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Early Months with Twins
What to Expect and Tips to Survive the First Weeks with Multiples
By Kim Seidel
In the first few months with your newborn twins, your days will be consumed with baby care. Your own sleeping, eating, showering and housekeeping will take a back seat to taking care of your twins.
"For me the biggest challenge was having to be 'on' around the clock," says Dagmara Scalise, mother of 3-year-old fraternal twins in Chicago, Ill. "With two babies, there is absolutely no downtime. There is always a crying baby or two to take care of. My husband and I also had a 2 1/2-year-old at the time, so any potential rest time was taken up interacting with her."
In the initial weeks, Scalise, author of Twin Sense: A Sanity-Saving Guide to Raising Twins – from Pregnancy Through the First Year (Amacon, 2008), says it's a full-time job caring for twins. It took at least an hour and frequently up to two hours to feed the babies. Plus, she was pumping breast milk to keep a supply on hand, changing diapers, soothing a crying baby, washing pumping supplies and bottles, mixing formula (the twins also drank formula in addition to breast milk) and taking care of their older daughter.
"I literally felt like I would sit five to 10 minutes and have to get up again," Scalise says. "I really looked forward to visits from family and friends, if only because they would be the ones to hold the babies for a little bit."
Accepting help from others was just one way Scalise and her husband handled the challenge of newborn twins. They also devised strategies to get uninterrupted sleep and gave up the idea of perfection. "Our house was a constant mess, we barely showered, our food choices were not the greatest, but our twins and our older daughter were taken care of," Scalise says.
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