Sleep.

One of the most common words of wisdom we would hear when I was pregnant was, "Sleep now, because when the babies come, you won't be sleeping much." The first few times we heard it, we would chuckle along with those veteran parents and nod like we knew what they were talking about. After about the 106th time of hearing it, we'd chuckle and then roll our eyes like ya, ya...we get it already. Sleep can't be that hard to come by once you have babies, right?

Well, little did we know, it would be almost 15 months before we got a full night's sleep once our twins were born. That is 414 nights of getting up in the middle of the night up to 10 times between both babies. Every. Single. Night.

The months would come and go, and our hopes of sleeping through the night seemed like a distant wish that no genie was granting. I would hear stories of friends and fellow moms with twins whose babies had slept through the night since they were 3 hours old.  We'd read baby books that said we could expect babies to sleep through the night at 12 weeks old. And 12 weeks came, and our babies didn't sleep. "Once the weather gets nice, the boys will playing outside and all the fresh air will make them so sleepy. For sure, that will make them sleep through the night," other parents would tell us with pity in their eyes. 

We tried swaddling, not swaddling, pacifiers, no pacifiers, noise machines, lullabies, white noise, no noise, a little warmer in the room, a little cooler in the room, ceiling fans, darkening blinds, having the boys share a room, separating the boys into different rooms, humidifiers, rocking to sleep, patting on the back to sleep, giving them a bottle in the middle of the night, warmer pajamas, cooler pajamas, bigger diapers, double diapers, changing the diaper in the middle of the night. Really. We feel like we tried EVERYTHING.

But what we did not try was letting them self-soothe themselves back to sleep when night waking. Ok, it's called crying. Good ol' Cry It Out (CIO).

I will be the first to admit that my threshold of listening to crying is about 5.5 seconds. I hate crying. It breaks my heart and it takes everything within me not to run to the rescue of one or both of my babies crying.

But it was time.

So I finally caved in to letting a little crying, not only so we could hopefully get some sleep one of these years, but so the boys could get some better sleep, too. While Mommy secretly loved the midnight (and 2am and 3:30am, and 5am...) snuggles, I was becoming a walking zombie and it wasn't pretty.

It wasn't nearly as bad as I had imagined. And after a couple nights we heard nothing but silence and crickets chirping (from the sound machine). All. Night. Long. 

So, I'm happy to announce that we can finally jump on the "Our Babies Sleep Through The Night" train! Can I get a Choo Choo?!

Aaron sleeping through the night! August 2013

Owen sleeping through the night! August 2013

PS: The 2nd most common words of wisdom I would hear from well-wishers was "Sleep when the babies sleep." Can I just tell you that that phrase does NOT apply to twin moms? It just doesn't work that way.