Restless sleeping twins

[tgm1974]

My friend has twin boys who were born at 28/30 weeks ..... they are now 19 months old.

Until recently their sleeping patterns have been total opposite to each others. One would be happy to be put down to sleep, awake, and would not wake all night. The other would need to be nursed asleep with a guarantee of waking once or twice through the night.

These past few weeks this has all changed and now both boys practically scream the entire night. They are late with teething but nothing she uses helps. Not even Medised, teething rememdies, etc. She works full time and they are with her parents through the day. When she collects them from work they are to the point of screaming as no matter what she/her Mum does, they will not have a nap through the day. As you can imagine they are a nightmare to control due to overtiredness.

Has anyone experienced anything similar and/or found a remedy to help.

She is literally at her wits end now and any advice would help. Even the twins food is being monitored and she says they wont really entertain sugary foods so being "hyped" up on sweetners is not even an issue.

Cheers

[annie0000]

I have two boys 13 months apart, so I do have an appreciation of what it is like. As far as the daytime nap goes, both my boys grew out of their nap at about that age, and the only way to get them to sleep was to go for a drive or a long walk. We used to drive until the fell asleep then find a good place to stop and have a nap ourselves - not sure if that is an option for the grandparents - other than that , going for a long walk and totally ignoring them also used to work.

I think that their night time routine is out of sorts because they are overtired, if you can sort that out, the nights might become easier. I take it she does all the usual bath time, calm atmosphere, dimmed lights, warm milk and quiet story stuff already?

Another trick that worked for us was to have them sit on our knee and we pretended to be asleep but holding on to them, if you breath deeply an rythmically, it seems to calm them and they soon drop off. Only danger is that you sometimes drop off as well!

The fact that everyone else is so stressed will not be helping, so they need to try to be as chilled as possible as the boys will pick up on the stress, but that is easy to say and difficult to do in the circumstances.

[tamborine]

My boys (2 yrs apart) were more needy than my daughter. I think these twins want more of their mother's attention, 24/7!

How do the twins behave in the mother's care?