Twin sleep updates, bedtime improvement plan, 10% of my waking life is too much time spent on someone else's sleep.

Elisabeth is recapping her Cardiff visit over on her blog - it seems crazy that it was over a month ago she was here!  She recently posted about our trip to St. Fagans, which is my all time favourite museum.  I also can't believe a month ago I had two helpers for twin nursery and lunch.  

In some ways, I feel like Elizabeth's trip was the start of the twins being interesting little people.  I know that sounds terrible, but for me, twins are hard. It was hard to experience them as little people and not just moving bundles of need.  There are so many needs! Clara is especially clumsy, and can trip over nothing, and can be (understandably!) upset about it.  Aubrey is generally so happy, but also know her mind, and know the right way to do anything.  Clara is far more experimental.  Between them, there can be very strong (and very loud) disagreement on many things

However, recently, there is also a lot of fun.   They talk to each other! They build magna tile castles together! They play funny games and chose their own entertainment and sometimes can entertain themselves for 15 or 20 minutes.

They play with the big kids sometimes

They are really cute

Anyways - one thing Elisabeth's post made me realize is that it has now been almost two months of terrible horrible no good very bad bedtimes.  So while they are becoming cute little people, their bedtimes are a growing source of frustration.

When Elisabeth was here we were working on twin bedtime - they had just moved out of cribs in May (for safety reasons - I would keep crib to 5 if I could!) and every night was a long long bedtime battle/process that was just... bad.

Plus, we have 2 other kids to get to bed.   Crib bedtime started at 6:45 for twins, 7:15 for Lily, 7:30 for Ezra, and everyone was generally asleep by 8pm (one parent could usually start tidying up at 7:30).  Bedtimes for everyone were now taking a lot longer - and sometimes twin bedtime pushed big kid bedtime back to the point that no one was able to start dinner clean up until 8:30 or 9. 

Like all good problems, bedtime needed a spreadsheet.  

It was easy to see why Andy and I were starting to lose the plot - bedtime was taking an average of 1hr 15 minutes.  Every week, we were spending 8 or more hours of our life putting twins to sleep.  7% to 10% of the waking day was used "doing bedtime"

Neither Andy or I have done an evening activity in 2 months, Andy quit his run club, I barely made it to one book club, we missed our dinner date, we barely maintained a basic FLOM (we were so wiped out from bedtime that we couldn't really plan), I went to the office once since moving to beds.  It has been, honestly, bad.

Yesterday we devised a bedtime improvement plan.  I am cautiously optimistic.  There was some crying yesterday, but not a lot, and bedtime took 30 minutes, not 90 minutes.  I remember reading once that when it comes to kids sleep there is time and crying and you can chose one or the other or both. I don't have time for both.  

Fingers crossed for better bedtimes. It will be way more fun to enjoy time with fun little people when I know the fun will end with sleep.