Step by Step Parenting

There is nothing quite like being sent home from the hospital with two newborns while you, yourself, are still in diapers.

Even if you’ve had nine months to wrap your head around it, even if you’ve known you’d have twins since you were eight years old, even if your best friend’s neighbor’s cousin had twins — nothing prepares you for what it’s like to care for two newborns, simultaneously, 24/7.

Well, almost nothing. After six months of being a twin mom, I can’t help but share at least a few things that I wish I had done to help get myself ready. “Wish” isn’t quite the right word, though, because I don’t think anyone would do any of this voluntarily… you’ll see what I mean!

Get 3-4 puppies, and make sure they are not potty-trained. Not even crate trained. While the puppy-to-newborn ratio is not exactly 1:1, getting three or four puppies should guarantee as close of an experience as you can get without kidnapping human babies.

Play crying sounds from bluetooth speakers scattered throughout your house, 24/7. Put a speaker right by your bedside, another in the kitchen, a few scattered throughout the hallways and the living room. Major bonus points if you find a way to set them all on timers so they go off at random times, but if not, having constant crying is pretty good prep, too.

Cook a hot meal. Plate it. Leave it on the counter for a few hours. Then eat it. Other ways to authenticate this experience are to only eat it with your non-dominant hand, or to tie your hands behind your back and eat with no hands at all. Or better yet, try and rub your stomach with one hand, pat your head with another hand, and eat your food with another hand. Wait, that’s too many hands. Now say that last sentence slower and get used to that feeling.

Every time you leave your house, take the puppies with you. Need to go the grocery store? A doctor’s appointment? Your mom’s house? The Chick-fil-a drive thru to order a large soda as a treat, where you inadvertently scare some teenager working there with your tears that you didn’t know you were going to shed, as he listens in horror to the guttural screams emitting from your backseat? Yeah, make sure you load up the puppies. Take the puppies to your car one by one, taking at least thirty minutes to do so. They’ll probably pee all over your car and chew things that will cost a lot of money to repair, which isn’t exactly that same as having newborn twins in the car, but close enough. Think of it as prep for the toddler years! And if you’re going to the grocery store, just toss the puppies in the cart when you get there. What, there’s nowhere to actually put your food now and everyone in the store is staring at you? Perfect.

Make sure you play the crying sounds in the car, too. You’ll hate it, the puppies will hate it, the teenager working in the Chick-fil-a drive thru will hate it. Bonus points if you attempt to play your music on top of the crying noises, because the car rides are supposed to be you time… right?

Do four squats with a twenty-pound dumbbell every fifteen minutes. The lower you can go, the better! This could also be done with one puppy in each hand, or even a squirmy puppy in a baby carrier. Which brings us to our next point:

Put an octopus in your baby carrier!  I don’t know where you’re going to find this octopus, and that’s really not my problem. All I care about is that you feel like you’re fighting a drunk raccoon when you put on your checker-print baby carrier that your favorite Instagram influencer linked in her stories. You need to be drenched in sweat by the time it’s finally securely strapped on, and you have to have lost several clumps of hair. I feel like an octopus would help you accomplish all of this!

Pull an all-nighter, then do it again the next night. Then again. Then again. Then again! It’s like college all over again, complete with a crawl to McDonald’s as the sun is peaking above the horizon, illuminating the bags under your eyes! Except skip the part where you take a whole day off from life to recover. Can you imagine? A day of… rest???

In all seriousness, none of this is necessary to prepare for twins. Although my husband and I did play audios of babies crying from our phones simultaneously, that was mostly to get our dog used to it (and it worked!).

I said it at the very beginning of the post: nothing can prepare you.

For a while, that was daunting. When I was pregnant, and two of my kids were fighting while the other was crying about something unrelated and the dog was unwinding another roll of toilet paper, I would look around and think, ’Holy $h!t, how will I ever manage two MORE babies on top of all of this chaos?!’

But that would freak me out. Eventually I realized that knowing nothing would adequately make me feel prepared was… freeing. There was no research I needed to do, no Reddit forums I needed to sift through, no virtual support groups I needed to join. Sure, it was out there, but I didn’t need it.

Instead, the best way to prepare is to ditch your preconceived notions of how you’ll parent twins and just wing it. Because when you’re not wasting your precious mental energy fighting for this version of twin motherhood you conjured up in your head before you ever spent a single day with them, things get a whole lot easier. Turns out the most foolproof way to prepare for twins is to not prepare at all, and learn to just go with the flow.