separate or together for naps?

schoolsoutbride

My babies are making me INSANE at naptimes. Seriously.  They go down ok, we have a little routine for that.  But they only sleep for 30 minutes and then wake up cranky and tired and need to nap again in less than an hour.  I can sometimes soothe them back to sleep, but often once one starts crying, the other wakes up, and by the time I can soothe one the other is screaming, and it's all over then b.c I can't soothe both at once effectively.

So I want them to be used to each other's sounds, etc, but I also can't deal with days like this.  I'm not enjoying them, just spending the day putting them down for naps.

So I tried separating them, which got better naps out of them, BUT then if they do both start crying, they're in different rooms, which makes it even harder.

Any advice (besides stab my eyes out)?

leviandlandensmom

Keep them separate if it gets a better nap out of them and just make sure you get whoever wakes first right away that way you can feed and change before the other baby gets up.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head, hopefully someone will have some better advice!

bellasmom27

schoolsoutbride:

My babies are making me INSANE at naptimes. Seriously.  They go down ok, we have a little routine for that.  But they only sleep for 30 minutes and then wake up cranky and tired and need to nap again in less than an hour.  I can sometimes soothe them back to sleep, but often once one starts crying, the other wakes up, and by the time I can soothe one the other is screaming, and it's all over then b.c I can't soothe both at once effectively.

So I want them to be used to each other's sounds, etc, but I also can't deal with days like this.  I'm not enjoying them, just spending the day putting them down for naps.

So I tried separating them, which got better naps out of them, BUT then if they do both start crying, they're in different rooms, which makes it even harder.

Any advice (besides stab my eyes out)?

I am so with you on this one! It sucks really bad and when I separate them, 1 is upstairs the other is downstairs. I cannot begin to tell you the extensive workout I get at home climbing up and down the stairs constantly to attend to each baby when they start crying 5 minutes apart from eachother!

sfshawna

This is why my twins took every nap in their swings until they were 6 months old. Those were miracle workers!! I have no other advice. Sorry!

TheNewFry

We seperate ours because they would always wake each other, which led to two cranky babies who wouldn't go back to sleep.  Since we've seperated them, the regularly give us two good naps a day!

redtop40

We put the babies in different rooms at about 3 months. It worked wonders. They slept so much better.  It was an incredible difference.

Of course I worry about missing cute moments when they start "talking" to each other etc while in their cribs. But they are each sleeping 11-12 hours at night, and I don't want to rock the boat! 

floridakat

When we hit the 30-minute nap problems, we tried a "rousing" technique, and it definitely helped! When one of them would fall asleep, we would set a timer for 25 minutes (set it for about five minutes before the baby usually wakes up.) What's happening is they're coming out of a sleep cycle and not going back into the next one.

When the time went off we'd go in and rouse them just a bit. Touch their face, back, whatever you need to do to get them to move around a bit, but ideally not actually wake up. They should resettle into the next sleep cycle. You only have to do it once, and we would get much longer naps out of them. It doesn't always work, but when it does it's heaven.

We started putting them in different rooms for naps at about this time, and are just now are putting them back in the nursery to nap together. They usually nap at least an hour now (sometimes as much as two), and it's heaven! (You don't have to keep doing the rousing technique; eventually they will learn to get into that next sleep cycle on their own.) 

rplanker

I keep mine together for naps.  They seem to sleep better together than when we separate them.  We're only 8 weeks into it though.  They've slept together since they were conceived and sleep through each other's jabs and cries.  If they're tired, they sleep, if they're awake, they're awake.  It's not the brother's fault in my case.  I guess we're lucky so far.