Book Recommendation: 12 Hours of Sleep by 12 Weeks

Every mother should read this book! Even if your baby is already older than 12 weeks it can still help you make sure your baby is sleeping through the night!

            The author is a mother of five including, a set of twins. She also has sleep trained several sets of twins and worked with a M.O.M group of triplets in Washington DC.

            As with every book on sleep training and schedules you will have to tweak it to what works best for your children since every child is different.

Why I recommend this book

·         Easy read. I read in a couple of hours with breaks in between to care for the babies.

·         It starts with what to do from day 1 to eliminate habits that may be hard to break later down the road. But can also be useful to a mother at any stage of sleep training your children.

·         Discusses habits that may lead to a child not sleeping through the night

·         Discusses age and weights of when a child is ready to sleep through the night. I really like this since my twins are preemies. It was nice to know when they weigh 10lbs then you can try these methods vs. when they are blank age try these methods.

·         Discusses schedules and nap times.

·         Lastly, because it works! It has worked great for both of my twins. Both sleep through the night without waking every single night and can sleep for 12 hour stretches. They are happy well rested babies! I have read and heard the horror stories of one baby sleeping through the night and the other baby being a wake the whole night!

As I said earlier you may have to tweak some things (as with any book) to make the “plan” work best for your family. For example: my babies can easily sleep the 12 hours but I wake them after 9 hours of sleep to feed them and put them back down for the other 3. I do this so when the nanny (our moms) walks in the house she will have an easier transition and so I can have some mommy time with them before I go to work.

So we put the babies to bed at 9pm and wake them at 6am to feed them. When they are done feeding we put them back to bed until 9am.

Another tweak to the plan is we feed the babies less and more often this the book’s schedule recommends. Right now we are feeding ours twins every 3 hours/ 4oz/6 times a day…  the book says 8oz bottles 4 times a day. Our babies can’t finish an 8oz bottle in one feeding and if they drink much more than 4oz at time they spit it all up. This is still a total of 24 ounces.

The last tweak … the book suggests a 1 hour nap in the morning and a 2 hour nap in the afternoon. We do three 1 hour naps instead. So they are still having 3 hours of nap time a day. But three 1 hour naps just works better with our feeding schedule and the twins wouldn’t nap much longer than 1 hour when we tried to do a 2 hour nap.

So as a wrap up this book is great but you may have to tweak some of the tips for your children! As a first time mom it really helped me to get an idea of schedules, sleeping patterns, and naps.

Again my twins sleep through the night every single night! So I recommend this book!

Buy it here:  http://www.amazon.com/Twelve-Hours-Sleep-Weeks-Step-/dp/0525949593/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1350488491&sr=8-1&keywords=12+hours+of+sleep+by+12+weeks

 Hope this helps someone like it did me!

XOXO,

Heather