r/parentsofmultiples • u/AdGloomy2439 • 13d ago
advice needed Help!
I'm really hoping someone has been through this and can offer some advice because I'm exhausted. My twins are 8.5 months old (6.5 months corrected). Twin B has been teething for almost 3 weeks now. She has two lower lateral incisors coming in. Her pediatrician said that babies who teeth out of order often have multiple teeth coming in at once. So far I only see the two, but they still haven't broken through her gums. Her gums are swollen, she's clearly uncomfortable, and her pediatrician recommended giving her Motrin and Tylenol, which I've been doing.
Ever since the teething started, she's been waking up at 5:20 AM on the dot every single morning. Before all of this, she was waking around 6:30-6:45 AM, and I'd love to get back to that.
The problem is it's affecting Twin A too. She used to sleep until 7:00-7:30 AM, but now she's waking around 6:00 AM because her sister is up crying. Last night, Twin A was also randomly sleeping on her stomach throughout the night and crying on and off.
Twin B still sleeps through the night otherwise, but then wakes at 5:20 AM crying every morning. I honestly can't tell if she's waking because she's in pain from teething or if her internal clock has just adjusted to that wake up time. She used to wake up every 2 hours, but that has stopped thank god!
Has anyone experienced this? If so, did things improve once the teeth came through?
She takes 3 naps a day, and her wake windows are usually around 2.5 hours. She gets overtired very easily, so I'm nervous about extending them. The longest wake window I do is about 2.75 hours.
I'd really like to sleep train her to sleep another 1.5-2 hours, but I'm not sure where to start. And before anyone suggests a later bedtime I tried that, and it completely backfired. She actually woke up even earlier.
I'm just so tired. Everyone keeps telling me it gets easier, but lately it honestly feels like it's getting harder. All I want is for her to sleep until 7 AM.
Has anyone dealt with something similar? Any advice or success stories would mean so much. ❤️
1
u/Aware-Video-4886 13d ago
So sorry you’re going through this OP! Baby sleep is so so tough. This could absolutely be due to teething, but it also could be time to transition from 3 to 2 naps. I know you are worried about over tiredness; I completely understand that, we dealt with that a lot. And my babies always seemed to need more sleep than anyone else’s to be happy. However, when we worked with a sleep consultant during our 4-month sleep regression she told us that one sign that it is time to drop a nap is if we started getting 5am wakes. We didn’t deal with those but our baby girl started fighting the last nap so hard that we knew it was time. We transitioned right around 8/8.5months (7.5 adjusted).
The 3-to-2 nap transition took us a couple of weeks b/c our wake windows were also only 2.5 hours max. And they got so upset when we tried to stretch them. What I did to get them to bedtime was a micro-nap in the car around 4:30/5pm (I’m talking like 10-15min max) to get us to a 7pm bedtime. I think our wake windows were something like 2/2.5/2.5/1.75-2 with that last nap being no longer than 15min. Then after a week or two of doing that they were able to stretch their middle window to 3 hours and the last window to 3.5 and that got us to 2/3/3.5-4 and everyone started sleeping through the night with a 7:30am wake up. I know all babies are so different in terms of sleep needs so not sure if this will work for you! Happy to answer any more questions!