We're At It Again...

...sleep training.

(did everyone just groan or was that my imagination?)

Our girls are now 20 weeks old or 14 weeks corrected gestational age. We decided to stop swaddling them last week and it seems as good a time as any to start teaching them the skills to fall asleep by themselves.

It really hit me how important this was today when I was dealing with both kids who were super cranky because their napping schedules were off. I've signed them up for a class run at the local community center called Babygym where you take your kids and do "age appropriate movement". It was fun but the time is from 9:45am to 10:30am, right smack dab in the middle of nap time. As I was scurrying back and forth between the two cribs, sticking pacifiers into mouths that were promptly being spit back out, shushing, jiggling, trying to pick one up and then then other, I really felt like a chicken with my head cut off. It was madness as I was trying to soothe both and succeeding at soothing neither. I finally ended up having to let Victoria cry it out and fall asleep like that because I simply only have two arms.

I've also noticed that Victoria has started going from zero to hysterical in a nanosecond because she knows that we tend to cater to her as she is louder and, well, she's just really loud. We started calling her "squeaky wheel" (which we have to stop) but that completely describes her. We are guilty of catering to her needs over Caitlyn's because she is just louder. There is no chance of Caitlyn getting down when Victoria is screaming so loudly. I swear this afternoon I heard ringing in my ears that is how loud Victoria was screaming.

I also feel like I am rewarding Victoria's bad behaviour. Her crying sounds to me like she's throwing a tantrum and by responding to it and always rushing to her side when she does that reinforces the bad behaviour. I'm not saying that I won't go to her if she's genuinely upset and needs me, but this hysterical crying at naptime and bedtime needs to stop. I will lose my hearing if it continues.

This time around, we have also decided to use graduated extinction where we will allow longer and longer intervals between when we will go in and console them. We decided on 2 minute intervals.

Tonight, it took one 2, 4, 6 and an 8 minute interval between crying fits and they fell asleep. Total time - 20 minutes of crying not including any soothing time. All in all, better than the extinction method. We'll see how this works out second time around.