Monday, September 26, 2011

An EASY Day

I wouldn't exactly call my days with almost 4-month old twins easy. In this situation EASY actually stands for Eat, Activity, Sleep, You. A friend of mine introduced me to this acronym and I really like it. It is pretty much the same as the popular Baby Wise, "eat, play, sleep" approach.

As with most new parents of twins, I longed for a schedule and structure to my day, in the early weeks. That's a bit hard to do with tiny babies who don't know the difference between day and night and a new mom who is struggling with feeding and never knowing if the babies are getting enough to eat. Once we established a feeding schedule (every 3 hours during the day, starting at 7am), the rest has slowly fallen into place.

After the girls eat at 7am, they have mat time. They're becoming very interested in grabbing toys now. They'll spend some time on their tummies and even roll over, on occasion. We'll do some of our yoga movements. At some point between 8:15-8:45, they usually get a bit cranky. At the first sign of tiredness (rubbing eyes, yawning, crying etc), they're up in their cribs for a morning nap. At this point, I have some me (here's the Y) time, although it usually involves getting stuff done around the house. After their 10am feed, we often go out. Sometimes we walk in the neighborhood or the park, meet friends for coffee, play dates, run errands etc. On Fridays, we have yoga.

I've noticed in the last few weeks that the girls have naturally adopted the eat, activity, sleep routine. Around 1 1/2 hours after eating, they start to get tired. I've also noticed that they're much happier and less cranky babies when they get proper naps in their cribs. Up until recently, we went out a lot. Yes, it's tiring to get two babies ready to go out, but it was much needed to keep my sanity :) It gave me confidence that I could handle two babies on my own around the city and it was great for them to experience different sights and sounds. Now that they're needing crib naps, I'm trying to be home more. We still get out at least once per day.

Our days are definitely never boring! We're always looking for new and different activities, so if you have ideas, send them my way! I love that we have a schedule now and the babies do too. Thank you, Kate, for the introduction to EASY days :)

3 comments:

  1. You are welcome! It's all in the Baby Whisperer book by Tracy Hogg, a great present we received before Hannah was born. Now, if only the world was on the same EASY schedule as our babies (ie. my Living & Learning class starts right at feeding time), life would be ideal :)

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  2. This is nice to read :) Are your naptimes pretty stable now?

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  3. @Emily- We're getting there. They consistently take a morning nap at some point between 8:15-9. They will sleep for 45min - 1 1/2 hours. I'm trying to get them down for a good nap in the afternoon as well, usually around 2ish. My struggle is getting them to stay asleep!

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