I am not a person of habit. I find rituals difficult to follow and schedules... forget about it. I've never gotten the hang of doing the same thing at the same time every day. Nothing works for me that way - you can imagine how this has played out in my job! But other than that this lack of planning/scheduling has never really negatively impacted my life. It's made things fun and spontaneous.
And then I had daughters.
I'm finding that my seeming inability to stick to a schedule is making wake-time, nap-time, bed-time not just hard to predict but hard to manage. And these poor girls get too tired and then get cranky.
But how do I fight a lifetime of schedule-shirking and help my babies find a sleep pattern that is sustainable?
Perhaps I hire a sleep doula to help sleep train the girls (and me!)? Perhaps I read more books about the subject? Perhaps I continue this sleep-on-demand thing even though it only works spotty at best...
Crap - I forgot to pump. I'm an hour past my time. What else is new?
Ciao.
My theory: your kids will be fine no matter what. Go to a kindergarten class and you won't be able to pick out which kids had sleep schedules and which didn't.
ReplyDeleteThat said, sleep schedules might make your life easier. Set an alarm to remind yourself to put the kids to sleep. Then you might have more time while they sleep to be spontaneous and unplanned. :)
From what I've read, most kids do well with a sleep schedule because they sleep longer and harder if their body knows what to do when. That said, some kids have seemingly no bio-clock at all and need to sleep when they're tired and that's that. Point is, don't sweat the one right answer, there isn't one. But if you can at least put them to bed for the night around the same-ish time each night, you might find that they sleep "better" eventually. The same might be true for naps, but isn't guaranteed. But dude, my 18 month old is STILL waking us up at 3am sometimes, so whatev. You are doing a great job mama. You'll get through this.
ReplyDelete