Sleep

Parents of small children who don't sleep well tend to spend a lot of time obsessing about sleep. That would include me. Andy and I seem to have genes that combine to create children who walk early and sleep through the night late. Personally, if given a choice, I would vote for sleep through the night early and walk late, but the universe doesn't give us such choices.

In the early days of sleepless nights, the outside world is forgiving. "They have newborns at home, poor things. No wonder they look exhausted." It's even more so with triplets: "How do they get any sleep at all?" We actually did really well in the early days. We were given a gift of night time help, so we got to sleep through many of the mid-night feedings. Our nights were short and somewhat interrupted, but not completely broken. Then, the gift money ran out before the kids were sleeping through the night and we were on our own for nights. As sleep deprivation mounts, all sorts of things suffer and getting back to sleeping well becomes hugely important.

When infants are sharing a room and waking at night, there is always the question of "will they wake the others?" A certain amount of fussing while they figure out how to go back to sleep is sometimes good for one child, but it becomes a disaster when one baby wakes two babies, who then cry like mad about being woken up. It has taken us some time to find a balance that mostly works. And we are still working on the whole "sleep from bedtime until morning" thing.

On an excellent night, Michael, William and Jocelyn are asleep by 7:00 pm and Patrick is asleep by 7:30. Michael sleeps through until between 6:00 and 6:30 am. Patrick sleeps through until somewhere between 6:30 and 8:00. William and Jocelyn have each slept through until 6:00 or 6:30, but never on the same night. More often, one or both of them wakes and wants a drink of water between 3:30 and 4:30.

On a more typical night, we don't go in to see them any more often than on an excellent night, but Michael wakes and cries out 3-4 times before midnight and William wakes and cries out 3-4 times between midnight and the early morning water. After his early morning water, William often chatters to himself - or to Jocelyn if she will listen - for half an hour or more before going back to sleep.

Because of the concern about one baby waking the other two and the fact that sound doesn't travel well from the nursery to our bedroom, we have had the monitor on and are being woken by the cries that don't need help. It is time to turn the monitor off and trust that we will hear the important cries, and hope that the ones we miss don't turn into all-baby cry-fests. If that works, it will still take time for our bodies to sleep through the times when the babies used to cry.

Turning the monitor off felt like a big deal when Patrick was ready for it. It feels even more frightening now because of the possibility of mass meltdown if we don't wake soon enough. But it has to be tried. Wish us luck.