How We Got Our Tube-Fed Twins on a Decent Sleep Schedule

Bringing your twinnies home with a feeding tube can feel overwhelming, especially when it comes to sleep schedules. See how one twin family eventually figured out how to get their tube-fed twins on a decent sleep schedule.

Sleep. We all need it.

But as parents of infant twins, we’re lucky if we can string more than a few solid hours of it together. 

Add to that a feeding tube for one or both of your twins, and sleeping can feel all the more overwhelming.

If you’re in a similar situation with your twinnies, know that you’re not alone. Read one twin mom’s honest saga of figuring out a solid sleep schedule for her tube-fed twins.

The NICU-to-home sleep transition for our tube-fed twins

When my husband and I brought our tube-fed twins home for the first time, they were just about three months old. And to put it plainly, we had NO idea what we were doing when it came to getting them to sleep. 

The first two months of finally having them home with us, we had them sleep in their pack n’ plays in the living room (the same area where we would unwind together and watch TV at night). Since one had an NG tube and the other a G-tube, all their extensive medical supplies (including an overnight feeding pump for our son), was housed in the kitchen. 

Keeping them downstairs to sleep allowed us easy-access to all of their equipment, complete with cords, alarms, ph strips, saline flushes, and much more.  Their nutritional needs at 3 months still required that we fed them every 3 hours… And we were not about to be trekking up and downstairs all through the night when it was feeding time.

On top of that, I was pumping. So staying near the fridge and my wall-dependent (at the time) breast pump was more convenient for me late at night. 

The first month home with them…

For this first month home with them (they were then around four months old), we would take turns sleeping on the living room sofa so that we were no more than a few feet away from each baby. This meant we could more “easily” feed them at midnight and 3am. And yes, as you can imagine, this did not lead to a good night of sleep for my husband and me. 

Friends and family members would ask, “When is their bedtime? Are they sleeping well?” And inside we would crazily chuckle to ourselves since in reality, there was no official bedtime. They were basically still on their hospital schedule. And sure, the babies were sleeping well, but we were not! 

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Phase two of our tube-fed twins’ sleep transition

Eventually, we moved the twins to their nursery. We had a futon (and also an airbed at one point) where we would spend the night while the they slept close by in the same room. Any time either of them would stir or cry, we would be there to comfort them immediately. 

This new setup also allowed us to continue to be extra vigilant of our son who was still on his overnight feed, which meant that he was hooked up to a feeding pump for 8 hours straight. Occasionally, to my horror, I would wake up to find him with the tubing wrapped loosely around his neck. I had to beg and plead with his dietician to finally let us transition off of this overnight feed. It was becoming a sleeping nightmare for us as caregivers.

Phase three of our tube fed twins’ sleep transition

Finally, somewhere around 7.5 months, when we weaned Q off of his continuous overnight feed, we both began sleeping in our own bed again. Despite this big step, we still needed to feed the babies at 9pm and midnight each night while they slept to keep up with their ever-growing nutritional needs.

Not too far into this phase is when we began to think a bit more strategically about having a strict bedtime, around 7/7:30pm. Yay, normal baby things!

This unfortunately didn’t provide all that much of a reprieve. Though we were still tube-feeding our son overnight, our daughter had graduated to nighttime nursing sessions (a big win for us given her track record of oral aversion). Because we allowed her to feed on a more “natural” schedule overnight, she began to wake up way more frequently. Since her crying would occasionally wake up her brother, we decided to temporarily move her to the pack-n-play in the guest bedroom, which was right next to our bedroom. 

This led to me often sleeping in the guest bedroom so that I would wake up to feed her more immediately when she would cry and thus avoid disturbing our son. The drawback to this was having to move our daughter back to the nursery intermittently whenever we would have guests (like my out-of-state parents) stay overnight with us. Needless to say, we were lacking consistency.

This phase carried on for about a month and a half, and that led us ever so nicely into the 10-month sleep regression. 

Something’s gotta give!

Around 10 months, between both babies, one of them was waking up almost every hour. We. Were. Miserable.

Nobody in the house was getting a good night’s sleep. We were irritable and sleep-deprived, and it was really taking a toll in all aspects of our lives. I would spend many early mornings sleeping with one or both of them in their playpen after giving up on getting them back to sleep in their crib.

After a few really brutal days right after the holidays, my husband and I couldn’t take it anymore. If I could go back to this precise moment in time, I would have enrolled in some sort of twin sleep support program. We knew we needed to make some changes or else the chaos of sleep deprivation would prevail.

At the start of the New Year, we basically had a sleep intervention meeting with ourselves and decided on a few plans of attack to make our routines more consistent. We also made the tough decision to try letting them cry for a few minutes at a time with gentle check-ins in between if needed. I was hoping to avoid anything resembling the “cry-it-out” method of sleep training at all costs. For three months while our babies lived in the hospital, we couldn’t be there for them when they cried at night. It felt like we missed out on three months of that natural baby-caregiver bond. 

But we couldn’t continue on with our current sleep challenges. We needed sleep to get through long days of work and parenting. (We were both working a full time job at the time). And they needed better sleep to continue to support their intense developmental growth.

How we overcame the 10-month sleep-regression

The final straw:

Here’s a glimpse at one of the final awful nights of sleep before we finally made some changes. On January 2nd, our bedtime routine (from the start of taking them up to the nursery until they actually fell asleep), took an hour and a half. They finally fell asleep at 7:30pm even though we took them up to their room at 6:00pm. It took them 24 minutes of crying before they passed out. At 2am they both woke up and refused to go back to sleep. I ended up sleeping in the playpen with both of them in our living room. (Ugh, this felt like such a fail at the time).

Here are the sleep changes we made from there:

• Created a more consistent nap schedule (8am-9am + 12:30pm – 2:30pm)
• Moved bedtime up slightly earlier (6pm)
• Re-instituted their white noise machine 
• Established a more positive relationship with their bedroom by moving up to the nursery 15 minutes before bedtime (we had previously done this in the living room)
• Let babies cry for short periods with gentle check-ins if needed

Here’s what happened the first few days of these adjustments:

Day 1 – babies cried for 10 minutes before falling asleep and slept from 6:30pm to 4:30am without waking in between

Day 2 – babies cried for 4 minutes before falling asleep at 6:00pm. D woke up at 6:30pm and 9:30 but went back to sleep on her own without any intervention

Day 3 – babies cried for 5 minutes before falling asleep on their own at 6:05pm without waking in between

Day 4 – babies cried for 2 minutes before falling asleep on their own at 6:00pm without waking in between

Now, not every night since that switch was perfect. But on the whole, everyone in our house was finally getting way more consistent sleep! 

Final thoughts on sleep transitions with tube-fed twis

If you have twins who have feeding tubes or other medical interventions that can disrupt sleep or other daily routines, my heart goes out to you. I would also say: learn from my mistake and get support as soon as possible! If there’s one thing I would do differently if I could, it would be to seek the support of a twin sleep expert.

So much advice around sleep out there is good in theory. But in the day to day life of a twin parent, it doesn’t quite pan out effectively when you have two babies to feed and soothe. It took us until the 10-month mark to finally get anything resembling “normal” sleep as twin parents. And our mental health and overall well-being paid the price.

Lastly, you know your twins best. They’re each unique individuals with their own quirks, strengths, and challenges. Make your sleep decisions based on what you know about them each as individuals and also keep your own needs in mind. If there’s something you need to discuss about your twins’ medical situation with their doctor or specialist, advocate for yourself and your twinnies.

Even the most well-meaning of pediatric specialists doesn’t always see how their advice translates to everyday life within your home. So speak up and be honest with them about what is and isn’t working so you can make adjustments as needed!

Want to read more about twin sleep or tube-fed twins? Check out these articles too!

• What if My Preterm Twins Need a Feeding Tube?
• Formula Fed to Breastfed: Transitioning After the NICU
• The Newborn Twins Sleep Guide Resource Page

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