ON HAVING TWINS

I'm writing today to link up with Kelly's Korner Show Us Your Life series, and this week is for Mom's of Multiples.  I am thrilled that I actually fit in this category!

I always, always, always wanted twins.  I hoped and prayed for them.  Twins don't run in my family, so it seemed a long shot, but with God - all things are possible.  It seems truly incredible that my wish came true, especially in the fantastic and miraculous way that it did.  We are truly blessed.


(photo from their newborn shoot with the amazing Main Street Studios)

My guess about twins was that it would be about 1.5 times as hard as having one baby at a time, and for our family, that is definitely the case.  Since I didn't have a twins pregnancy, it certainly started out physically easier - though not emotionally - adoption is simply no joke.  Though they were in the hospital for almost three weeks, once they came home, they were pretty average newborns, though small.

Those first several months feel like a sleep-deprived blur.  When a friend who is a twin and has twins came to the hospital to visit, I asked her advice.  Here's what she told me -

1)  You will sleep again someday.  It will not feel like it for quite some time, but you will sleep again someday.
2)  Always feed them at the same time.

In the short five months that we've had our precious twins, those things both ring true.  I need to hold on to the fact that we will sleep again, and it seems as if we can almost see it on the horizon.  Almost, but not quite.  We are still plugging the babies with a paci pretty regularly at night, even with rice cereal being added to their last bottles.  And, I ALWAYS feed them at the same time - or at least within 20 minutes of one another.

This has made our life so much better, because it really does help them to stay on close to the same schedule, and as all mommies of littles know, schedule is king.  We still are not on a stringent napping schedule, but I know we will get there in time.

I'm so thankful that my twins are babies number 3 and 4 for me.  I am relaxed about them, and I generally know what to expect about babies in general.  One thing that is totally fascinating is being able to see two babies develop into two little people at the same time.  It would have been so fun to be able to compare Lily and Bella and see their similarities and differences so starkly, and with twins - you get that opportunity.



I have so much to learn about raising twins - though I think since we have a boy and a girl, I will not have as many of the identity issues that I imagine same-sex twins sets deal with.  I think our future will be a bit more complicated by the facts of adoption and transracial family issues.  However, I am so happy to know and trust that God put us all together for a reason.  He designed our family, and he will guide our decisions and circumstances as we lean on him.

So - twins are just as fun as I thought they would be and getting more fun all the time.  It is true that someone is more likely to be crying, so sometimes it does feel twice as hard - but mostly, it is twice as joyful, because we are getting to raise two precious people together, along with our other two precious people.