Mom's Lullaby

Giordano interrupts: "It will happen. It'll be all right."

Baby Steps to Sleep

Raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Giordano, 43, was married and had her first child at 18. By 28, she had a 9-year-old, a 7-year-old, a 2-year-old and a baby on the way.

Or so she thought. When she went to deliver, twin boys came out.

"In that culture," she says, "husbands do not help at all. I cooked. I did the laundry by hand. I was supposed to have the kids clean and fed and look pretty when he came home. I had two cribs on my side of the bed."

She couldn't handle it. At one point she went to her parents' house, exhausted, miserable, desperate. Her father looked at his drooping daughter and took over.

"My dad said, 'Why don't you give the babies to me and go get some sleep?' " Giordano remembers.

Perhaps there was a tiny bit of hesitation, but, at that point, sleep was simply essential. So she went to bed. And slept. And slept.

She woke up 24 hours later in a stark panic.

"What about the babies?" was the immediate jolt in her gut. She was breast-feeding, they hadn't been away from her before, how had her father managed?

"And my dad said, 'I just went to the supermarket and got some formula,' " she says. "He was just fine."

So were the twins.

"I realized then that I had to have a plan," she says.