13 month twins night time feeding frenzy = how long will this go on?

[twintense]

Hi, can anyone give me some hope that I will get some sleep again without weaning my DTs?

For the last few weeks they have upped their breastfeeding at night (they also still have mid morning and mid afternoon b/feeds most days). I breastfeed on demand and have always breastfed them back to sleep when they wake in the night. Until recently that has been on average twice each which has been manageable.

They had been off their solids for a few weeks because of molars coming through I think but have eaten well again for the last 5 days. However, night time feeds are every few hours and sometimes lasting up to 50 long, long minutes. I am exhausted and find it very hard to cope and stay calm during the night - now even when I don't have one on the boob I am lying awake stressed about how I'll cope the next day.

We don't co sleep (unless they're ill or inconsolable) because I'm such a light sleeper.

I don't really want to wean them yet. My hope was that they would have cut down on their feeds by now and I would love to get to just one or 2 feeds a day.

does anyone have any experience of this increase in night feeds? HOw long did it last? Any advice?

I night weaned my twins at 10 months or so - still kept up the daytime and bedtime feeds until they were 1 year old and did the occasional night feed if they were very unwell.

My advice is that night time weaning had no impact on my milk at all and they started to sleep a tiny bit better afterwards. So that might be something to consider?

My approach was to try to resettle the first waking by any other means I could - rocking, cuddling, moving on to patting in their cots. Later wakings I fed them. Next stage was to do the last feed in a brightly lit room and put them in their cots awake and again get them to sleep by any means possible (I spent a lot of time with one arm through the bars of one cot and one arm through the bars of the other cot, patting their backs for ages!).

Once bedtime was vaguely sorted without feeding to sleep, I got a bit more hardcore about the last night wakings.

The key for me was being able to settle them without feeding.

Good luck. It is so hard when you put one down and then the other one wakes!

Hi OP. You need to have a routine, to start with. I only fed my twins on demand for the first few days, then they were off to 2 hourly feeds and then 3 hours. When they were already taking bottles and eating during the day, I was "forced" to buy a bigger bottle as they wanted 360ml of milk! I put a stop on it, after trying a few tricks, and just removed this bottle fatwa nothing else worked, they complained for a few days and that was it. They were 20 months old. After that they slept much better too.