This week I tried to think about what people might want to know about having twins, since that’s sort of my angle here.  

The question I seem to get most from friends and family is: How bad is it?  The nights.  They want to know if I ever sleep.  People who have had to get up at night with one newborn want to know if getting up with two is as bad as they think it is.  The answer is yes.  Yes, it is THAT bad.  For those of you with a morbid streak, I’ll go on.

I remember some nights being so disoriented that I woke to the sound of a screaming baby and would need a minute to figure out whether or not I was already feeding one.  I didn’t remember putting the last baby back into the crib or getting back into bed myself.  
Most nights I put myself to bed pretty much as soon as I had the little ones down.  And yet it was rare to accumulate five hours of actual sleep before morning.  I know this because I couldn’t resist calculating my sleep.  I don’t know why anyone would force arithmetic on a brain addled by loss of sleep.  But I couldn’t help myself.  Every time I woke up, I’d figure how long I had been asleep and add it up.  I’m not sure whether it was morbid curiosity or just boredom.  I also set completely arbitrary goals for sleep.  Goals over which I had zero control.  I might put M in the crib and calculate that since I fed G pretty recently, it was somewhat reasonable to expect a whole hour before I had to get up again.  I’d give myself a mental pep talk about how I could make it through the day if they’d only give me that hour.

And then there were the infomercials.  If I sat on the edge of the bed to feed the babies, I was seriously afraid that I would fall asleep sitting up and drop a baby.  So I turned on the TV to try to keep myself alert.  I know, watching people get excited about a mop would usually put me to sleep, too.  But I had transcended the usual tiredness.  If I lay on the bed to nurse, I still needed the TV to keep me awake in order to get any sleep.  Did that make sense?  Of course not.  Remember that math I was forcing on myself?  This is where it got complicated.  You see, if I put M right back into the crib after she ate, she would likely sleep for two hours or so.  But if I fell asleep with M in the bed, she’d wake up an hour (or less) later when I needed to feed G (or the other way around) and then I’d have to feed both babies before I could get back to sleep.  Does it make sense yet?  Perhaps it only makes sense when half your brain is listening to the merits of the Ab-Decimater.

I still haven’t slept a full night since sometime in the second trimester, maybe as far back as October.   But sleep has improved for me most nights.  In fact, I’ve had as much as six hours in a stretch.  And it was wonderful.

Mandy, the mom to newborn twins and two young children, appears Saturdays on TriangleMom2Mom.