Theo and June are eighteen months old now, and I've finally gotten enough sleep, most nights, to look back at their first year without my eye twitching. People gave me a lot of advice when I was pregnant. Some of it was great. A lot of it was about singletons, delivered with a pat on my belly and a "Double trouble!" that I heard roughly four hundred times.
Here's what I wish someone had sat me down and said.
The math is not double. It's weirder than that.
Everyone says twins are double the work. In some ways that's true: two of every diaper, bottle, and car seat. But the hard part isn't the doubling, it's the overlap. When one baby needs you, the other one usually does too, at the exact same moment, and you have two arms and one brain.
Around month three, I got into a rhythm where I could feed both at once with a twin nursing pillow, which honestly changed my life. Before that, a single overnight feeding session could run ninety minutes, because by the time I'd finished one baby, the other was awake and furious. I remember doing the math at 4 a.m. once and realizing I'd been awake with at least one baby for six of the previous eight hours.
Sync their schedules. Seriously.
A nurse in the NICU step-down unit told me, "If one wakes up to eat, wake the other one." I thought that sounded cruel. It turned out to be the best advice I got all year.
Once we kept them on the same schedule, feeding, napping, bath, bed, we had actual windows of quiet. But when you've been awake since 3 a.m., forty-five minutes of two sleeping babies feels like a spa weekend. I kept a simple log on my phone for the first four months: who ate, how much, who pooped. Sleep-deprived brains cannot remember which twin had the last bottle.
You will not love them the same way every day
This one's hard to say out loud, so I'll just say it. Some weeks I felt closer to one twin than the other. June was a calmer baby and easier to soothe, and there were days I dreaded picking up Theo because he'd been screaming for an hour and I was out of ideas. Then I'd feel awful about it.
What I figured out, eventually, is that it rotates. Around nine months, Theo became the snuggly one and June started arching away from every hug. Neither of them was keeping score. I was the only one keeping score, and I needed to stop.
Your marriage becomes a shift schedule
Dan and I are a good team. We were also, for about eight months, basically coworkers passing each other in a very loud break room. We split nights into shifts: I took 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., he took 2 a.m. to 7, since he had to be up for work anyway. It meant each of us got one real stretch of sleep. It also meant we barely talked about anything except ounces and diaper rash.
Things that helped us:
- A standing ten minutes on the couch after the twins went down, no phones, even if we were both half asleep.
- Saying the annoyed thing out loud early instead of letting it stew for a week.
- Remembering that neither of us was the lazy one. We were both just tired.
Leaving the house is a whole project
Getting two infants out the door took me forty minutes at first. Diaper bag, two car seats, the double stroller that barely fit in the minivan, the blanket someone would inevitably spit up on. I skipped a lot of outings I probably would have enjoyed, just because the logistics beat me before we got to the driveway.
What changed it was packing the bag the night before and keeping a spare set of everything in the car. Also lowering the bar. A walk around the block counted. The grocery store counted. You do not need a mommy-and-me class to get out of the house.
People want to help. Let them, specifically.
For the first two months, when people asked "What can I do?" I said "Oh, we're fine!" We were not fine. The day I started answering with something specific, "Could you fold that basket of laundry" or "Could you hold June while I shower," everything got a little easier. My neighbor dropped off a lasagna every other Thursday for six weeks, and I still think about that lasagna.
The small wins count
Nobody tells you about the good stuff, either, maybe because it sounds too small to mention. The first time they noticed each other, really looked at each other, around four months. The way they'd babble back and forth from their cribs in the morning like they were planning something. The first time both slept seven hours at once, when I woke up in a panic and then almost cried from relief.
The first year with twins was the hardest thing I've ever done, and I've done the dental board exams. But I'd tell anyone at the start of it: it gets better in pieces. One slightly easier week at a time.
And if anyone says "double trouble" to you in the grocery store, you have my permission to just smile and keep walking.
