Daylight Savings Time-How We Got to Enjoy the Extra Hour of Sleep

This post won’t help you this year, since Daylight Savings Time happened on Sunday,but if you are expecting, or know someone who is, it will help you next year! So, being a mom of twins, I operate on a strict schedule for their sleeping and feeding times. Let’s face it, if I didn’t have them on a schedule, I would be feeding, burping,changing and putting kids to sleep all day long. My good friend Kim calls herself the “nap nazi”, and I am absolutely the same way. I learned very quickly that sleep is the key to a happy baby (and a happy me) so this is the one thing I focused on trying to get just right from the day they were born. I have been very diligent about ensuring my boys get the proper number of naps in a day, and the proper amount of sleep at night, all with the proper amount of awake time in between, and the proper amount of total sleep required for their age. Sound complicated? Well, it kind of was, but I finally figured it out. So what happens when your kids have been so well-trained that they literally eat and sleep by the clock, and then all of a sudden the clock “falls back” by an hour? Well, if you don’t prepare for it, what happens is you have babies that wake up and go to bed an hour earlier every day, and it throws off all their nap times and feedings in between. Being the planner that I am, I started preparing for the time change about 4 weeks ago. I didn’t want to talk about it on this blog unless I experienced it myself, and now that the day has come and gone, I’m happy to report that the planning paid off. The boys woke up at 7am (actually a little past) on Sunday, just like they do every other day, And they went to bed shortly after 7pm, just like they do every other day.

4 weeks ago, I started pushing their morning wake-up time by 15 minutes every week. I simply didn’t go into their room to get them until 715, then 730, then 745am. This eventually ended up pushing their feedings and naps for the day forward. They still seemed to get cranky and ready for bed by about 730pm every night, so I didn’t try to force that to 800pm, I figured I could deal with bedtime once the time changed if I needed to. Last week, almost every day, the boys didn’t wake up until close to 8am, and on Saturday night, we ensured that they didn’t get put to sleep too early. We adjusted the times a little bit because one of them consistently needs more sleep than the other so we just put him down a bit earlier and kept the other one up a bit later. On Sunday morning, they didn’t get up until close to 730am (after the clocks had already flipped back). The true test would be if they went the whole day right on schedule, and they did. It sounds pretty simple, and you may be reading this thinking you just wasted 5 minutes reading a blog post on something you already do, but to be honest, had I not read Babywise and been following some of the Babywise blogs, the time change thing would have never occurred to me. I’m so glad I stumbled upon these tips as I think it could have made the transition tough with 2 babies. I also learned that if you just stick to adjusting the morning wake-up time and not worry about anything else, the rest will eventually just fall into place on its own.

My husband and I were both able to truly enjoy that extra hour of sleep that everyone loves at this time of year! I hope this simple tip helps you with your twins (or singleton), or someone you know when it comes to time change!

I’d love to hear if you give the time change any thought, and if you do, how you tackle it!