Night time sleep and naps

Today we are out of routine. We went to the shopping centre to buy a slow cooker and replacement printer cartridge. The outing was very pleasant. Except the girls fell asleep in the car on the way home. To be precise they fell asleep at the set of lights, a mere 2 km from our house. Not long enough to be considered a nap. I tried to remove them from the car asleep, to no avail. So the mini, mini power nap has been enough to keep them going for another two hours.

I've placed them in their beds, in the vain hope that they will play and then fall asleep. Over tired babies are every mother's nightmare.

Day time naps
When they were younger and had just past the sleepy newborn stage and become infants, around 12 weeks, I had a real battle with day time naps. There is a wealth of information on night time sleeping, but information on daytime naps were for me harder to locate. In hindsight I made all the mistakes, over stimulating them by picking them up because they cried, not picking up on their tired signs. In truth, I had no idea what tired signs to look for, and misinterpreted their different cries. A cry was a cry to me. As a result I spent a lot of time with crying babies. Over time I became to recognise the difference, don't ask me how, one day it clicked into place for day time naps. We did keep a routine diary and this did help to establish an ideal time to put them down for naps.


Nighttime sleeps
We were blessed with babies that slept through the night early, between 12 and 16 weeks. The first point I will make is the babies were breast feed until 12 weeks, and then we changed to formula feeding.

Between 12 and 16 weeks they decided that they would drink most of their night time bottle. We always gave a full bottle (260 mls) and let them drink as much as they wanted. The first time this happened I  had a sleepless night, they slept fine, but I just struggled to come to terms with them drinking 220 to 260 mls in one sitting. I was up checking on them every few hours. I also tried to give them a night feed, which upset them, they didn't drink and were very cranky about been woken up. Eventually I realised I had to step back, if they wanted to drink a full bottle and sleep the night through, who was I to interfere? They continued to sleep through but it didn't stop the nighttime parent visits to see if they were fine.

So as you can read for the above, whilst they were sleeping through the night it took a long time for our day time naps to fall into place. Two babies who cried most of the day was hard work. But I still consider myself lucky, because there just might be parents out there struggling with night and day sleep.

P.S       15 minutes after been put in their cots they are sleeping.
P.S.S    Forgot to buy the printer cartridge (big sigh)