Schedule Nazi

I admit it, unabashedly so, I am a schedule nazi.

Call me a control freak, I don't care. Mothering them is my job and my mission, and scheduling them, I believe, is loving them best.

So...I have a confession to make.

I am not looking forward to the schedule disruption of the upcoming holiday travel.

There--I said it.

I am giddy about sharing Thanksgiving and Christmas with our girls--I bought them a Christmas present the other day, and wanted to give it to them as soon as I got home (my husband made me put it away). I am also looking forward to spending time with family--with all the quirks and dysfunction that comes along with family, I do love the witty banter, laughs and precious conversations that are had. It's been over a year since I've been to my parents' house, between bedrest and the girls being born; I'm eager to visit them. This whole napping and sleeping on the road thing, though, is going to be intense, and I fear the worst.

Maybe my reservations would be better understood if you readers knew our sleeping nightmare journey. From a very early age, our routine with putting the girls down at night was to nurse them to sleep on the nursing pillow. I would then text my husband when they were good and asleep, and he would pick them up one by one off the pillow, and lay them down in their crib. Seemed like a pretty great system. The girls were never great nappers, but that was okay with me, because they were sleeping pretty well at night.

Then the four month sleep regression hit. The girls would wake up multiple times a night, and they had a very hard time going back down each time. I would spend an hour nursing them back to sleep, only to have one or both of them wake when Brad would lay them down in their crib. I remember the sinking feeling I would get in the pit of my stomach each time I would hear on of them cry, only moments after my head had hit the pillow. If I only had one baby, I would have gladly nursed it while sleeping on my side. With two, it was just not possible, and I was exhausted.

Finally, when the girls were six months, Brad and I walked, bleary-eyed into a sleep nurse's office, in desperate need of some answers, and some sleep. She gave us a plan to gently guide our daughters to putting themselves to sleep, and getting them on a napping schedule. Brilliant! Fast forward three months later, our daughters sleep through the night (most of the time), and take two naps a day. For the most part, everyone is happy and well-rested, as long as we stick to our schedule.

So, perhaps our history explains my vigilance with keeping their routine in tact. We schedule walks, playdates and errand running around naps and feeding times. Events that interfere with our schedule have been taken off the calendar. We have watched, amazed, at how well easily our daughters drift off to sleep with an ordered and predictable bedtime routine.

Over the next two months, I'm trepidacious, and a little curious, to see how the girls will adapt to makeshift bedtime routines in strange, new places. And, too, how they sleep away from the comfort of their own crib with all the familiar sounds and smells.

Anyone with any helpful advice to put this schedule nazi's heart at ease, do share!