Post Pregnancy Survival

1. Buy an electric double breast pump (if you plan on breastfeeding)! It has given my husband and I so much more freedom than we would have without it. I feed my babies tandem-style which is more than a little difficult to do discreetly in public. So instead, I pump every night before I go to bed (I’ve been doing this every night since the babies were 3 months old and started going to sleep at around 7 pm). When my husband and I want to go hiking or on an excursion that will take a few hours, we just grab a bag of milk and feed the babies bottles. We use the Ameda Purely Yours pump and it has been perfect. Plus, it matches all of the breast-pumping supplies the hospital gave to us after the babies were born.

2. If you plan on breastfeeding, learn how to tandem feed. I would go nuts without this time-saver. It was too frustrating to do during the first four weeks, because the babies had such a hard time staying awake through feedings and I had a hard time holding both babies in place AND  trying to keep them awake. But spending a month with another baby screaming who didn’t like waiting for their turn while the other one ate encouraged me to keep trying to make it work. I didn’t really like the special nursing pillow for twins. I thought they were awkward and hard to get comfortable in. Instead, I sit on my couch an  place regular pillows on each side of me. Then I place a nursing pillow on top of those and use a blanket to help keep the babies’ heads in place on top of that. This has been so nice. One- I can pretty much nurse hands-free and two- during the night I can just lean back and sleep while the babies eat :)

3. Introduce the bottle to your babies as soon as you can. If your twins are like mine, they preferred breastfeeding so I didn’t have to worry about them rejecting me, but having them learn how to eat from a bottle has given us so much freedom. We’ve used them since they were only days old.

4. Get your babies on the same schedule as soon as you can. For the first couple weeks, it just meant feeding them at the same time, but as they have gotten older, we have helped them to also nap at the same time. We used the book Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child as our guide. (Don’t buy the Twins version of the book- I bought that too but it wasn’t very helpful at all). When one baby wakes up during the night to eat, we wake the other one up too.

5. Don’t stress too much about crying. At first I tried to soothe the babies so they wouldn’t cry at all. After all, I wanted to be a good mom, and I was trying to make up for all the tears they shed at the NICU. But this turned into nights where I would spend all night either soothing or feeding babies and wouldn’t get to sleep until even 6 am. After a few weeks of this, I let the babies cry a little bit when I put them back down after nightly feedings and was surprised to find they only cried for a little bit before they went to sleep. Now they don’t even cry at all!

6. Set low expectations for your day :). My cousin had twins a few years ago and this was her advice to me. It’s been really helpful. As long as you don’t expect to have a perfect dinner made or have the house clean every day, you will be a lot happier when it isn’t!