Your toddler twins will put on a show that can only be described as “twinadoes.”

Imagine the Tazmanian Devil from the Looney Tunes cartoons. He spins like crazy, leaving a wake of destruction in his path. Then, he takes a quick break, looks around and starts spinning again. Here is a video of the Tazmanian Devil to remind you:

Now imagine your twins’ smiling faces in that whirlwind of destruction and enjoying every minute of it. There is something magical about toddler twins that you won’t see with a singleton toddler.

Your twins will run, jump, climb, topple, wrestle, destroy, demolish, slam, bite, hit, kick, cry, scream, and bounce off the walls like nothing you’ve ever seen.

The twins will feed off the actions and energy of the other to create super twinadoes that you’ll be hard pressed to contain.

Your clean family room will be struck by the twinadoes and you’ll have to carefully tread through the aftermath.

Yes, the twinadoes will even splatter food, spill drinks, leave crumbs, and dirty up your clean kitchen.

So don’t get too hung up on keeping your house spotless and tidy. As long as you have twinadoes roaming your halls, you’ll have messes to clean up.

The trick is to use the time when the eye of the storm is present to teach the whirling dervishes how to clean up their own messes!

Newsflash: Your house will be a mess with twins.

I remember when our house was always orderly and I could walk freely through the house without stepping on a hard plastic toy. Those days were before twins.

Before twins, your home may be a house of order and zen-like peace. As a dad of twins, now is the time to lower your expectations.

When your twins arrive, you will not be able to physically handle everything you once did. Some things will have to be let go or left undone.

A clean and orderly house can be let go.

You’ll quickly realized that it is unrealistic to try to keep the house totally clean, especially during the day when the kids are awake.

My wife and I will spend the hour after the kids go to bed (which is at 7:00) doing tag-team cleaning every night. We start in the kitchen and clean up after dinner and then work through the toy room and family room, picking up the random items the kids failed to put away. Then we go on to our evening routine.

We don’t necessarily love that we have to spend an hour every evening cleaning up, but we do appreciate the lower stress levels a clean kitchen gives to start a day.

We’d also rather spend time during the day playing and reading with the kids than cleaning. Granted, as the kids are getting older, we are involving them in more cleaning and chores. However, with newborn twins, you’ll just have a mess.

Get used to the mess. Embrace it. Ignore it. Clear a pathway through it for those late night walks you’ll take to care for a baby.

After a while, you’ll be able to adjust to the new reality. Some time after that your twins will be old enough to not only make a mess but clean it up too. Just lower your expectations between now and then and you’ll be fine.

Your twins will go through diapers at a rate that will surprise you.

“Didn’t we just buy a box of diapers?” you’ll ask, surprised, when you see your stock running low. (The answer is always “yes,” by the way.)

One of the challenges of diapers is knowing when to move up to the next size. Each size diaper corresponds to a weight range to help you know what size to buy for your babies. What you may not realize is that there is about a two pound overlap between sizes. So you don’t necessarily need to max out the weight range on one size before moving up to the next size.

So how do you know when the time is right? The solution is simple:

When your twins start having blowouts and leaks on a frequent basis, it is time to move up to the next diaper size.

This may seem obvious, but in practice, it is not.

Your twins will have a poop that overflows the diaper and you’ll be so busy cleaning it up that you won’t see the pattern that is emerging.

If you hear yourself saying any of these things, it may be time to change diaper sizes:

• “Again! She had a blowout yesterday…”
• “What? Another blowout?”
• “Why does she keep overflowing her diaper?”
• “I really hate cleaning out these poopy clothes!”

Once you start to see multiple blowouts and on a recurring basis, go ahead and buy the next size diapers.

What if you still have a stack of the current size?

Two solutions: use them on the other twin or give them away.

One of our girls seemed to be having the blowout problem more than her sister. So we moved up a size on one girl and not the other.

If both your twins are ready for the upgrade but you still have left over diapers, don’t worry: diapers make great gifts for other parents-to-be. Yes, even opened packages! You just don’t have to wrap those ones up. You only have to buy one package of diapers to appreciate even an opened package.

What if we move up a size and the diapers are too big?

Don’t let the “too big” possibility stop you from proceeding. Even if they don’t fit today, your twins will keep growing and they can start wearing them in the near future.

I will say, that with our four kids, we’ve never had the problem of poop leaving a “too big” diaper.

Why do diapers cost so much?

Short of changing professions or buying stock in Pampers or Huggies, you may just have to accept the fact that someone’s getting rich at your expense. Diapers are one of the financial curses of twins. Go get yourself a Costco membership and you can save on the diapers.

Babies are messy eaters.

Twins combine each other’s messiness to create a perfect storm of mess that seems to be larger than the sum of each individual baby’s mess.

Once your babies are eating solids and feeding themselves, your twins will make a mess with every single meal that they eat.

This means that there will be food not just all over the twins (faces, arms, legs, in the diaper, inside the clothes, etc.), but there will be food on the floor, walls, table, ceiling, and on you.

Cleaning the floor is one of my least favorite tasks and probably isn’t your favorite, either.

By the end of the day, you’ll find that your twins have covered your kitchen floor with food crumbs, spills, remnants, and rejected nibbles.

You may be tempted to clean these up right away. Granted, if your twins are your first kids, you may think that is the only option.

However, after you have a few kids, you realize that messes are inevitable and you can’t immediately clean up every one of them.

The messy kitchen floor is no exception.

My advice: clean up wet messes right away, let everything else wait. When you let regular food wait on the floor, it will start to dry out and then becomes that much easier to sweep up.

So waiting to sweep up the kitchen floor actually works to your advantage because all those dried bread crumbs, cracker pieces, pieces of rice, and hardened noodles sweep up all the easier when they aren’t fresh.

Giving twins a bath is always an adventure. When our girls were newborns, we decided we would bathe one girl every other day.

That idea worked on paper, but in reality, with life being unpredictable, we couldn’t keep that schedule. We needed to make sure we got the girls bathed whenever we could.

Since our girls are identical, we started with a rule in our home: both babies can’t be naked at the same time. This helped us keep them straight until we could tell them apart more easily and not have to rely on our clothing colors color-coding system.

I’ve found that once our girls got mobile, they wouldn’t take turns with bath time. They both wanted to take a bath and they both wanted it now.

Here are some tips I’ve learned about bathing twins in the bathtub:

• Get all your towels and wash rags ready before you start the water.
• Make sure your soap is within reach of your kneeling on the floor position.
• Put down a non-stick mat that covers the bathtub floor.
• It helps to have a cup for rinsing the babies. You may need two cups so that one baby can play while the other is cleaned.
• Strip down both babies to their diapers so you can pull one’s diaper off, put the baby in the tub, and then immediately take off the other baby’s diaper in rapid succession.
• Once the water starts in the tub, you can’t leave. Your babies will need constant supervision.
• Use the kneeling pads you can find at a garden center while kneeling on the hard bathroom floor.
• You’ll need an extra towel to mop up all the splashes.
• You’ll have at least one twin that wants to drink the bath water. This same twin will then be surprised when too much water comes out of the cup.
• Be ready at a moment’s notice to help a baby who slipped sit back upright.
• Babies are really slippery when wet. Try to keep at least two points of contact when moving them.
• If you can get your spouse to help, you’ll be a happier person. My wife will take a baby to dry off while I finish cleaning the other.

If you want some step-by-step instructions on bathing twins, see this list on ehow.com.