Nursing twins

Let me say right off the bat that nursing twins is tough at first. But so is bottle-feeding twins formula, according to many moms I knew in my Mother of Twins Club. I'm going to include some excerpts here from a journal I kept sporadically when my twins were babies. They were one month and four days old at the time of this entry:

Last night was a Mother of Twins meeting, the first one I went to...since I had the babies. It sounds like our life here is typical of life w/twins -- most people don't get babies in bed until at least 10 PM, and most people feed a lot from 5 PM until 10 or 11. Also, most babies are pretty fractious in the evening. A bottle feeding generally takes at least an hour a baby [remember, these are very young babies; times get shorter]. We've been finding that during the day, a bottle feed can be 30 - 45 m, a breast feed can be various lengths, anywhere from 15 m - 1 hr. But the evening feed for the 2 of them [with two of us feeding] takes all evening; say at least 8:30 - 10:30 or 11... But it does seem like we're not doing any worse than other parents of twins, and it doesn't sound like breastfeeding is making it any worse!

I know, that sounds scary. The beginning month or two is kind of scary, but all the "look at our beautiful babies" makes up for it. My point is that while breastfeeding is tough, there are a lot of advantages, and it's not like bottle-feeding your newborn twins would be a piece of cake anyway.

Maybe you can learn something from my entry, too. It seems ridiculous, doesn't it -- we just fed the babies for hours? In retrospect, maybe we should have given them a nice feed at 7 PM and put them to bed, then wake them up at 10 or 11 PM for a quiet, dark, night-time feed and then right back to bed. We were brand new parents of two babies and we were a little clueless. Do yourself a favor: read up on how to tell the difference between hungry babies and tired babies and try to do way better than we did.

Nursing pillow: I recommend a nursing pillow meant for twins. It's important that it straps around your waist.  The types I know of are the "EZ-2-Nurse Twins" pillow and the Ultra Plush Nurse EZ Twin pillow. There's a blow-up option, which I never used, that I can't imagine would be as good as the pillow.

Swapping or assigning breasts: Some people are adamant about swapping breasts each feed, that is, if Baby A is on the right for the first feed of the day s/he is on the left for the second feed. There are some advantages to this, which you can read about elsewhere, but the disadvantage is that it can be really confusing. There are times when you end up feeding them at different times (or you have a dawdling eater) and you feel like one breast didn't have time to recover. When my twins were 3 1/2 weeks old, I decided to assign each baby a breast.  They had very different eating patterns and I thought the breasts would adjust separately to each child's need. This is something that worked fine for me, so if you're having a tough time with the logistics of alternating, you may want to think about it. No matter what, make sure to mix up the positions to empty the breasts as well as possible. The position you're using will have an effect on what milk ducts are emptied.

Nursing twins in public discreetly: Honestly, while there might be some people who could nurse twins discreetly in public, it wasn't something I was comfortable with. So I used to nurse them one at a time when out at a restaurant or something. It worked because I was only out at a restaurant if I was with my parents or my husband. We'd wheel the double stroller next to the table, sit down, and I'd nurse one while looking over the menu. If the other baby needed attention, whoever was with me would keep him/her happy. I'd swap babies when I was done and they would usually be relatively happy for the amount of time we were at the restaurant.

I also heartily recommend nursing shirts. I liked the style where there were two openings in the shirt under a top layer, so you lift the top layer up slightly, position the baby and then the top layer nestles against the baby's face so your breast isn't really showing (unless baby pops off for a moment). With the two openings, if you do choose to nurse both in public, you're not showing as much, and the shirts are good for home, too.