June 2009

Hello. I am a (relatively) new sleep-deprived mother of twins, and this is my tale. 

As of today my boys are 21 weeks old, soon to hit the five month mark, though they were born five weeks early, and being born five weeks premature DOES matter, don’t let your pediatrician tell you it doesn’t. I waited five extra weeks for smiles, for cooing, and for rolling over and fretted needlessly. If only I really understood that yes, you must calculate these early milestones using your babies’ due date, I could have turned my attention to the REAL important shit, like worrying about whether my dog could give my newborns Kennel Cough. (He can’t, by the way.)

My last good night of sleep was probably last September, when I was pregnant but before I was waking up 6 times a night to pee. Oh dear, I just teared up writing that sentence because you’ve got to understand how much I love to sleep. LOVE. it. And need it too. If there was an Olympic Sleep Team, I’m telling you I’d be its star player and likely Captain. I can sleep 10 hours a night without any trouble. Or rather, once upon a time I could.

My boys are not necessarily bad sleepers themselves. It’s just that there happens to be two of them, and like many fraternal twin babies, they are very different kids with different sleep behavior. Doot has always been the sleepy baby. He takes after mama in many ways, including his delight in sleep (giddy, smiling, sometimes happily squealing when put in bed). Bing will fight sleep like a UFC champ because he is so engrossed in the teddy bear or the cat or the carpet that he can’t rest until he really, truly gets what it’s all about. Just like his Dad.

When they were first born they were under 5lbs and it was a cold, cold winter. We kept them in long sleeve sleep-n-plays (with legs and feets – screw baby sleeper gowns. I hate them because I always seem to strangle my kids with that stupid elastic bottom when I’m putting them on) and we double swaddled them in two receiving blankets as per the nursery’s directive. We kept them together in a bassinet in our family room, and we took turns camping out on the couch with them 24/7.  The boys were eating constantly then, like anywhere from every hour to every 2 and a half hours, and often not at the same time.  I was trying to build a milk supply too so I nursed them a lot, but they got bottles of formula as well. (My boys had bottles of formula from the beginning because the hospital was incredibly shitty when it came to things like NOT FEEDING YOUR BABY FORMULA unless you, in your pre-eclamptic induced panic remembered to order them not to. Because they sure as hell will NOT bother to ask you this before doing it. So, my boys were given bottles of formula before I even met them. Suckass hospital.)

Once they passed their due date, things began to shift.  They were still sleeping a lot, but they started waking up a lot, too. It was a sort of nightmare of short periods of sleep and short periods of wakefulness, 24 hours a day. Which meant there were no decent stretches – not even say a three hour stretch – where someone could sleep while the babies were sleeping. It was like you’d just finish a diaper change and then wash some bottles so you’d be ready for the next feed, and then you’d lay down and one of them would start crying and you’d start the feeding/changing cycle all over again. 3o minute breaks (or less sometimes) between feeding/changing all night and all day long were typical for the first three months.

I’m telling you now, if Alex wasn’t home with me during that period, I would have really lost my shit. With two of us going full steam and breaking each other for 6 hour stretches of sleep, we were still getting our assess kicked up and down the block again. And neither of us were working yet.

Now before the boys were born, I really thought we could impose a structure, just like all the twin books and not fewer than several sets of twin parents recommended to us. But we just couldn’t do it. Because I swear, we’d put out that memo that said, “In RE: Twin Boys’ Schedule…boys will eat every three hours and then sleep” but the kids, they kept telling us, “Hey, we never got that stupid memo. What memo? We’re calling in our union.”

Eating/Sleeping Routine Memo FAIL.

I was doing it wrong. Because had I been doing it right, my kids would eat and sleep with some kind of regularity, just like all those parenting twins books say, right? My twins had the audacity to get hungry whenever the hell they wanted. You just ate an  hour ago, I’d tell whichever one was complaining. It must be something else. And he’d scream and scream and scream and after trying everything else from pacing to rocking to singing kumbaya to swaddling, I’d make a bottle or nurse him and hey! Guess what? THE KID WAS STARVING.  

And I’d worry I was overfeeding  or being an Italian mama who wants to solve all problems with food. But you know what? Looking back on it now, I can see my boys were just plain hungry, and most likely their little bodies were working to compensate for that prematurity because by their 4 month well baby visit they were 50th percentile in weight on a non-adjusted scale (not adjusted for prematurity), so yeah.

The first three months were harder than I can tell you. If you’ve got twins, then you may know. Or, if you’ve got twins that check their inboxes for the routine memo and naturally take to structure, then you may not know.

But if you’re about to have twins, or just had them, then this is the only advice I have for you:  GET HELP NOW.

Because you won’t know whether your twins are the memo reading routine abiding type, or the creative free thinker show up to work whenever I damn well feel like it type.

Well, there’s one way you can guess which type you’re gonna get.

Look in the mirror. What you see is probably what you’re getting. In any case, that’s what we got. One like him, and one like me. And neither of us are the routine type.

That said, things are much better now at the 5 month (4 month from due date) mark. It’s easier than it was, partly because they’re older and eat every 3-4 hours now, and sleep longer stretches at night. And it’s better partly because we’ve learned how to structure their evenings in a way that works for all of us.

Next time I blog, I’m going to blog about that. But for now, I’m going to go crawl under a table and nap and hope their father doesn’t find me for a few hours.

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