24 weeks later: a father's recollection of our first months with twins (part two)

Part II   

One of the most common (and least helpful) things expectant parents hear is, “Boy, your life is really going to change!” As parents of twins, this became a daily occurrence. Family members, friends, and strangers at the store all seemed linked by a common need to let us know that when our babies arrived, “things are sure going to be different!” 

Thankfully, we were already on top of it and had vowed we’d be ready for this new and different lifestyle. My wife had scoured the library and local bookstores for materials on parenthood. We interviewed friends who already had children for hints, tips, and lessons learned from their experiences. We enrolled in hours of classes to help us prepare for the twins. We spent a weekend with a group of expectant parents studying Childbirth Education, took eight hours of night classes on nursing, and finished off the trifecta with a two-hour course titled “Mommy and Me,” a riveting yet touching experience where I learned the practical application of rectal thermometry.

Well-studied on parenting stories and with these classes under our belts, I felt we had a handle on how much change we were in for, thought we’d settle in fairly quickly once we got past the Great Unknown of the actual delivery. As an example, here’s a conversation between my wife and I during our first day in the hospital:

Me: “The nurses are going to ask whether we want the babies to sleep in the nursery tonight. I think we should say no—I mean, we’re going to be going home in the next few days and we won’t be able to pass them off to a nurse or a nursery then, so we might as well get started having them around tonight, right?”

Kate: “Makes sense, OK, let’s do it.”

This noble plan lasted until 9:00 p.m. By 9:30, after a frantic call to our nurse, the babies were resting peacefully (presumably) in the nursery. Kate and I were fast asleep (definitively) in our room…until midnight, that is, when the nurses brought Nolan and Nora in for their 12:00 feeding. And thus, we were introduced to The Feeding Schedule.

Ah, The Feeding Schedule: the one common thread initiating all new mothers and fathers into the collective kick-in-the-groin that is new parenthood. Mention The Feeding Schedule to any new parent you meet and I promise you that eight in ten will either cross themselves, shuddering, or break into tears. I firmly believe that whatever diabolical super genius devised The Feeding Schedule is also responsible for constructing Dick Cheney and unleashing Him upon this unsuspecting world.

Anyway...The Feeding Schedule. We were instructed to feed our newborns every three hours. Because of their low birth weights (5 lbs., 4 oz. for Nolan; 6 lbs. for Nora), we also had to supplement these feedings with small bottles. Our schedule consisted of round-the-clock feedings beginning at 12:00 a.m. and continuing through to midnight, when the schedule would begin again. In the early days, a typical feeding session went something like this: wake up 10 minutes prior to feeding time to get things prepared; wake up the babies with a diaper change; settle on the couch for feeding; wake up babies again (in those days, we actually worked to keep them awake--hilarious, I know); 20-30 minutes of intermittent nursing, followed by another 20-30 minutes of bottles; put twins back in the crib; clean up; back to sleep. A typical feeding session lasted anywhere from 60-90 minutes, which put us back in bed about an hour and a half before we had to get up for the next round. Rinse. Repeat. For 10 weeks.

That’s right—10 weeks. As we got into these routines and the babies got a little older, things became slightly more efficient--like a NASCAR pit crew we were frantically exploring ways to shave off precious minutes here and eliminate wasted seconds there, all in the quest for two full, unbroken hours of sleep between feedings. The first time we pulled it off in under 50 minutes we celebrated with a euphoria that bordered on the hysteric, and I place it fondly among our first parenting “success” stories. But even achieving these efficiencies, those first three months were brutal. I can count on one hand the number of nights where we had more than 4 hours of unbroken sleep, and those first weeks passed in a blur of coffee refills, missed meals, bad movies on FX, and marathons of Teen Mom and Jersey Shore. Thanks to 24-hour play loops, night and day held no real significance; I remember sitting on my couch one night watching Armageddon, holding babies in each arm, only to find myself in the same position the next day watching the exact same scene. Like that Bill Murray movie, Groundhog Day, only no one was laughing.

And so it went, all through January and into February. Finally Nora cracked the 10-pound barrier, and almost immediately she began sleeping through the night. Nolan soon followed. The shift was so abrupt and unexpected I didn’t believe it at first, sure it was some kind of trap. The first night I woke nearly every hour to check the monitor, certain something was wrong. The second night was every other hour; by the third night, I started to believe that maybe, just maybe, we’d reached that mythical Promised Land at which our parents and friends had hinted, that time when “it gets better.” I woke on the morning of the fourth day, seven (nearly) uninterrupted hours of sleep later, surprised to see the calendar read March.