If you use color-coded clothing to tell your twins apart, keep in mind that this won’t last forever.

We dressed our girls differently for several months after they were born. This helped us tell them apart at a glance and helped others tell our twins apart, as well.

However, our little twin babies started to grow up and have an opinion on what they wanted to wear.

What did they want to wear?

Each other’s clothes, of course.

When your twins are small infants, you can dress them in whatever you want. However, as they get bigger, you’ll find that they will start to resist your choice in outfits.

This happened to us at about a year old. By that time, all of us and our friends and extended family were used to the colors of clothing used to distinguish our twin girls.

Habits with that long of a history are hard to break.

I could no longer walk into a room, see a girl dressed in pink, for example, and assume it was the right daughter.

I constantly called out the wrong name to the wrong girl.

Take heart, because by the time your twins have an opinion, there will be plenty of other things to help you tell them apart.

Personalities will be totally different. Your twins’ voices and speech will be different. Physical looks (even on identical twins) will be different – especially to the trained eye of a twin parent.

This, like everything with being a twin parent, requires flexibility. Be flexible. Change when you need to and you’ll be better for it!

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.

As a dad, you may not care what clothing style or designs your twins wear.

However, there is one thing that will directly impact your happiness as a dad: snaps.

You see, baby clothes usually have easy access for diaper changes. If, by the way, you are looking at baby clothes that don’t have snaps on the bottom to make a diaper change easy, walk away and buy something else.

If you have both boys and girls, you’ll notice that girls’ clothes are usually more ornate and tend to have more pieces that need to be buttoned or snapped together.

Unfortunately for dads of girls, this means that you will be trying to get your daughters dressed in clothes that were designed for looks and not for ease-of-use.

Buttons on baby clothes are your worst enemy.

You’ll be trying to dress a wiggly baby and can’t get the buttons buttoned.

Or you’ll be changing a diaper and can’t get the buttons undone.

The lesson: avoid buttons at all costs.

Sure buttons make outfits “cute” and “precious” but you don’t care. Buttons on a baby outfit turn even a steady handed surgeon into a fumbled fingered failure.

So when you go shopping for your kids, or your wife brings home a stack of new baby clothes, be sure you ask the only question that really matters: “These only have snaps, right?”