Feeding Twins

So we've covered how twins come to be and how we found out we were going to be blessed with twins.  Lets talk about some of the quirks of having twins, and one big one is feeding.  When you become a parent to multiples you quickly learn you have to roll with things and improvise if you are to survive. 

When our boys were born there was 45 minutes between V and H.  By the time H was born they wanted me to breastfeed V so they asked if I could do both at the same time.  Huh!?!  You want me to do what??  I had difficulties nursing with my singleton babies and now you want me to do two at once?  I told them no, but later discovered if I was ever to have any time for anything other than changing diapers and feeding babies I would have to learn to do two at once.  I made it a little over a month breastfeeding, which happened to be longer than I thought I would, and I became quite adept at positioning for the double nursing experience.  Lots of pillows, that's all I have to say.  I would just sneak away to the bedroom with the boys - there is no being modest at all when nursing two at once - and the hubby would help me get going.  It became quite the time saver.

After we had moved on to bottles I had to figure out a convenient way to give both babies their bottles at the same time.  So I would sit on the floor between my two nursing pillows and set the boys in them and prop the bottles up with burp cloths.  Of course this is something I never left them alone doing but it was pretty handy!

H having his bottle

V having his bottle

It was when they started having more control of their hands and heads that things really became interesting.  It got to the point where I would have to hold each of their bottles while they were eating to prevent them from ending up on the floor.  I reached out to our multiples community here and was given two bottle holders by a wonderfully generous woman with triplets.  There was a ring to go around the bottles and on the other end of an adjustable arm was a clip to fasten it to either the carseat or reclining feeding chairs at the table.  These were a godsend and we completely wore them out or I would have passed them on to another struggling mother of multiples!

 

For awhile each of our boys was on a different formula.  H had stomach issues so we put him on a sensitive formula which helped and V stuck with the Kirkland formula that I had used with each of the older boys.  So during this phase each boy was assigned a color, H's bottles were blue and V's were green.  That was the only way to tell the bottle apart and to this day each boy does have his own green and blue sippy cups but those are quite interchangeable.

When we first started solids with the boys I was naive enough to think that I should use a different spoon for each baby just to keep things separate.  It took one or two feedings like this for me to say screw it.  They can share a spoon and if one is sick the other was bound to get it anyway, I just might have hurried the process along.  They would sit in their three stage reclining feeding chairs strapped to the dining room chairs and wait for food.  

Then we discovered the hanging highchairs!  We were hooked!  They were such space savers!  We bought one new and one used Inglesina chairs and we love them!  We still use them and they are easy to take down and take with you!

I do have to say that as the boys have progressed in their level of eating I have tried a few different things and come to the conclusion that if they can't feed it to themselves they aren't going to get to eat it.  It may mean that they are missing out on oatmeal, soups, and sometimes macaroni and cheese (unless daddy feeds them) but I'm ok with that.  If I spent all that time spoon feeding my 17 month old boys nothing else would get done.  They eat chicken nuggets, sandwiches cut up, crackers and lots of fruit.  I do typically give them whatever we are eating for dinner - unless it has to be fed to them, then they're out of luck.  After each meal I always have to clean up what I typically refer to as the food explosion, there is usually about a three foot radius of food on the floor under each of the boys.  It is quite impressive.

We do occasionally go out to eat at restaurants, but being as we live in Montana some of the restaurants surprisingly do not have more than one highchair.  We have run into this a couple of times and after attempting to make it work one time without a second highchair we now know that it cannot happen.  If a restaurant does not have more than one highchair they will not be getting our business.

I hope this has given you some insight into improvisations when feeding twins!  Next time I'll cover some of the questions I and many other parents of multiples get from the general public.  There really are such things as stupid questions.

Until next time!