Nowadays, I feel for the most part satisfied if I get at least 6 hours of sleep here and there and my day normally starts at 6 or 7 in the morning. We've gotten into a routine which is how I stay sane. The babies eat at the same time give or take a half hour and sleep at the same times. My day usually goes like this:
In the morning I change their diapers, get them out of their PJs, and feed them. Afterwards, I set them in their cribs to stretch and hang out. When they get tired of that, I put their clothes on and either let them hang out more in the cribs or I swaddle them.
Madelyn loves eye contact and will just stare at me for hours. She has been starting to smile more and it's super adorable! She loves the baby swing the most and doesn't like to spend a lot of time flat on her back. She loves being curled up in a ball and it's really difficult to get her to stretch her legs out as she doesn't care for that much. She loves being swaddled, more so than her brother. She tends to hate being in her carseat which makes traveling somewhat difficult at times.
Ollie is so much bigger than his sister it's funny how big the difference is (about 2 lbs). He has such big eyes and loves to stare at anything and everything...sometimes at nothing. He makes the funniest faces. He loves being swaddled, but more so than his sister, he loves to just lie on his back and kick and stretch his arms and legs. He keeps himself occupied doing that throughout the day. He loves to be sung to and rocked to sleep. He can fall asleep without it a lot of the time but if he's having troubles, I can generally get him to sleep by singing to him.
They've started recognizing each other when they're lying next to each other. They'll stare at each other as they fling their arms willy nilly at each other. For bath times, Ollie prefers to be in the shower, so a lot of times I'll hand him to Cam as he's in there and Madelyn prefers the bathtub. I tried giving them a bath together the other day and Ollie didn't quite appreciate it.
I'm crazy in love with these two!
As for bedtime, we struggled to find a routine with this. We had several nights where they slept for 7-8 hours, but for the most part they would wake up every three hours and we struggled to get them back to sleep at times. For a while, we tried waking them up around 10-11 at night to feed them in hopes that they'd sleep longer during the night, letting us sleep longer - however, that never worked. We realized that when we put them to bed at around 7-9 at night, they fell asleep more deeply and slept longer. When we had been waking them up late at night to feed them, we were interrupting their sleep and they had a hard time falling back to sleep after that.
Since starting that routine at the beginning of this week, they've slept around 7-8 hours straight for the first part of the night, we feed them around 4 and then they sleep until 7/8am. I've been loving the extra sleep and it's so much easier to take care of them throughout the day when I've had sufficient amount of sleep.
That's my life at the moment. It's crazy, stressful and sometimes I truly feel as though I'm going insane, but at the same time I'm loving every minute of it and I'm so afraid of it going by too quickly. I'm so in love with these two and am so grateful for the opportunity to be their mother.
