Schedule Smedule!

When we had Rio, we were very proud of the fact that we took her with us everywhere and she adapted to our schedule, not the other way around.  She was a great breast feeder, so after the first few weeks she would last a good three hours between day time feeds and was sleeping through the night by ten weeks. She was able to fall asleep anywhere, any time, on anyone's bed. Jordan and I often laugh that a four month old Rio slept sprawled out on the seat of a booth at a buffet in Vegas!

With the boys, we assumed it would be a completely different story given that there were two of them. We were pretty certain we would need them on a set schedule in order to accomplish anything. When they were in the hospital they were on a strict every three hour feed schedule, and I had a meltdown when it was changed to on demand. In the end, we did some negotiating and decided that on demand was ok, as long as they kept the boys' feeds within an hour of each other.

When they came home from the hospital, they were fairly consistently eating every four hours so we kept that up. But as the days passed, their sleeps were getting longer at night, increasing to 5 hours, then 6, and now close to 8. We weren't going to argue with the long sleep at night, but that did mean that their daytime feeds started getting closer together to make up the same volumes. So now, they eat when they want to eat, usually every three hours, and 99% of the time it's at the same time. It is a bit of a challenge to tandem bottle feed, but it's nice because it gets them over with together. If they don't happen to want to eat at the same time, the second one is always ready by the time the first one is finished.

So as it turns out, without us even realizing, the boys are in fact on a schedule but it is a schedule of their own. It works because we're not forcing them to eat when they don't want to, and given that we are bottle feeding and can control the volumes we know we can count on a set length of time between feeds. It is nice to know that we don't feel forced into a regimented schedule just because we have twins, but we have some consistency that works for the babies and us. I know that somehow we lucked into having three kids with fairly easy temperaments so that definitely helps. But I do like to take just a bit of credit for not forcing any of us into a routine just because that's what we thought we were supposed to do.

Oh so full and covered in spit up x 2