Help!
My twin boys, now 8 months have always followed EASY, very happily. Lots of good napping in the day (I did a bit of PU/PD sleep training to get them to nap by themselves around 4 months) and sleeping happily at night with one/two feeds. About a month ago I stopped feeding at night, as they were on solids and seems ready (only a short feed each night).
Since then things have been in slow decline. They were waking during the night, but white noise and a little pat put them back to sleep. Then early waking started - 5.30, then 5. We sat with them in their room, keeping the blinds drawn and waited until 6 to feed and start the day. Not only no improvement over a few weeks, it's getting worse! Now Finn wakes at 4 regularly and I have resorted to feeding him, and he goes back to sleep until 6. Theo on the other hand has started waking all the way through the night - last night was 9.30, 11.00, 11.45, 12.45 and 3.15. Can't do this any more!
This was our easy routine until last week:
5.30 wake
6 breast feed
7 breakfast
8.30/9 nap (usually 1.5 hours but occasionally only 45 mins)
10.30 breastfeed
11.30 lunch
1.00 nap (3 hours after waking from last nap. usually 1.5 hours but occasionally only 45 mins)
3.00 breast feed
4.30 3rd cat nap (Finn no longer has this, Theo does sometimes)
5.00 supper
5.45 bath, breastfeed and bed
6.30-7 fall asleep
After reading about 3-2 transition I brought bedtime forward and have been stricter on stopping cat nap. But still no improvement....
Recently they have also started really resisting going to sleep - throwing their heads back and arching their back while I hold and sing to them, only calming down to go to sleep on my shoulder.... IS this teething? Or being OT?
There are so many possible things going on:
- moving from 3 to 2 naps? Will it take a while for things to settle?
- teething? They both have two bottom teeth, could the others be coming through and causing pain? I don’t want to fill them up with calpol un-necessarily.
- colds? Theo in particular has a nasty cold now, and woke up with a cough but in the past colds have never caused this much disruption
- milestone? Both boys started crawling in the last 2 week and are now exploring everything in sight and pulling themselves up on things.
- separation anxiety? And if this is it what can I do about it?
- need a different routine?
It just feels like the whole thing is falling apart! Not sure where I'm going wrong so any suggestions would be fantastic