The Feedings

During the first 4 months, I cried a lot.  Literally, I think I cried almost every day.  But, I was okay with this because I knew why I was crying.  Well, I kind of knew.  First of all, after having 2 babies, my hormones were ridiculous!  When you’re pregnant with twins, there is obviously just more of everything.  So, it makes sense that it might take longer for my body to balance itself out.  But, on top of that, I had 2 babies at home.  2 babies!  It is just ridiculous no matter what!  It’s very overwhelming with 1 baby (according to all my friends who had just 1 baby) and they all said they don’t understand how I did it with 2.  And I will say, I absolutely don’t understand how anyone has triplets!  At least with twins, I have 2 hands; my husband and I are 2 people so we can each take care of 1.  But, 3 at the same time?  Wow!

Anyway, I quickly realized that for me, the most overwhelming part of this was the feedings.  Anyone I spoke to about twins always told me how important it was to have the girls on the same schedule.  When 1 eats, the other eats.  When 1 sleeps, the other sleeps.  But, with 2 preemie babies that weighed just about 4 pounds each, I could not figure out how to feed them at the exact same time by myself!  They were too little to really be comfortable eating in bouncy seats, their car seats or on boppy pillows.  I really had to hold each girl when she ate.  So, I would change 1 baby and feed her, the whole time praying that the other baby wouldn’t scream her head off waiting for me!  Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn’t.  The problem also was that as preemies, feedings took a long time!  And in between the feedings, the girls didn’t do much at this stage.  They slept, pooped, opened their eyes to look around and have to eat again.  Not much reward so far in this job!  I felt like I was always feeding someone and I was not super into it!  The best part of my day would be when I had a family member over to help!  I always scheduled their visits around feedings so someone could feed 1 girl, while I fed the other.  If you weren’t willing to help with a feeding, I did not want you to come over!

The good news is, as everyone told me it would, things got easier as the girls got older and bigger.  After about 4 months, I finally felt like I could take a deep breath again.  I realized that this was my life and I had wanted it really, really, really badly!  The girls started sleeping longer stretches at night and I got used to the feedings.  They became quicker and the girls could sit in some kind of contraption.  This way I could feed them at exactly the same time by myself.  For example, I would put them each in a bouncy seat and I would sit in between them holding their bottles up for them.  (Unfortunately, my girls never learned to hold their own bottles.  To be honest, I never worked really hard with them on that, but it definitely would have made things easier.  Instead, I worked on the girls holding and drinking out of cups when the time came and that, they did really well at a pretty early age.)  Of course, when 1 needed to burp, I had to stop feeding both of the girls to burp 1 and then the other.  And of course, I couldn’t have 2 easy babies, but 2 babies with reflux so that made feeding even harder.  And that made my entire wardrobe smell like cheesy vomit!  The girls spit up constantly, all day long, and they both did it!  Zoey would finish her bottle and 2 hours later, right before she was due for her next bottle, she would still be spitting up.  Kayla would do the same thing.  It was disgusting!  But, we all made it! The reflux and spitting up got better once the girls learned to sit up on their own, which was about 7 months and now, the girls happen to be amazing eaters!  But, there’s more on that to come!

As a side note, I want to thank everyone for all their wonderful responses to this blog!  I just felt like when I was going through all of this, not many people were talking about it and that would have helped!  I know I might be rushing through things and that’s because I want to catch everyone up to real time with what’s happening with the girls now!  But, please, do not hesitate to contact me directly with any comments and/or questions about anything I’ve discussed: fertility treatments, twin pregnancy, the birth, etc.  I’m here to be as open and honest as possible and would love to help!  I’m having so much fun finally putting this all down on paper and I really have to thank you all again for all your support.  Stay tuned for the next entry….