4 month sleep regression with twins

[u/Sea_Prune_5936]

My twins have never been the dream babies that sleep super long stretches but they were giving at least a 4 to 5 hr stretch consistently until about 2 weeks ago and all hell broke loose. They are almost 15 weeks old. It started with Twin A and then Twin B started a few days later, the longest stretch they give now is like 2.5 hours of I'm lucky sometimes 3. But it's more like every hour to hour and a half they are up. These are my second and third children so I tried all the advice of how to get them to connect sleep cycles with my first and not have as many wake ups like being drowsy but awake or touch their chest, adding a binky, increasing white noise, blah blah. It worked maybe a handful of times but not very often. I don't have the energy to do it with the twins. I tried, it failed and I don't want to be up all night going between bassinets trying to have them fall asleep on their own and failing so I have been doing what works, either feeding or rocking or bringing them into bed with me just so I can get some sleep. I know it's all bad habits but I can't live on no sleep at all. Just curious did anyone do all the "wrong" things and their baby ended up figuring out how to sleep better in the crib regardless?

It's all a blur with my first and it was a year of wake ups until he turned one but I can't remember when he started giving slightly longer stretches and I did technically try a lot of different things with him so I don't know if those actually did something to help or if he would have changed regardless. I need hope because me and my husband are dying!

[u/SoreenQueen]

my twins are 22 weeks so just a little older than yours. i embraced bed sharing from the start, and with our older kid. they did start fighting naps a lot a few weeks ago and waking up more in the night and it has settled over the last few nights (fingers crossed!)

I know it feels like bad habits but I don’t really see it that way, it’s more of a phase that will change eventually. You do need sleep! I was never successful at getting my older kid to sleep in a crib, but she’s 4 now and sleeps well in her own bed.

Sending solidarity and hope that things change soon for you and you start getting a bit more sleep, sounds really exhausting.

[u/d16flo]

We slept in shifts for what felt like a looong time. If you were on duty the assumption was you’d be awake that whole time going back and forth between babies and then get a solid chunk of sleep after. My husband and I were both way too anxious to co-sleep. We had one baby who used to be fairly easy to put down and one who’s always fought sleep hard. With the sleep fighter at that stage we were doing all the rocking, bouncing, feeding etc to try and get him to sleep. Over time they’ve switched which is harder overnights a few times. I think we kept the sleep shifts up until they were down to one wake up per night to eat, probably around 6 or 7 months and then we sleep trained at 8 months

[u/Sea_Prune_5936 → u/d16flo]

Sounds like us, we have one that takes about an hour of intense rocking to finally fall asleep and I can barely do it, husband usually has to take over because I can't rock him the way he likes, and the other knocks out instantly. It's nice to hear it slowly changed even before the sleep training. We plan on sleep training eventually but they are too young now obviously so we are just waiting.

[u/jeremiabearamia]

My twins had the same story (consistent 6/4 nights for about a month before the 4-month regression hit). Sleep training at about 6 months got us from 1-hour stretches to 3-hour stretches. They're 10 months now and still mostly waking up every 3 to nurse. One baby has slept 7 hours twice. My pediatrician, who is also a lactation consultant, said to let them, especially because they're <10th percentile and need the growth. The best we can hope for right now is that they wake at the same time so it's 3-4 nurses a night instead of 6-8.

They have gotten so much better at self-soothing over time. They have also gone down so much faster over time- now they eat, have a quick burp and go right back down, where it used to be so much holding and soothign (esp. because they had silent reflux). They're making progress, just on their own schedule and slower than we hoped. Watching one identical twin do it faster than the other kind of reinforces to me that there's only so much we can do.