All Things Haley: Giggle #14 Just Like Daddy

Our little man is absolutely on his way to becoming just like Daddy! I think he's seen Ben in one too many sleeveless shirts, because he's getting some muscle envy. One of his new weird quirks is slamming his legs down on his crib when he's trying to fall asleep or in the middle of the night. And this isn't any old leg raising, this is full blown, WWE leg slamming action. He actually shakes his crib. He's been doing this for several days now, but today I saw him for the first time doing it during playtime.

I was calming Grace down from a fuss-fest when I started hearing repetitive slamming over in the play area. I walked over and he was lying on his mat, smiling up at the yellow plastic piece that he loves so dearly, clasping his hands, and slamming his legs down over and over. He was actually scooting himself a little bit each time and he kept scooting off of the mat and then slamming his heels on the tile! I had to put him back on the mat three times, he just kept doing it.

But even better than that is Caleb's new obsession with ripping the hanging toys OFF of the playmat. I hooked a bunch of rings on the mat so they could practice grabbing at them. He got better at grabbing and decided it was time to show off his strength. He's pulled every single one of those rings off of the mat and flung them across the play area! Channelling Daddy's workouts already.

Today's schedule was totally thrown off because we brought the littles into bed this morning when they were having trouble falling back to sleep after the 3am bottle...they ended up sleeping REALLY well in bed with us and didn't wake up until way later than usual. I guess we'd get much better sleep if we were a bed-sharing family. But with twins, there's no way that would work out for us. I'm paranoid the whole time and they're hardly even moving yet. I can't imagine how crazy it would be in that bed once the littles are rolling all over the place.

I haven't mentioned it, but we've been on a mission for the last few days. Mission: Mommy Sleep! We're on Mission Mommy Sleep Experiment 2 Day 3 tonight. Experiment 1 was the dream feed. We did it for a long time (too long I think) and it was working for a while...until they started waking up all the time. I thought that maybe the dream feed was contributing to the multiple wake ups, so we dropped it a few nights ago in hopes that they would sleep right through until around 3am or maybe even 5 or 6 (gasp!). Nope. So far, experiment 2 is a flop. Not that we'll be going back to the dream feed, they need to learn to sleep through the night at some point. Feeding them in the middle isn't going to aid in that.

So we've been up around midnight to replace a binky, then again usually for the other baby around 1:30. Then waking up hungry around 3 or so. Then again around 4:30. Then again around 5:30, which is too early for us. So it's back to bed and then they were waking up at 6:45 or 7 for the day the first two times we tried this. Last night was a bit different with bringing them into bed with us.

I'm not really sure where to go from here other than traditional sleep training. From what I can tell at this point, Grace is an escalator now- she'll work herself into a frenzy if left to cry for too long and then hardly anything can calm her down. Caleb is still a little iffy for me. I was sure he was an escalator, but recently he's been putting himself back to sleep a little more or at least calming down to a dull cry/grunt after a bit. So maybe he'd be better with a Cry It Out type approach. I just don't think I can do it with Grace. And Caleb wakes up EVERY time she cries. Oy.

I'm thinking that maybe we try banishing the binkies. But that's gonna be a ROUGH few nights of a lot of crying and soothing...in some way...for our little binky addicts. I'm not sure how we'll get them to stop crying when the binky has been pretty much the only way for a while now (other than the bottle). Any thoughts or tips?