Sleep issues

[sharn]

Megan and Emma will be1 next week. They occasionally sleep through the night but mostly they get up at least once a night. I nurse them to sleep. Does anyone have any suggestions for getting them to bed earlier that does not involve nursing them to sleep? We are going to switch to whole milk soon since I can no longer pump enough for daycare and my freezer stash will be gone in about two weeks. I will continue nursing at home but I am going to stop pumping within the next month or so. I expect we will quit nursing altogether sometime this summer.

[3andMe]

Congratulations on making it to a year of nursing! I started transitioning to whole milk at a year and stopped pumping at work at that time, too, and I can tell you until I stopped pumping and nursing the twins, I had no idea how much the stress of worrying about my supply was affecting me. This did not happen with my singleton, because I did not have the same supply issues with him, but with my twins I was always counting how many ounces I had in my freezer and stressing if I pumped less than usual. On the other hand, it is hard to have to think about packing food for them on trips instead of just having it with you.

I continued to nurse on my days off and in the evenings for about three months after that, and it was a nice, gradual transition.

What I did to stop nursing my babies to sleep was to start nursing them before bedtime, away from the bed. I changed the routine a little bit at a time so instead of toothbrushing, stories, nursing in bed, we did toothbrushing, then nursing in the glider and then stories in bed. They liked binkies a lot, so I gave them those instead and wore a tight shirt that they could not access while I was reading them stories. Other people have had luck switching to someone else (dh) doing the bedtime routine, but it worked for us. I was still being woken up 5+ times a night at a year old for nursing, so even though they learned to fall asleep without nursing, not long after that I decided to night-wean them as well. It was a lot of changes, accompanied by a gradual switch to cow's milk.

It was not very difficult in general. Each change in routine was gradual, and I gave them a semi-passable substitute (like a binky, or cow's milk) to replace what they were used to. Tell your girls happy birthday from their APA family!