Sleeping through the night! (or, happy birthday to ME!)

The girls are doing it!  Not every night, but with more and more consistency...  It's a beautiful thing to wake up around 5:30am and realize that you've been asleep for more than a four hour stretch.  We have friends whose babies have done this from 3 months of age, but we also have friends (mostly mothers of multiples) whose little ones are still waking at night at 14 months, 18 months, 24 months...  And that is not a pretty picture!

We're so glad the girls are starting to protest less and less as we "encourage" them to learn how to fall back to sleep on their own.  Read: modified sleep training, and not picking them up at every peep and cry.  We have walked the line for the past 4 months between going to them every time they wake versus crying it out, and have used a modified cry it out pattern that has worked really well for all four of us.  It may have drawn out the process a little longer than if we had just truly let them cry themselves to sleep, but Leah and I didn't feel that was right for our little munchkins and our whole family.  Sleep training, like everything else in parenting, is such a personal journey.

This also means a varied wake-up time.  This morning Em decided that 5:45 was the time to wake up, and darling Charlotte (in a very uncharacteristic move) slept in until 7:00!  We had to wake her up so the girls wouldn't get too far apart in scheduling for the day!  Anyway, it was about the sweetest birthday present ever to spend some time one-on-one with Em.  Granted, it was while I pumped milk for them for the day, but Leah, Em & I cuddled all together in bed this morning and it was so sweet.  Normally I don't get to see them in the morning until after I've gotten completely ready for work. They tend to cry if they see me and then I go away without feeding them, which makes sense given that they've just gone a 12 hour stretch without the boob!  I know they will grow out of that, they are just getting used to the long stretch at night and when they see me in the am it's like, "oh, right! hey, mom... = boob! now!"  :)

happy birthday to me, the first one as a mom.  it's the best birthday ever.

i love you two little munchkins, more than you can ever know, at least until you become moms.

this picture is an old one, but it's one of my favorites of the three of us...