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."

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.

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