it's bad luck to be superstitious

So I'm sure I'll manage to jinx myself by writing about it here, but two girls in the Cady household have been sleeping pretty well lately. Their sleep training and management has been a full-time job for some time now, and getting them to where they are now has been a series of small steps, full of both disappointments and successes. The most recent changes are the somewhat final stages -- we've given up the so-called "dreamfeed", and we're putting the girls down (for the night!) still awake.

There was a time, I think around the last twin-of-the-month post, when things were going quite smoothly. We'd rock the girls to sleep around 6:30-ish, wake them up for a feeding around 9:45, and then head to bed and not hear from them until morning. Then around mid-May we had a slew of visitors that coincided with some new night wakings, mostly from Annamaria. The first thing to change was that we started two weeks ago to rock the babies a bit and then put them down awake instead of holding them until they were asleep. We've been doing that at naps now for a long time, but I was hesitant to do it at bedtime. That step went *very* well... the first couple nights they cried for no more than 15 to 30 minutes, and since then there's just some chatter or no noise at all.

Unfortunately, there were still a lot of night wakings! I finally decided that if I were going to be up at night anyway, we might as well let the babies get some consolidated sleep. For awhile now, they had been in deep sleep when we woke them up for the 10 pm feeding, but had been WIDE awake and ready to play by the time we finished. It seemed like it was doing more harm than good. A week ago tonight, we stopped waking them up. Annamaria still wakes up occasionally around 4 or 5, but she's made it until morning sometimes, too. The night before last, she slept from 7 pm until 7 am with no crying! That's certainly not the norm, but I'm so glad that we're moving in the right direction.

If you've read this far, you're more interested in the boring details than the average Joe (a post this boring is really more for myself, to help remember later on) and may want to take a peek at their sleep charts: here's Eloise's and Annamaria's. Those solid-as-a-rock long consistent naps you see in blue? That right there is the fruit of my labor. That's the only gold medal, my laurel wreath, my tacky trophy. I'm so pleased to have put in so much effort teaching these girls to sleep well, on their own, and to finally start seeing some results. Cross your fingers that the trend continues!