A baby's cry pierces the middle-of-the-night silence. You check the clock, see that it's 2 in the morning and stagger down the hall to the nursery. An hour later – after feeding, changing, rocking and soothing your baby back to sleep – you collapse back into bed at last.

Ten minutes later, your other baby's cry pierces the middle-of-the-night silence.

When you have more than one baby, you can expect to have lots of challenges, lots of work and lots of fun. What you can't expect is to get lots of sleep, and this can lead to lots of problems. While this is the case for most sleep-deprived new parents, it is especially true for parents of twins, triplets or more. "Parents of multiples have more physical demands on them," says Trina Lambert, a mother of twins from Englewood, Colo. "If they don't take care of themselves, they are at risk of burning out."

The Need for Sleep Routines
For parents of multiples, a big part of taking care of themselves is getting as much sleep as possible. An important thing parents can do to get the sleep they need is to establish a sleeping routine for their babies. "The benefit of a sleeping routine is that parents can get more sleep and thus be better able to keep up with all they need to do in their daily lives," says Lambert.

Ann Douglas, author of The Mother of All Pregnancy Books: The Ultimate Guide to Conception, Birth, and Everything in Between (Hungry Minds, 2002) and The Mother of All Baby Books: The Ultimate Guide to Your Baby's First Year (Hungry Minds, 2002) agrees. "The key benefit of establishing a sleep routine is to maximize the amount of sleep that the parents are able to squeeze in," she says. "Caring for one newborn can be exhausting. Caring for two or more babies can be totally overwhelming if you're not getting the sleep you need."

Good Morning!
When you're ready to begin establishing a sleeping routine for your babies, you may be surprised to find that the best time to start is first thing in the morning. "You want to try to get the babies on the exact same schedule," says Jodi A. Mindell, Ph.D., author of Sleeping Through the Night: How Infants, Toddlers and Their Parents Can Get a Good Night's Sleep (Harper Collins, 1997). "The best way to do this, although it's difficult, is to wake a sleeping baby if his twin is ready to get up."

Throughout the day, try to coordinate your babies' feeding, napping and waking times. "I tandem-nursed my babies, so they were on the same feeding schedule," says Lambert. "That helped them be more likely to feel sleepy at the same time."

Cheryl Mills, a mom of triplets from Clayton, N.C., also relied on a regular schedule for her infants. Although it wasn't easy to feed three babies at the same time – she recalls holding two to feed them and propping a bottle for the third if there was nobody around to help – she says it was worth it when all three slept simultaneously.

Nighty Night
The need for consistency continues when it's time to put the babies to bed for the night, advises Mindell, who recommends a consistent bedtime routine. "It's not too early to start when the babies are 3 to 6 weeks old," she says.

Whatever you choose to include in the bedtime routine – such as a feeding, a bath and a lullaby – make sure to complete each step in the same order each night, so your babies will learn to associate these steps with going to sleep.

After the routine is complete, put the babies to bed drowsy but awake. "You want to avoid rocking or nursing the babies to sleep," says Mindell. This is because babies who need to be rocked to sleep at bedtime will need to be rocked to sleep when they awaken in the night.

Lambert found that having her husband take part in the bedtime process was a great help in getting her twins into bed. "Each parent can take one child and get him or her ready to be put down," she says.

In the Still of the Night
It's a fact of life: Babies wake up in the middle of the night. During the early months, these night wakings are necessary since "babies need that nighttime feeding in order to grow and thrive," says Douglas. However, you can minimize the number of times you are up during the night by, once again, coordinating your babies' feedings, and waking a sleeping baby when his twin is ready to eat.

As Lambert discovered, if you don't feed your babies at the same time, you could easily find yourself feeding someone around the clock. "I woke the second baby for feedings in the middle of the night until my babies turned 4 months old," she says. "This maintained their schedule so that they would be more likely to sleep at the same time. And, quite frankly, I would not have been able to function well if I had been nursing all night long."

After a few months, though, many babies no longer need the nighttime feeding and many parents stop waking the second baby. "By 3 months, you really want those babies sleeping through the night," says Christi Gillentine of Tulsa, Okla., who gave birth to twins when her firstborn was only 11 months old. "Waking one up because his twin is hungry isn't going to help do that."

Gillentine's son continued to wake for a 4 a.m. feeding for several weeks after his twin sister started sleeping through the night. At that point, Gillentine let her daughter sleep while she fed her son.

Lambert stopped waking the second baby when her twins were 4 months old, but she could never be sure which twin was going to wake during the night. "For the last month of night feedings, they seemed to switch who slept through the night," she says.

Whatever Gets You Through
During the first year, there are problems that can disrupt even the most finely tuned schedule. Mindell is often contacted by parents who wonder what to do when one of their twins sleeps well, but the other doesn't. She advises parents that a child will often sleep through her twin's crying. However, if your crying child consistently awakens your sleeping child, you may need to separate the two. "Move the good sleeper into another room temporarily," says Mindell. "Then you can let the other cry a little without having to worry about him waking the sleeping twin."

Keep in mind that establishing a sleeping routine is an ongoing process, one that can be temporarily disrupted by illness, teething or many other factors.

"My daughter and son started waking up again in the middle of the night around 7 months," says Lambert. "They were both learning to stand up. We kept putting them back down and, within a week, my son slept through his sister's screaming. It took a full month to get her back to sleeping all night, but that effort saved us in the future. I would advise mothers of multiples to be persistent in trying to establish a routine. It isn't going to be easy, but it will be a lifesaver."

Want to see more?

• Sleepy-Time Stress: Reviewing Sleep Strategies
• Crying Baby, Sleepless Nights: Why Your Baby Is Crying and What You Can Do About It
• Breastfeeding Twins Series
• Talk about it!