Keeping Time

Caring for infant twins is an exercise that requires a great deal of planning, coordination, and moment to moment prioritization and task management. I imagine that's true of parents of single infants, as well, but with two babies it becomes all the more critical. I suppose that if any new parents would be required to manage the schedules and details required to care for infant twins while keeping sane it would be Hanna and I. We both tend to be, shall we say, detail-oriented. (Friends that know us well may use less charitable adjectives.) Our implementations differ -- Hanna with her binder and whiteboard filled with hand-written lists, me with my Evernote-based GTD setup and Inbox Zero philosophy -- but the resulting lack of clutter and general order in day-to-day life is similar. So when the various books about raising twins (such as Juggling Twins, which I recommend) emphasized the importance of sleeping schedules and recommended keeping a log of feedings, we were in comfortable territory.

To an outsider, our household may seem too fixated on the feeding schedule. Parents of single babies think we should feed them whenever they are hungry; why make them wait half an hour? Why on earth would you wake up a sleeping baby in the middle of the night to feed him? The answer is simple, and repeated over and over in the books about multiples; with twins, everything is different. Without the schedule, caring for twins quickly descends into a realm of chaos where nobody sleeps and everybody cries -- including parents.

Of course, the schedule is not set in stone; while caring for twins demands a large measure of discipline, it also requires a great deal of flexibility. In general, however, our days currently go something like this.

The day begins at 6:00 AM; Hanna gets up and breast feeds the twins, plays with them some, pumps more breast milk for the day, then starts getting ready to go to work. I get up around 8:00, so I can watch the children while she gets in the shower. The second feeding of the day begins at 9:00; Hanna's already out the door by then, so this is my first feeding of the day. After the twins get their bottles of breast milk, they tend to be pretty sleepy, and so I swaddle them up and let them sleep in their bouncy chairs while I do up the dishes from the morning and take care of anything I can on my to-do list. The next feeding is at noon, so the time between 10-12 in the morning also gives me some space to work. At noon, the twins get formula again, and then almost always drift off to sleep again. This gives me another couple of hours to work, until 3:00 PM when they get breast milk again. We play some after this feeding, if they are awake, until around 5:00 PM when I need to start dinner. Hanna gets home around 5:30, and takes over the duties of baby care from me while I finish up in the kitchen. She breast feeds again at 6:00 PM, and once the kids are fed and settled we can sit down and feed ourselves. After dinner, I set about cleaning up the kitchen, and Hanna gives the kids baths. We try to put the kids down to sleep in their crib after their bath; if this works we get an hour or so to ourselves to sit and talk, read, or sometimes watch TV. (Movies are still a bit too long to fit in this time, unfortunately.) Hanna pumps milk again for the night and goes to bed around 9:00 PM. At 10, I feed the children formula again and put them down for the night. I then settle the house, and take a few minutes to write in my journal and exercise before getting into the shower and going to bed myself. The nights are variable; sometimes the twins wake up at 2:00, sometimes closer to 4:00, and on nights when Fortuna smiles on us they sleep all the way to 6:00 AM. Then the cycle begins again.

This division of a day's labors works well for us, for several reasons. The basic feeding times (three hour intervals during the day, with a "top off" at 10:00 PM and on-demand feedings during the night) are recommended by Juggling Twins, and serve to not only keep our day somewhat ordered, but will gradually teach the children to sleep through the night. Additionally, we've managed to find a way to allow Hanna and I to both get several hours of uninterrupted sleep. She's always found it easier to get up in the mornings, and at night when she's tired and ready to fall asleep I'm still wide awake and ready to go. By letting Hanna do the first feeding of the day and me the last, we use this to our advantage. Finally, with Hanna going back to work, she needs as much rest as possible during the night, which is the primary reason why I'm always the one stumbling around the house in my bathrobe at three in the morning heating bottles and trying not to fall asleep in the middle of feeding a baby. I have the advantage of working at home, and I can always take a nap in the morning if I'm too exhausted to think; Hanna doesn't have that luxury in her office.

When the twins first arrived, I felt at though my life was completely out of my control, and I could do nothing about it -- a feeling that is anathema to me. But, as with other obstacles, I've tried to figure out what works, and what doesn't. I've read books, practiced, experimented. I've watched what my and Hanna's parents do, and tried to emulate the things I thought were good ideas. Some things work (baths make babies sleep better), and some things don't (spending all day at the beach makes babies cry all night). Gradually, I've felt more and more competent and knowledgeable, and that pushed aside the feeling of my days being uncontrollable chaos. In fact, I think caring for infants has improved my ability to prioritize and make efficient use of my time. We still have to be flexible, of course, but thanks to learning how to keep a schedule that works well for both the babies and their parents, I have a handle on how to deal with challenges as they arise.