You thought you only bought those baby wet wipes to help with diaper changes. It turns out those little wet wipes come in handy anywhere you go.

Here are some ways you can use baby wet wipes:

1. Wipe off the kitchen counter
2. Clean up the spilled liquid off the floor
3. Wipe up that mess around the toilet when your kid misses
4. Clean hands in the car
5. Clean kids’ hands when they refuse to wash in the sink
6. Get bird poop off your car windshield or hood
7. Get bird poop off swings or slides at the playground
8. Wipe off the insect repellent from your kids once they are done playing outside
9. Swipe away the sweat from your face on a hot summer day
10. Sanitize after using a public bathroom with the kids, especially if there was no soap
11. Wipe sticky food/residue off of toys
12. Get dirt off your hands after you just loaded up your truck with mulch at the home improvement store
13. Dislodge crusty boogers from around your kids nostrils
14. Wipe off the dog or duck poop you stepped in while playing with the kids at the park
15. De-stickify the outside of your kids’ water bottles
16. Remove the residue that always seems to appear on your deck furniture
17. Dust your hard surface furniture
18. Remove dirt, grime, stains, and crayons from your walls
19. Help clean up a skinned knee
20. Quickly clean up the bathroom surfaces before guests arrive
21. Remove the grease and dirt from your hands after you worked on the car
22. Clean off your car’s dashboard
23. Remove make-up
24. Sanitize your computer keyboard
25. Clean the hand prints and smudges your kids leave on the car windows
26. Clean up after play-doh, glue sticks, and washable markers
27. Wipe down doorknobs and switch plates
28. Don’t forget to have one or two handy after you finish that bucket of KFC!
29. Wipe up spit-up from the leather couches
30. As a bullfighter’s cape when your rowdy toddler wants to be the bull
31. Hasty wipe down of the table after you’ve been seated at the restaurant but before your server appears
32. Compress to soothe fevered brows
33. Cleaning up twin bums after your twins have synchronized poops

What would you add to the list? What is your favorite use of wet wipes?

Just because you are having twins doesn’t mean you need two of everything.

What are some items that you can get away with only having one of instead of two?

If you already have a child or two, or whether twins are your induction to parenthood, try to think about possible scenarios where your twins can take turns using one piece of baby gear. Here are a few examples to get the creative juices flowing.

For example, you only need:

One baby bath but two towels

One changing table but diaper supplies for two

One crib (shared in the beginning) but two as your babies get bigger

One playpen or play set where you can sit one baby on each side

One bedroom that the twins can share

One of any given toy until the twins are old enough to both want the same toy at the same time

One wardrobe of clothes particularly if you have identical twins that can share everything they wear

Be judicious with your purchases. You’ll need double of a lot of things (like diapers and doctor visits) with twins but there is no need to spend more money than is necessary. Your twins will share a lot as they grow up together, you might as well start them early.

One of the big expenses with raising twins is diapers. From the day they are born until they master potty training and keeping their pants dry overnight, you’ll need to buy diapers.

Twin Diaper Usage

Newborns average about 10 diapers a day per baby. So your newborn twins will need about 10 diapers X 30 days X 2 babies = at least 600 diapers for the first month.

After about a month diaper consumption goes down to about 8 diapers per day. You’ll need 8 diapers X 30 days X 2 babies = at least 480 diapers per month for a few more months.

After three to six months, your babies should fall into a regular pattern with more predictable diaper usage. The blow outs and leaks of the newborn days are gone and you’ll see a pattern emerging. From 3 months to 1 year you should wean down to about 4-6 diapers per day per child.

So based on averages (your twins’ usage will vary) you are looking at using about 2,000 diapers by the time your twins turn 6 months.

After the year mark, diaper use is usually down to about 4 a day: one change when they wake up, one before naps, one before bed, and one for the random poop that happens every day at unpredictable times. So your toddler twins will need 4 diapers X 30 days X 2 toddlers = 240 diapers per month.

This means your twins could use close to 3,000 diapers in the year between ages one and two. (Makes you want to potty train early, doesn’t it?)

Diaper Transition

Once your twins potty train, you’ll be free from the traditional diapers. However, in some cases, you might need Pull-ups for nap times and overnight sleeping until they master the overnight dryness too.

Unfortunately, Pull-ups (and especially the overnight extra absorbent kind) tend to be more expensive than regular diapers. Fortunately, the volume of diapers during this transition period is cut in half.

Diaper Budget

You may want to establish a generous diaper budget for yourself as you stock up on diapers during pregnancy and maintain regular diaper use through the first two years or so.

What should you do with that money after you don’t need diapers?

You’ll see food consumption rise as your twins get older. That increased expense will likely offset any savings you see in no longer buying diapers.

Alternatively, you could start saving the money you did spend on diapers in your twin’s college savings funds. That way when it is time for college, you can remind them that they don’t have enough money because they refused to potty train until they were four.

When you find out you are having twins, you will think that everything you own is too small to handle your suddenly bigger family.

You may be right.

Your first thought may be that you need a bigger house. In fact, you may not need a bigger house with twins.

Your next thought will be about your car. How are you going to transport your new twins and your current family around town?

Do you need to buy a new car?

Here is the simple formula:

Current Number of Kids + Twins + Parents + Future Kid Plans = How many seats you need in your car

If the number of seats you need in your car is greater than what you currently have in your vehicle, it is time to start shopping.

Before we had any kids, I swore that we’d never own a minivan. I told myself and wife that we’d just get a big SUV to haul around the expanding family.

That plan worked until we had two kids. At that point we knew we wanted room to grow and so bought a minivan. Don’t feel bad if you have to take back a similar “no minivan” promise. They aren’t so bad after all.

So when we found out we were having twins, we already had room in our van and didn’t need to buy a new car. However, the girls’ arrival immediately maxed out our seating space.

Remember the formula above. If twins are your first kids and you have a back seat in your car, you may be fine waiting to buy a bigger vehicle.

If, on the other hand, you already have a child and just a little Honda Civic, it is probably time to upgrade.

Keep in mind that car seats are often bigger than a normal person is wide. So just because you have three seat belts in the backseat doesn’t mean you can fit three car seats back there. Take your car seats to the car dealership when you test drive to make sure they will fit.

Good luck!

As a proud father, you’ll want to preserve the arrival of your twins for future posterity.

To do so, you need to be prepared with a plan for getting the pictures and video you want.

You need to keep in mind how your twins will arrive, where they will arrive, and what you will be doing during delivery.

How the Twins Arrive

Your twins will arrive in one of two ways: naturally down the path God created or a more direct route courtesy of a Cesarean section procedure.

Either way they arrive, they will come one at a time.

Where the Twins will Arrive

Where you are when the twins are delivered often depends on how they are being delivered. You may be in a birthing room for natural delivery or in an operating room for the c-section.

The “where” may restrict what you can take pictures or video of. Be sure to ask your OB when discussing delivery options early in the pregnancy if you can take pictures and video of the delivery.

Some doctors will be video shy. After all, you could sue them for something they did wrong. Ugh. Fear of lawsuits shouldn’t prevent you from getting your kids’ arrival on video, though. If you have a good rapport with your doctor, take some time to discuss their concerns, your desires, and find out exactly what the hospital policy is. If it’s important enough to you and your doc is adamantly against video and pictures, then you may need to find a new care provider.

Right Equipment

For the birth of our twins, I used a digital camera that also takes video. To the outside observer, it looks like a camera, which your medical staff shouldn’t have trouble with.

The tricky part is that I could switch to video mode and capture my girls’ first moments while the medical staff thought I was taking pictures.

If you walk into the operating room, for example, with a big camcorder, they may not let you use it.

Timing

Time starts to speed up once the first baby is emerging from mommy. You need to be Johnny-on-the-spot and have that camera ready. If you have a digital camera that takes video, you can switch modes and keep rolling. If you have two separate electronics, you may want to duct tape them together as someone suggested to me.

Once your first twin is born, you’ll likely follow her over to where the nurses suck out her nose and mouth, get her cleaned up, and swaddle her in some blankets.

You’ll be so excited that you may forget there is another one coming. Keep an eye and ear on what is happening with the second delivery so you can quickly move back to your wife and have the camera ready for your next child.

I struggled with wanting to see my first newborn, comfort my wife, and watch the second birth all at the same time. Nevertheless, I managed to get video of both births and of their first few moments of life.

Awesome Experience

Watching your twins be delivered is an amazing experience that you will never forget. Plan to be there and be prepared to capture the moment for the future. After all, you wife won’t be taking pictures during delivery, so it is up to you.

When your twins are ready to start eating solid foods, you’ll need somewhere for them to sit.

Traditionally, this means buying high chairs.

Since you’ve got twins, you are already used to unconventional methods, so here is another tip:

Buy booster seats that fit on your normal kitchen chairs instead of buying high chairs.

Eventually your kids will need booster seats anyway. So if you skip the high chairs, you save money and can use what you buy for a longer period of time.

High chairs are great when you have one baby at a time. However, with twins, here is why you want booster seats instead of high chairs:

• two booster seats are cheaper than two high chairs (and many times even cheaper than ONE high chair!)
• two booster seats take up less room in your dining area than two high chairs
• high chairs have more surface area to clean than booster chairs
• you can leverage the chairs you already have in your kitchen with booster seats
• booster seats are easier to transport if you need to eat at Grandma’s, a friend’s, or if you take a road trip–anytime you are away from your kitchen for a meal

We purchased some Fisher-Price Healthy Care Booster Seats and have loved them. We cover our existing kitchen chairs with a towel and then put the booster seat on top.

The seat’s tray can easily be washed by hand or stuck in the dishwasher.

The hard plastic seat can easily be wiped down. When too much of a mess builds up on the towel under the chair, we simply swap it out, throw it in the wash, and put a new towel in place.

Another advantage of buying booster chairs instead of high chairs is that you’ll save money. Saving several hundred dollars for baby seating is totally worth it.

Transporting your twins is a challenge worthy to be included on The Amazing Race. You’re leaving the house with twins? You’re awesome. Pat yourself on the back.

However, gone are the days of up and deciding to go somewhere on the fly. Now you find yourself getting the babies (and anyone else) ready to leave at least 30 minutes before you actually need to leave the house.

There’s a lot to think about and a lot to remember to make sure outings go smoothly once you leave the safety of your home. So do yourself a favor and let your brain rest once you’re on your way with this one little tip.

A tip that is worth the price of admission:

Get an inline double baby stroller.

In fact, not just any inline double baby stroller. We bought a Baby Trend Double Snap N Go Stroller Frame that easily fit both our Graco car seat/infant carriers.

I can safely say that this piece of baby gear is unequivocally the best purchase we have made to date.

Why? It’s light, compact, easy to maneuver, and you never have to disturb a sleeping baby by taking him out of the car seat. Just lift out of the car, snap into the stroller base, and go.

Seriously, if you don’t take a single other piece of my advice, take this one: get this piece of equipment. You will thank yourself many times.

Once you are done with your inline stroller, you can easily resell it on Craigslist or at a garage sale when you are done with it. Snap N Go strollers are very popular and high in demand.

Inline vs. Side-by-Side

There are a bazillion stroller options out there. Thankfully, having twins narrows that number to a couple hundred. But really, there are only two basic types: inline and side-by-side.

You’ll have to weigh the pros and cons of each kind based on your situation and the way you think you’ll use a stroller. The reality is that you may end up trying both kinds over the course of infancy and early childhood and that different types of strollers will work for you at different times of life.

How Long Will It Last?

In our case, we started with the inline and then moved to a side-by-side. The inline stroller only lasted for us until our girls got long enough to kick the other car seat, and consequently, her sister’s head. (We hit this problem about the six month mark.)

Once our twins could sit up on their own, we switched to a more basic, double stroller like the Jeep Wrangler Twin Sport All-Weather Umbrella Stroller. Since these umbrella-type strollers don’t need the bulky car seat carriers, they take up less space and aren’t such a wide load problem.

When you bring your baby twins home, can you let them sleep in the same crib?

Absolutely.

In fact, at the hospital, the nurses had our twins together in the same bassinet. When we got home, we just continued this pattern. From their time in utero, each twin has constantly been with their sibling. Why not continue?

We found that our babies would actually turn towards each other when they were sleeping side by side in the same crib.

As newborns, your babies aren’t going to move around much so where you put them is where they will stay. In the crib, this means that you can have both babies sleep together.

We’d swaddle each baby individually and then have another blanket swaddle them together.

What about wiggly babies?

Eventually your babies will start to wiggle and hit each other. Don’t freak out. They were doing this in the womb for months (just ask your wife). If it doesn’t bother them, it shouldn’t bother you.

When to Separate

We kept our girls in the same crib for several months until they started getting bigger and rotating around. We knew it was time to separate when were jarred from sleep because Twin A had put her foot in Twin B’s head and Twin B was crying.

When that time arrived, we had two cribs in the same room, with one baby in each. The girls seemed to miss each other at first but would call out to each other via squawks or gurgles in a form of echolocation (think bats) to make sure their sister was near.

Hard to Sleep?

So you may ask: Don’t they wake each other up if they sleep in the same room or crib? No, not necessarily. Typically one twin can sleep through the cries of the other. You’ll even find one of your babies with arms or legs sprawled over the other with both twins sleeping contently.

Some Extra Advantages

Feel safe and confident starting with one crib. This may give you time to move an older child out of his crib like we had to do, or can give you time to defer that expense a few months.

If you aren’t familiar with Costco, then you are missing out. It is a large warehouse style retailer that sells food, household items, electronics, clothing, and a bunch more. If you don’t have a Costco in your town, perhaps you have a Sam’s Club or BJ’s Wholesale.

The bottom line is that you, as a father of twins, need a membership to Costco. Here’s why:

1. Diapers and Wipes

Your twin babies will go through lots of diapers and baby wipes. You may find yourself going through as many as 100 diapers per week in those initial days of newborns, and as the kids get older, that number will slow down to about 150/month. This means that you’ll be spending a lot of money on these items. We’ve found Costco’s store brand diapers to be superior to other store’s generic brands and that they even rival national name-brand quality. The bonus is that they come in a massive box, perfect for surviving twins’ diaper needs over extended periods of time.

2. Baby Formula

If you chose to bottlefeed instead of breastfeed your twins, you’ll need to find cheap formula. WebMD has a video interview with a doctor reminding us that essentially all formulas are the same, so it’s up to you to decide if you want to be brand loyal or not. Costco has a store brand which is really cheap but they also have Similac that our babies liked. Formula costs can be hefty (between $1500-3800/year) so you need to both find coupons (usually you can get these from the manufacturer) and a cheaper retail price (Costco fills this void).

3. Cheap Food

We’ll make our grocery list and go to Costco first. They don’t always have all the food we need, but if they do, it is generally cheaper than the grocery store. This includes gallons of milk that are usually a dollar or two cheaper than the grocery store.

Bonus: If you like to grill out or BBQ, Costco has the best-looking and best-tasting meat we’ve seen recently. My mouth waters just thinking about it.

4. Freezer Meals

Costco has rows of freezers full of ready-made meals as well as frozen fruits, vegetables, meats, and desserts. These quick-to-prepare foods will be how you survive the busy life that twins bring. Be ready: stock your freezer now. Watch your mail for in-store coupons at Costco, as they often include sale prices on these freezer meals.

5. Electronics Return Policy

OK, your twins probably don’t care about electronics, but you do. Especially once you realize you won’t get out of the house as much as pre-twins. You can buy televisions, computers, phones, and more from Costco at good prices and they come with an amazing return policy. You can return them anytime up to 90 days for a full refund. This is awesome and blows other store’s 15 return policies out of the water. So go buy that new TV or computer, try it out and if you don’t like it, no problem, take it back.

6. Free Samples

Let’s be honest, grocery shopping isn’t in the Top 10 of fun activities for a Dad. Costco will make it up to you: they have free food samples all over the place. This definitely helps make a trip there with the family in tow worth the effort.

7. Big Shopping Carts

Costco is the only place I’ve seen with huge shopping carts that have two seats for kids. Perfect for twins. You don’t have to worry about where to put the kids, as the cart solves that problem for you.

Get Your Membership

Yes, Costco has an annual fee for membership. It starts at $50. But listen, the savings you keep from their low costs and your volume twin-style purchases will pay for the membership and more.

If you are concerned about the price of the membership, convince family or friends to get it for you as a baby shower gift or for your birthday.

You can learn more about Costco at costco.com.