With two babies, night duty is the single most valuable thing you and another adult share, and the easiest to argue about. Not because anyone is unwilling - because at 4am, nobody can remember who did what, and the sense of unfairness fills in the blanks.
A split that feels fair is worth more than one that is technically equal. The goal is simple: each of you gets a protected block of real sleep, and neither of you lies awake keeping score.
Divide by time, not by baby
Splitting the babies - you take this one, I take that one - sounds tidy and rarely survives contact with a bad night. If your baby has the rough night, you get none, and resentment does the rest.
Dividing the clock works better. One adult owns everything until, say, 2am; the other owns everything after. Whoever is off duty is genuinely off - ideally in another room, fully asleep. A shorter block of unbroken sleep beats a longer one shredded into pieces.
Protected sleep is not a luxury you earn later. It is the thing that makes the next shift possible.
Make the handover carry the facts
The handover is where fairness is won or lost. If the person coming on duty knows exactly where things stand, they are not starting from zero at the worst possible hour:
- Who last ate, and when. So the next feed is a decision, not a guess.
- Who has been harder tonight. Context, not blame - it changes what you expect.
- What is already logged. No need to whisper a report; it is all there to read.
One shared record, not two memories
This is the quiet reason a shared log matters. When both babies' feeds, wakes and nappies live in one place, the adult taking over just looks. There is no groggy debrief, no two versions of the night that do not match. Multibaby keeps the same record for both of you, so the handover is a glance, and the argument never starts.
You cannot make two babies sleep through. But you can make sure the sleep there is gets shared fairly - and that alone can change how a hard week feels.