New Parent Syndrome.

My two-month-olds are sleeping through the night (like, up to 8 hours) and will go to bed early enough that I can stay up for a bit and get some things done and still get decent sleep. They'll also fall asleep without needing to be held, rocked, nursed, etc... we just swaddle them and lay them down, and sometimes they need their binkies, but sometimes they don't. I can lay them in their bassinets, turn on the baby monitor, and walk out of the room.

I'm smart enough not to mess with this by seasoning their sleep habits with a hefty dose of Mommy Issues, but I won't lie... I feel horribly, desperately guilty leaving them alone in a dark room. I know I care way, way more than they do because, well, they're not crying (half the time they lay in there "talking" to themselves, especially Susie, and Lulu is often most of the way asleep before I even make it out of the room), and if they do fuss we go right in and settle them down so it's never for more than, say, 30 seconds at the most-- the amount of time it takes us to determine that they're starting to get upset and then get up the stairs to our room-- and ultimately we go up to bed beside them and they wake up with me there, feeding them right away, and Daddy on the other side, and I hold them practically all day long except when they're napping or playing, and when they're playing I'm right nearby...

but I still feel terrible. I feel like I've abandoned them! I keep doing it because, well, at the end of a long day with twins I really need to be not holding someone and I need time to do things like clean and prep their milk for the freezer and change laundry over and get the pump parts ready for overnight, and even do things like blog (ha! not nearly often enough, though). And I know it's better for them, in the long run, to be comfortable settling down to sleep on their own, and the fact that they even have the capability of doing it at this age is remarkable. All of this is easier than torturing them when they're old enough to know the difference by trying to slowly wean them off needing help to sleep. But that doesn't help me feel like I don't need to be right there with my ear to the baby monitor.

I also worry about things like... well... we'll say "the S word." I dare not speak its name. I don't like them being alone for that reason as well, but I keep reassuring myself that they're healthy, not alone for long, breastfed, they can hear us puttering around downstairs, there's a warm room but a fan on for air circulation, they're sleeping on their backs, they're a little older every day... oy.

There's a strong undercurrent of "Am I doing this right?" to all of my parenting choices-- and "Are WE doing this right?" to the conversations Husband and I have about these things-- and the frustrating part is that the closest to a "yes" answer anyone can ever really get is your gut telling you that you're making the right decision. If you don't have that, well, you have to hang around for 18 years and see if you kid gets into Harvard and then you can retrospectively justify all of your parenting decisions (ha).

Not gonna lie... I usually treat this particular affliction by checking on them a few times until I'm reasonably assured that "quiet on the monitor" does not mean anything is wrong, and that they are, in fact, quiet and we don't have a broken monitor and secretly screaming babies that I somehow can't hear from the living room.