I will admit, I failed to heed the warnings of others about just how life-changing having kids would be. I am by nature an optimistic person, and it definitely showed in this case. Here was my reasoning: newborns sleep 15-16 hours a day according to the experts. This means that even if my twins slept on completely different schedules (a situation I planned to try and avoid by waking one to feed if the other one was also up), that would still leave me eight hours a day for sleeping assuming that I needed to entertain them for their entire waking period (which also seemed ridiculous). Yes, I knew it would be fractured sleep, but I’ve had fractured sleep before, and it’s never really bothered me. So how bad could it be?

Okay, I will pause now as all you parents (especially those of you with multiples) laugh at my naïveté. . .

You back?

As anyone who’s ever had a baby knows (and probably any of you who are better at listening to advice than me), that is not how babies work. I failed to account for little things like the fact that both of my girls prefer to nap on top of me instead of the crib and neither of them particularly likes when I try and wear them both in the Moby wrap so I can get other things done (Mr. BBB can somehow accomplish this—I credit his wider chest). Nor did I account for the increase in baby-related chores I would need to do like washing bottles, washing laundry, pumping milk, washing laundry, picking up the baby detritus that seems to migrate around my house without human intervention, washing laundry. . . So while they may only be awake eight hours a day (and even that, I question), I am definitely spending far more than eight hours taking care of them.

So how did my first week go? I will preface this by saying that because they were premature, they were actually better sleepers the first two weeks than they were later. Generally, once we fed and burped them and put them in their cribs, we could count on them to stay asleep until we woke them up again. Mostly. So here was a typical day:

1. Midnight-1:30AM: Change, feed, burp, pump. Because they were smaller than average, the doctors had us supplementing every feeding at the breast with pumped milk/formula. Since they were both lazy nursers at first and Mr. BBB and I were still getting the hang of things, it took awhile
2. 1:30AM-3:00AM: Sleep
3. 3:00AM-4:30AM: Wake them up to change, feed, burp, pump.
4. 4:30AM-6:00AM: Sleep
5. 6:00AM-7:30AM: Wake them again to change, feed, burp, pump (sensing a pattern?).
6. 7:30AM-9:00AM: Sleep
7. 9:00AM-10:30AM: Wake them to change, feed, burp, pump
8. 10:30AM-11:30AM: Finally drag ourselves out of bed. Take the dog out and make and eat breakfast.
9. 11:30AM-12:00PM: Clean as much of the house as we could.
10. 12:00PM-5:00PM: Random work on the house/feeding babies. Because we were optimistic, we had some unfinished projects when they were born (side-note: not a good idea—your to-do list should be clear around 32 weeks if you’re having multiples). So on most days, my awesome in-laws would come over around noon. Mr. BBB and my father-in-law would then spend the next 5-6 hours working on projects while my mother-in-law cleaned/helped with babies. I would be mostly focused on babies though I could sometimes help for an hour or two. Lunch would sometimes be in here, too, though I skipped it more than I probably should have.
11. 5:00PM-6:00PM: Try and make/eat dinner. I was successful in this endeavor around 75% of the time. We did have some easy-to-make meals already prepared which I would sometimes scarf down at 5:45 if I hadn’t had a chance to do anything else.
12. 6:00PM-7:30PM: Feed, change, burp, pump
13. 7:30PM-9:00PM: Finish up chores. Generally, this included cleaning up from dinner, laundry, and various other tasks to keep our house from becoming a complete mess. Sometimes, we would sleep in this interval instead.
14. 9:00PM-10:30PM: Feed, change, burp, pump
15. 10:30PM-midnight: Collapse, exhausted, into bed

If you’re doing the math, you can see that my eight hours of sleep was definitely optimistic. I was typically getting 5-6 hours a sleep (even now with them sleeping a bit longer, it’s still around 6 hours, maybe 7-8 on the weekends if I sleep in. And no that’s not continuous.) We considered shift sleeping so we could each get more sleep, but especially at the beginning where we were still learning how to do things, we needed both sets of hands even to do something as simple as get both babies latched.

But we made it work. At the end of the day, everyone was fed and alive, including the dog, so I considered it a success. I also learned that a lot of the things on my “critical” to-do list weren’t truly critical after all. The house is clean-ish (as in, it won’t be condemned), but that’s mostly thanks to my mother and mother-in-law who have helped with a good chunk of the household chores. The girls are still sleeping in a crib in our room at three months and will likely stay there for another month or two (until they start rolling over and waking each other up). And while we did finish the nursery, we subsequently turned it into a guest room so my mother had somewhere to sleep while she was visiting to help with the household. That means there’s not actually room for us to move the second crib in until we get the bed out. The plan was to move the bed into the third bedroom; however, that bedroom is currently full of junk (we use it to store things without another home) and has no ceiling. Four months ago, I would have made cleaning it out top priority and pushed myself to the limits to finish it in the next month just in case we need to move the girls. Now, I’ve realized that if it doesn’t get done by the time the girls need to be separated, it’s okay. We’ll figure something out. It won’t be perfect nor likely even what I planned, but it will work. And at this point in my life, that is what matters most.