Scheduling Breastfeeding

I've been doing baby-led nursing for the last month, but I've had to give it up.  I think it's a great idea, and it would totally work if I had only one, but two babies seem to want to nurse at two different times 75% of the time.  Add hour long nursing sessions to that, and pretty soon all I am doing is nursing and sleeping (and not much of that).  I don't even have time to shower or eat anything that requires two hands.  So I've decided to put them on a schedule, in the hopes of salvaging a few hours of non-baby time a day.

I talked to my pediatrician, and she said that the babies need to eat every three hours at this stage.  Twinspiration, which I got from my mother-in-law, suggests 15 minutes of feeding every three hours.  I'm not convinced that my babies can get enough nutrition in that time, though, so I'm doing a modified version of the scheduling plan I found in Secrets of the Baby Whisperer.  Basically it's up to 45 minutes every three hours; I anticipate that I can get about 10 hours of sleep in 1.5-2 hour chunks and about 4 hours of non-baby time if I can get them to sleep on the schedule.

Secrets of the Baby Whisperer is a bit old (2005), but scheduling is really out of fashion right now.  Google scheduling breastfeeding and you will get pages of results on how putting your babies on a schedule will ruin their lives forever.  Of course, ten years ago, failing to put your baby on a schedule would have done the same thing.  I had a good laugh with my monther and my cousin over thanksgiving on a similar topic.  When I was a baby, you put babies on their back for SIDS and that's the recommendation now.  However, in the eighties, when his children were babies, you slept them on their stomachs.  At the end of the day, I'm going to do what works for me and figure that babies just aren't that fragile.  I think everyone would agree that scheduled breastfeeding is better than baby-led formula feeding, and I refuse to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

However, I don't think that Monkey and Football will just fall right into the scheduling thing - I imagine that I'll be soothing hungry and confused babies for the next few days as we all try to figure this out.  Wish me luck!