps. I had been kind of curious how it would be, having only one child up at a time, and I have to say, I did not like it one bit. It was actually kinda creepy to have only one baby there when you're used to having two. I spent the afternoon with the nagging feeling that somebody was missing. Part of my brain was in a constant state of thinking "oh my God, where's the other baby, we've lost the other baby!"

Part of my brain is sorta stupid.

Plus it was totally exhausting to not have a break all afternoon, to constantly have to be "on" for hours upon hours. Oh well, at least now I sorta know what it would be like to have only one baby - if that baby was some sort of cyborg, non-sleeping, Energizer-bunny baby.

And now, a picture of Leah and Riley in a circle of 6-month olds at the neighborhood easter egg hunt. Please note how nobody else in the circle has cheeks that can hold a candle to Leah and Riley's. All hail the cheeks!