Sometimes I feel like I am dying. I’m telling you this not for pity but as a statement of fact. I never sleep, exercise, or breathe fresh air — but it’s mainly the sleep.
Every time I think we’ve rounded a corner of sleep training, that train goes off the rails again. About a week ago, the girls started climbing out of their cribs. I think on some level they’ve known how to do this for a while, but suddenly, they started to do it constantly. I woke up more than once to a very subtle shuffling noise that turned out to be the patter of tiny little feet running gleefully up and down the hallway in the pitch dark, perilously close to the stairs.
I asked the usual suspects for advice and heard back a lot of “convert them to toddler beds,” which didn’t really sound like it was going to solve the problem of them getting out of bed constantly, but on the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t break their necks climbing over the crib rails.
On Sunday we took the sides off their cribs. I was pretty excited about how cute this turned out:
However, as suspected, it solved zero problems. First of all, as you can imagine, the very first thing the girls did was rip every single one of those books and stuffed animals off that shelf until you couldn’t see the floor anymore. I am starting to understand why some of my twin mom friends advise stripping their room of belongings like a prison cell and installing a lock on the outside of the door.
Also, obviously, they wouldn’t stay in the beds to sleep, so the first night, Jon and I took turns sleeping on a camping pad between their cribs. Every time one of the girls woke up and crawled out of bed, we placed her back in. Needless to say, Jon woke up in the morning with Phoebe on the floor next to him. He has slept on the floor in their room every night since.
At least we solved the problem of them climbing over their crib rail, right? Well, no:
Pretty sure we’ve set ourselves up for a few years of co-sleeping, after all the hard work we’ve done to create sleep boundaries. Ah well. The thing about twins is, you can’t do it right. When I meet other random strangers in public who also have twins, if those twins are significantly older, they look me deep in the eyes and say: “Four. Just hang in there.”
