Monthly Meeting at Cradle this Sunday (3/11/12)

Hi All,

Just a friendly reminder about our monthly meeting at Cradle this Sunday (3/11) from 10 - 11:30a.

Looks like Beth Grams Haxby will be stopping by for a "meet and greet" with our group.  She's interested in finding out more about  what we'd like to hear about regarding sleep and twins.  She is not charging for this meeting, but we hope to give her a little something for her effort, in addition to our usual donation to Cradle.

We're hoping to have our workshop with Beth in the next month or so - venue still to be decided.   Thanks to Benita for making the connection with Beth!  

Please rsvp if you think you'll be attending Sunday.  Hope to see you all there.

Lana

Possible Talk on Babies and Sleep by Beth Grams Haxby

Beth Grams Haxby gives talks on young ones and sleep. I asked her if she'd be willing to do one geared specifically to families with twins and she said yes. If you are interested, when would be doable days / times for you? What about sometime like a Saturday 1-3 pm, or 10 am - 12 pm? (I would like to avoid a 6-8 pm weekday time, as I've seen her do!) She's looking into having it at the Cooley Dickinson Midwifery Center meeting space. Besides hearing her perspective, it could also be a great chance to hear from other twin parents about practical experiences & tips.
please leave your comment to this post if you are interested in attending and let us know what time would be best.
Benita

All 4 Kids Consignment Sale!!

Introducing Solids

I remember having a great time introducing foods and making all my own purees....i loved a book from the library i got called "Baby Blender Food" by Nicole Young.  An online site I'd often find myself referring to was wholesomebabyfoods .

I used "the magic bullet"....loved it for the purpose of making baby foods.  Do a batch of your puree, pour into ice trays and, once frozen, dump all the puree cubes into freezer bags.  So nice to spend a bit of time filling your freezer and then you are set for several days (or weeks) without having to prepare anything new.  I still do this to some extent for my 2-year olds - portion sizes just got bigger and stopped blending.

As for "the magic bullet", loved that it was small and portable.  There were a couple of times we went to grandma's or did a timeshare, and i brought "the bullet" with us.  There are other similar blenders out there too.  The annoying part was that the blender came with all these cups that i knew I'd never use.  

How do you respond to needs of both babies?

Hi All,

Thanks everyone for contributing. I have to chuckle at nap schedules, cuz it seems soooooo far down the track for us. Our little ones are just three weeks old and I'm still in the very early stages of figuring out what it is that they want/need at any particular time! But I was SO PSYCHED to find this discussion group AND to see that you've started a facebook group, Benita. Thanks so much.  I must admit I'm a bit slow and resistant to the whole email/facebook thing, but I'm starting to warm to it now that I'm feeling pretty isolated and desperate to reach out to other parents of multiples. 

I look forward to much sharing and learning from fellow parents who are experiencing similar stuff with multiples. 

Here's a question for the group - how does one respond to the needs of both babies when one is screaming and the other is quietly lying there? I have one baby who is definitely more needy - she has some reflux stuff going on and is generally more fussy, so I end up attending to her more often than my little boy. And then I look over at him just lying there looking around and I feel so guilty and torn and wonder how to give him the attention he needs. Any advice? I can't seem to really achieve this balance unless I have an extra set of loving hands here, helping out...And unfortunately, that isn't always possible.

Also, can anybody recommend a book about twin care that they really enjoyed and that didn't make them feel like they were doing a bad job ( I just remember being given a book on this stuff when I had my four year old and how I cried trying to institute what the book said and then failing).

I'm trying to learn more about scheduling feedings/naps/ structuring the day, and general care.

Thanks again,

Dana

Naps

Hi,

a question for you parents of toddlers....my 26 month old twins are in a pattern of taking up to 1 1/2 hours to fall asleep during nap time.  They are usually in their room (both in cribs), bouncing around, giggling or quietly sitting talking, singing etc.  for the most part, no one is ever upset or crying.

They are usually up in the morning between 7 and 7:30, and I usually put them down for nap at 1p or 1:30....they are regularly not falling asleep until 2:30 or 3, or sometimes even past 3.  But, they almost always eventually fall asleep and sleep for at least 1 1/2-2 hours.  I don't let them sleep past 5.  On the days when naps run especially long, bedtime might get pushed back to 8:30 at latest.  They usually have no problems at bedtime and sleep thru the night.

my question is...have any of you experienced this?  I'm wondering if I should officially move nap time back so we can do more in early afternoon (after lunch), but fear they will get overtired and not take nap or will still take just as long to fall asleep, which would be too late in day.  maybe i should not worry about it as it doesn't seem to bother them to be up in their room for so long before falling asleep?

thanks for any sharing you may have!

Lana

Sharing

Hi everybody,

I'm wondering if anybody has suggestions about this.

My girls are 24 months, and are very close. So close, in fact, that they've more or less spent their whole lives sitting on each other, and we're starting to have some conflict with toys. There's been some biting (which I thought we'd grown out of), some hitting, some grabbing. 

I'm sort of at a loss about what to do to help them work through these things as a parent. With violence, I was trying a no tolerance "time out" policy, but whenever I single out one girl (as in, you're on time out now), the other gets very upset, and sometimes it feels like my intervention causes more bad behavior. There are definitely incidents where they just get frustrated and panic and attack each other, but sometimes (often) it feels like they act out the banned behavior on one another to test boundaries with me (example: baby A gently bites baby B in slow motion while they both watch me grinning). I've been trying to just say a firm "we don't bite" and separate them by a few feet, but so far it seems to be doing nothing (especially since they're magnets and are hard-wired to repeat, repeat, repeat). Has anybody else had the whole time-out concept backfire with twins? Do you intervene in their conflicts? What are you doing for discipline? Are my expectations for them even age-appropriate?

Also, what are other people's rules/philosophy about the big sharing question? They used to be so harmonious with toys! They would each drop whatever they were playing with on the ground and switch places, they had a fairly elaborate trading system for the high-value toys as soon as they could crawl, or they could just play together. So we generally just have one of every toy. Now, there is a lot of grabbing (seems to go both ways--they're equally matched), which then spins out of control. Sharing still is not a problem with other children. My pediatrician actually told me to do nothing to intervene, "let them duke it out," which seems like a bad idea (oh the violence). I want them to put their relationship with each other (and all people) before their relationship with things, but I also understand that it's almost impossible to do something like stack blocks or color or work on a puzzle with another set of hands trying to do it at the same time (with the same exact block, crayon, and puzzle piece)--there's a lot of skills that they need to be learning right now by playing by themselves. I do put toys on time out. I try to maintain a "no grabbing" rule (they respond to it with the "look, mom, we're grabbing! over and over again!" game). I encourage trading. Other than that, definitely at a loss on this one, and things seem to be getting worse.

Twins really are a different game, aren't they? 

Thanks for your help,

Liz