Surviving the first year with twins: My 4 pieces of advice I wish I had known
When I found out I was pregnant with twins, I let out a laugh because of how arduous our fertility journey had been. But, deeper down I was reeling. My eldest was barely one year old and hadn’t taken her first steps — how would we care for two newborns day and night plus our toddler? It felt unmanageable.
Spoiler: it was.
The newborn memories were fresh — the night feeds, the hairdryer app on both our phones to stop her fussing and the exercise ball we bounced on with her for an hour or more when we needed her to sleep. The thought of doing this with two was terrifying.
I reached out to my local twin association and attended a preparation class. But what I got were tips on how to tandem breastfeed and why you should do it, which formula brand is best and the double stroller I must buy to survive. I needed someone who had lived through infant twins (and a toddler) to impart their wisdom.
Our twins are now 14 months and when I let myself reflect on the first year, this is the advice I wish someone had shared with me.
1) Embrace outsourcing
We didn’t have our parents close by so we quickly accepted we’d have to pay for extra support. We kept our dog walker, full-time daycare for our toddler (it’s not safe to have one adult to a toddler, plus newborn twins) and cleaning service. But this still didn’t make having twins manageable. We were drowning.
Our budget didn’t permit paying for more help, but we didn’t see any other way of getting through our days. And, we recognized these costs were short-term.
After our freezer was emptied of all the meals people kindly cooked for us, our only option was take-out. I spent my days (and nights) nursing the twins, changing their diapers or rocking them to sleep. I didn’t shower. I didn’t make coffee. I didn’t go to the bathroom. My hands were never free to do any level of dinner prep. Unlike with my firstborn, baby wearing wasn’t an option. We found a meal service that delivered homemade prepared dinners once a week and this saved us for the first three to four months.
I couldn’t wrap my head around managing the weekdays on my own with newborn twins. I had lined up a part-time nanny, but she backed out two weeks before I was induced. I felt screwed, but didn’t have the energy or motivation to go through the process of finding someone again.
By week three, I had called my husband at work crying enough times we ended up hiring occasional nanny support one to two half days a week. This was the only time I didn’t have a baby on me and I had freedom to leave the house easily and take time for myself, as our weekends were more hectic than the weekdays since our toddler was at home.
2) Do not ignore your mental health needs
The sleep deprivation with our twins was profound. For the first few months, my husband and I slept in 45 min to one-hour chunks. We had never experienced this level of sleep deprivation. I feared the night and some nights I struggled to keep up with the pace of the feeds — as soon as one was settled, the next would need a feed. I’d wake and was incredulous I actually slept a wink.
This level of sleep deprivation made my husband and I crack at different points of the first year.
In both our cases, we identified for the other that our mental health was suffering and both went to our family doctor for medical support. I had post-partum anxiety that worsened when we were selling our house combined with all things twins. Medication helped give me greater capacity for the stress and chaos we were living through.
3) Learn to ask for help
My biggest self-discovery over this year was how terrible I was at asking for help. A friend pointed out around the three-month mark that the perception was I had mastered the twin thing and didn’t need support.
Wrong.
But, she was right — I failed to reach out and as a result, I felt isolated in my struggles. I had to get comfortable with saying yes when people offered to help me with bedtime when my husband was away for work, or when they asked to take my eldest to the park on the weekend so we could rest.
I realized this wasn’t just my roadblock. When the twins were almost a year, I met a couple in the grocery store with six-month-old twins. We commiserated on how physically taxing it is and how you have no life whatsoever beyond keeping your babies alive. I related to their feelings of isolation and how they felt their friends only wanted to hear about how gorgeous and cuddly their twins were, not the hardship and moments of unhappiness. I think had they been more open, their friends would have been happy to give some of the support they desperately needed.
4) Redefine success
This is a work in progress for me. We lived and worked in urban Toronto and measured our success by salary, job title, size of home and the desirability of our neighbourhood.
This had to change once the twins came. There was no way my husband and I could continue on our professional trajectory if we wanted more time with our kids. And we couldn’t afford to live in our city if we didn’t continue pushing our careers. We also wanted more space than we had and we couldn’t manage to upgrade in the city.
We reflected on our priorities and it wasn’t the big job downtown or the ridiculously priced house in an urban neighbourhood. The priorities became more time with our family. This didn’t jive with my husband’s frequent overseas travel and the inflexibility of my 9–5 job with a 1.5-hour commute round-trip.
When I was pregnant with the twins, I came home from a trip with my friends and my husband told me he wanted to leave his job and industry and begin a whole new career that he could do remotely. He didn’t want the travel and inflexibility of his current career.
This was beginning of our decision to blow-up our life. My husband’s new career path was our first step towards shifting towards our new priorities.
He got his new professional designation in the summer before I delivered the twins, and about two months after the twins were born, he began his new career. By spring, when the twins were about 8 months, we had bought a fixer-upper in an Ottawa suburb that needed a full renovation; staged and sold our Toronto house; and found a six-month rental in Ottawa where we would live during construction. It was a wild endeavor on top of infant twins and a toddler.
Life beyond the one-year mark with twins
Our family now lives in suburban Ottawa surrounded by woods, parks, ponds and paths. Our cost of living is lower, and we live around the corner from family and close friends. The kids are all in daycare and we’re both working out of the house (I’m now a self-employed communications consultant building my business) and our renovation is nearly done.
We made it to that one-year finish line and life is more balanced. The work to redefine success for ourselves was extraordinary, but I know we’re in the right place for our family of five.
We’re back to cooking our own meals, most nights we all get uninterrupted sleep and we’re never shy to take Auntie up on babysitting.
