Jules makes bedtime quite the horrorshow. Her twin sister? Bedtime angel. This makes me happy in a small way.

Edward has never been a good sleeper. We let him sleep in bed with us. It was the only way I could nurse and sleep at the same time, which was crucial to my being able to remain on Earth as a living entity. Once he moved to his own bed, he still woke every night and shuffled down the hall and climbed in between me and Dex. It took years to get him to be able to sleep alone. Naps? He took them, but reluctantly. Even now, I think he’d prefer to sleep next to a warm body than all alone, even with Davey in the same room.

Being our first, it was all too easy to blame myself for his poor sleep habits. I talked to his pediatrician, I read books, Dex and I argued, tried his techniques, tried my techniques, relented all together, then started the whole argument again.

When Davey came home, he slept. What a wondrous and amazing thing it was. I assumed having spent his first 14 weeks in the hospital taught him to sleep soundly and alone. And once home, it was impossible to bring him into our bed - he came attached to an oxygen tank, a monitor, a feeding tube.. a little too crowded for comfort. I gave the nurses all the credit for Davey’s good sleep habits.

Then along came the twins. I nursed them the same, swaddled them the same, put them to bed the same. And even so I end up with two girls with polar opposite sleep habits. It is so obvious to me now that the way they sleep is an extension of their personalities, hard-wired. Of course, we can encourage or discourage particular habits. I am trying now to get Jules back to falling asleep without me having to sit in the room. We’re making progress, but it involves a lot of screaming and crying (mostly hers).

One crimp in my master plan of Tuck In, Say Goodnight, Leave Room, is the blankets. Jules has decided that she MUST be covered by four specific blankets. It started with one sage green fleece square. She screamed bloody murder for an hour one night, wailing “beee! beeeee!” in between heaving sobs, until I figured out that she wanted that blanket, one she had used but never seemed especially attached to. Over the past couple of weeks, it has evolved to the quadruple layering on of blankies. She lies down in her crib and I lay each blanket over her, one by one. I count out loud, with Mae counting along in her sweet little voice from the neighboring crib.

The second I finish this ritual and step away from the crib, Jules starts to cry and stands up, completely undoing her blanket cocoon. If I try to leave, she holds up a blanket and wails “beeeee!” Depending on how many times in the evening I have already tucked her in, I either go through the laying on of blankets again or I zip up her crib tent and leave the room. I let her cry for five minutes, then return and repeat until she succumbs to slumber.

And if in my haste and by some awful oversight I forget one of the blankets? She knows. Even were I to count to four, this petite little thing weighted down by a half-inch thick layer of cotton and fleece knows if one of the blankets is not in place in the stack. The girl scares me.