We're gearing up to have a go at sleep training on our 9-month old boy twin over the Christmas week (o joy!) The girl usually sleeps through the night (7pm-6am ish) unless unwell, but the boy is a night-waker (2-3 times?) and usually has a bottle at some point between 11pm and 2am. We are feeding them both tons of solid food during the day and they are taking about 500-600ml of formula, so I don't think he is actually hungry. It seems to be more a case of habit, underscored by mixed messages from us - sometimes we pick him up and feed straight away, sometimes we try to resettle without a feed, and at other times we're so tired that whoever is in charge of night wakings brings him to co-sleep. (DH and I do night shifts: currently I look after 9pm-2am and he does 2am-7am - ish, and we locate ourselves in the spare room so the other can get an uninterrupted chunk of sleep.) The twins are in separate cots in a 3m square box room, so if one wakes the other can wake quite quickly, so we usually try to pounce as soon as we hear a squawk - is this bad practice?
[One thing we are doing this week is going cold turkey on dummies, since we were also doing the 'dummy run' through the night with both twins! Removing dummies hasn't exactly helped night wakings - the boy took 2.5hrs to resettle after his night feed last night :-( - BUT we think it's going to help in the long run.]
I'm looking for advice from others who have sleep-trained one or both twins. Should we do it in the same room, on the basis that they are to an extent / will have to be used to each other's cries? Should we take boy twin into the spare room in his cot / a travel cot? I'd be worried about it not being his usual environment and I don't like separating them as they've always been together. If keeping them together, presumably we need to train both, if girl-twin is being woken up? The logistics of it terrify me! But I think it's time to help him learn to self-settle.
On which note ... neither yet self-settle to sleep at night. They fall asleep on the bottle in our arms. For naps they are usually rocked for 5 mins either in arms or more usually both at the same time in the pram in the kitchen! Should we tackle this at the same time, or do a phased approach, teaching to self-settle first, and then 'sleep training' with regard to night wakings? Or are self-settling-to-sleep and sleep-training effectively the same thing? (I clearly don't have a clue about any of this!)
I think I'd like to try a softer approach than controlled crying at first, but not averse to giving it a go (she says, nervously...!)
Any advice welcome. Thanks!