Leaving Your Baby For The First Time

Whether it is your first baby or your 10th, it can be really difficult to leave your baby for the first time. In this blog post, I recount the first time I left my twin boys at night and some strategies that helped make this transition easier.

If you have a baby, you know how important bedtime is. Part of the reason that the first few months of motherhood are so challenging is because yore physically and emotionally exhausted running on no sleep. So when you finally establish a bedtime routine, you fight like hell not to disrupt that routine.

How To Decide When Leaving Your Baby For The First Makes Sense?

In the beginning, there is a lot of not attending functions past their bedtime, (for our boys, 7:30-8:30pm). That means planning feeding to make sure they can fit in 7 feedings a day with the last one within that time frame. That means ensuring your babies are up for at least 120 minutes before bedtime, and not going out during that time since the boys usually sleep in the car/at restaurants. It can be difficult, but establishing this bedtime routine early on really helps with their sleeep and then can make it easier to transition when you do decide to leave them either with your spouse or a sitter.

What does our bedtime routine look like?

Bedtime routine:

• Nurse the babies a final feeding

• Top off with a 1oz bottle of hypoallergenic formula with probiotics, vitamin d, gripe water, and gas drops in them.

• Burp and change each baby

• Wipe babies down with water wipes (we don’t bathe every night!)

• Lotion massage

• Put jammies on - we do long sleeve footed PJ's all year

• Turn sound machines and fan on and lights off.

• Hold each baby and read a bedtime story

• Kiss and hug each baby goodnight

• Put in cribs and put their butts until they fall asleep.

• *Sometimes we have to go in after a few minutes to replace pacifiers and soothe to sleep again.

Once the babies are asleep, they stay asleep until 6:30-7:30am. (10-12 hours!) This entire process takes two people about a half hour start to finish. Naturally, you can imagine how much more difficult this would be with two babies and one person.

Do I go? Do I stay?

When my friends and I had made plans to see Hunter Hayes weeks ago, it never occurred to me that it didn’t start until 8pm. 8pm for a concert is normal time! Not when you’re a mom... this meant I would have to be away at night and miss the babies’ bedtime routine for the first time since they were born. This meant I wouldn’t see from the time I left the house around 5 until they woke up the next morning! Part of me wanted to stay home... A LARGE part of me, but I knew eventually it would happen and my husband said he felt comfortable doing it alone. The anxiety in me thought there would be no way, they would be up all night and their entire routine would be thrown off, but the rational side told myself one night is not going to impact their sleep habits. So I went, and I had a great time.

When I got home around 9:30 the boys were fast asleep... and my husband, Brian, was alive! And when it was time to wake the boys up Friday morning, their smiles and laughs hit me even deeper than the usually do.

I can’t say that I will always choose a concert over bedtime stories but just this time, I’m glad that I did.