You know that you’ll need a lot of stuff to be ready for twins.

Once your twins arrive, the last thing that you’ll want to do — or have time to do — is go to the store.

The solution?

Stock up on everything.

“Everything” consists of two categories: stuff your twins will use daily and things that the rest of the family will consume.

Things for the Twins

Stockpiling a little bit here and there will be less of a shock for your budget later.

In addition to all the reusable baby gear that you’ll need (strollers, clothing, cribs, etc.), you’ll need to stock supplies that your babies will use (and use up) on a daily basis:

• diapers of all sizes
• baby wipes
• burp cloths
• baby formula
• bottles and nipples
• Desitin or another zinc oxide diaper rash cream
• baby body wash/shampoo

Things for the Household

When you think about the household items you use everyday, you’ll get an idea of the little things that you need to have stocked up for when the twins come:

• toilet paper
• paper towels
• soap
• dish washing detergent
• shampoo
• deodorant
• toothpaste
• laundry detergent
• dryer sheets

These are things you don’t want to worry about for a least a month after the twins arrive.

Stock your freezer. Remember, you can tell your friends you want a freezer meal shower.

If you have a stockpile of supplies by the time you hit the third trimester with your twins, you can relax a little as you enjoy the calm before the storm.

What other essential items would you add to the list to stockpile in your home?

If you decide to formula-feed your baby twins instead of breastfeeding, the costs can add up quickly.

Formula is not cheap and you’ll need to try different brands and “flavors” to see what works best with your babies.

The good news is that you don’t have to buy every ounce of formula your babies drink. Here are some free and discounted resources:

Hospital

The hospital where your twins are born has an almost infinite supply of formula. They even had the premixed, liquid versions which are super easy: just pop on a nipple and feed the baby.

Before you leave the hospital ask for extra samples and stock up. If you’ve been nice to your nurses during your stay, they will most likely help you out here. It doesn’t hurt that you’ve got twins and they will feel sympathetic to your situation.

Pediatrician

You’ll be visiting the pediatrician frequently in the first few weeks and months after your twins’ birth.

Ask your pediatrician for samples every time you visit.

Ask your pediatrician for a form to fill out and mail in to the formula company where they will send you a free case of formula. This is one of the perks of having twins. The formula companies want to send you samples because once you’re hooked, they know you’ll be buying double the formula.

Manufacturer

Most formula manufacturers have programs where you can sign up for coupons. Take advantage of this. Sure, they will market to you but it is worth the cost savings.

You’ll also see discounted formula at wholesale clubs like Costco (a twin dad’s best friend) where the manufacturers offer larger sizes at cheaper prices than other grocery or retail stores.

Friends

Odds are you’ve got friends who have babies. These could be coworkers, neighbors, or friends from church. Ask all of your friends who have babies and nurse exclusively if you can have their free samples. Remember they get all the same sample opportunities you got (at the hospital and pediatrican) but since they are breastfeeding, they don’t need them.

Get Used to the Expense

While the options above will help you save money on formula, you’ll still need to buy some and spend money. Don’t get your hopes up that once your babies are past the formula phase that you’ll all of a sudden have extra money left over.

You’ll need that money to put into your grocery budget to help feed your growing little ones!

Most baby showers produce cute clothes and maybe some diapers. And if you’re lucky, you’ll have a few people actually shop off your registry. While all of these things are necessary, let’s face it, they don’t directly help you, the twin dad.

Think about your circles of friends. You may get offers for baby showers from coworkers, church, friends, or from your neighbors.

If you have more than one kind soul offer to give you a baby shower, ask that one of them be a Frozen Meal Shower. It may sound a little odd, but it’s very worth it.

Guests can either buy something in the frozen food section of the grocery store and gift it to you, or they can make something homemade and bring it to you to freeze for later.

If adequate storage space in your freezer is a concern, it’s worth addressing in one way or another. Do you have funds and space to buy an extra freezer? If not, do you have a friend or two nearby that could store some freezer meals for you?

This was the biggest lifesaver for us when our twins arrived. It was one of the primary reasons we made it through the first three to four months postpartum. (Not that we had that many meals stored, but every meal lasted our little family 2-3 days!)

The Frozen Meal Shower is a twin dad’s best friend. During the end of twin pregnancy, your wife may very well be on bed rest. A freezer meal is something that even you, dad, can cook.

And once the twins arrive, both you and your wife will be so tired and exhausted you won’t be able to think straight. You need to make sure you are eating well. Skip all the food preparations and throw the frozen meal in the oven or microwave. Problem solved.

You won’t eat well when twins arrive unless you are ready. Stock the freezer now!

Your twins will trade food and drinks during meals and snack times.

So how do you know how much each child has eaten or had to drink?

We’ve sat our twins in booster chairs next to each other since they started eating solid foods.

Due to their proximity to each other, they tend to swap food, sippy cups, spoons, and anything else on their trays.

Your twins may very well do the same.

One option to make sure each kid gets what she needs and nothing else is to sit them on opposite sides of the room.

Unfortunately, this makes it a little more inconvenient to single-handedly meet the needs of both kids at the same time.

Our girls have shown that they will eat what they want and leave the rest. If they want more food, we’ve taught them to use baby signs to indicate as much. (If, by the way, you want some sanity in communications with your little ones read Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk.)

So even if there is food swapping going on, your kids will eventually be able to self-regulate their intake.

However, we found our girls were still swapping sippy cups. This created a problem because we wanted to make sure that they got the amount of milk they needed or the vitamins we snuck into their juice.

Our solution to managing the swapping: different color cups.

It seems simple because it is. Remember, just because your babies are twins doesn’t mean they have to have everything be identical.

Use color differences to your advantage at meal times and you will be able to easily see the status of each of your kiddos.

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.

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.

By the first birthday, your twins will be ready to make the switch from breast milk or formula to whole milk.

How can you make this transition an easy and successful one?

Chocolate.

Call it a bribe. Call it cheating. I don’t care.

The way to get your twins to make the move to whole milk is to make it chocolate milk.

Instead of this unfamiliar and different milk, they get a taste of something sweet and yummy, and they will be more willing to drink.

Over time, you can start reducing the amount of chocolate syrup you use in the mix and soon they will be drinking milk straight.

One word of caution: chocolate milk stains clothes. If you were serving just milk, a spill or dribble wouldn’t matter as much. However, with chocolate, you’ll have to take extra caution when cleaning the clothes.

Perhaps a bib will help. However, by our girls’ first birthday, they had long since given up on bibs. Your twins may be different.

Keep in mind that you’ll also need to be patient. Kids need upwards of 15 exposures to new foods before they embrace them.

If you choose to bottle feed your twin babies, you’ll face the challenge of making bottles in the middle of the night.

The middle of the night feeds are generally heralded when one of your babies starts crying. This jars you from your slumber and pulls you out of your warm bed. You may even find yourself sitting on the edge of your bed trying to figure out what is the next thing you are supposed to do.

Because of the bewildered stupor that you will likely experience during night feedings, you need to have everything ready before you go to bed.

Before you go to bed, lay out burp cloths, bottles, formula, and a container of water.

When your babies start crying for food, they want food and they want it now. The longer you take, the louder the cries and the more frustrated you will get, especially when you’re sleepy.

We’d have bottles and nipples ready on the kitchen counter next to the formula canister and the feeding log. The bottles would have the water already pre-measured and ready to add the formula to. Dump, shake, and go!

For water, we filled up a Tupperware-style water bottle with a flip top lid and kept it on the counter. The big advantage of this was that the bottle was always room temperature and ready for immediately feeding the baby. No, your babies don’t need warm milk, so save yourself some time and frustration by going the room temperature route.

As with many things when it comes to twins, you’ll find yourself making choices–and sacrifices–constantly. In this case, you’ll probably weigh the benefits of being organized (especially if it doesn’t come naturally) against a few minutes of extra sleep. Do yourself a favor, prepare when you are awake so you can sleep walk through the process quickly and thus quickly return to bed.

There always seems to be a lively debate about whether you should breastfeed or bottlefeed babies. The advances in formula have made the health questions behind that decision a pretty even trade off.

As a father of twins, what to feed your babies is more of a logistical question: how will you physically be able to feed two babies at the same time?

Benefits of Breastfeeding

With our first two kids, my wife breastfed and we were happy with that decision.

I think Dads should be big fans of breastfeeding. Why?

• You don’t have to do anything. Unless your wife pumps milk to be served later, you aren’t going to be feeding any babies.
• You don’t have to buy baby formula and thus you save tons of cash
• You don’t have to wash out bottles and related supplies all the time

All this sounds great when you have a single baby. But what about twins?

Sorry guys, twins are a game changer. As much as you’d love to reap the benefits described above, the decision on whether to breast- or bottlefeed twins is simple:

Do whatever your wife wants.

Why?

Logistics.

Breastfeeding Option

Breastfeeding twins is not a simple feat. How do you feed them at the same time? Imagine getting the babies positioned and latched and feeding all at the same time, alone or even with help.

Even if Mom breastfeeds the babies one at a time, she faces the reality of always feeding a baby, non-stop, almost all day. This violates the idea of keeping your twin babies on the same schedule.

Breastfeeding is a physical and emotional burden, so I reiterate: only do this if your wife wants to.

My wife wanted to and it ended up not working so well with twins. They had trouble latching on and getting a good suck due to short frenulums. This made them frustrated and even more hungry. So we switched to bottlefeeding the twins.

Even if you as parents decide to breastfeed the twins, be flexible and remember it is OK to change your mind.

Bottlefeeding Option

If your wife wants to bottlefeed the twins, roll up your sleeves and prepare to get to work. You will become the master of making bottles with one hand while holding a baby with the other.

Save some money for formula ahead of your twins’ arrival (just in case), ask for it for baby gifts, and get some coupons and samples from your Pediatrician to help with the financial burden.

When we switched to bottle feeding, the first thing I noticed was that there was a lot of overhead in terms of preparing and cleaning. But it gave me a chance as a Dad to hold my twin daughters while I fed them. It does provide a great bonding moment for a Dad. (Yes, even in the middle of the night!)

With enough practice, you’ll be able to feed both twins simultaneously with bottles.

You Choose

Whatever your choice, be prepared to help and support your wife. If she carries the burden of breastfeeding, you need to be her assistant, helping her position babies, bringing burp clothes, making sure she has plenty to drink, etc., until everyone gets the hang of it.

If you choose to bottlefeed, you’ll both have your fair share of feeds both night and day.

Either way, take heart. The twins won’t need help eating forever! In just a few months, they will be feeding themselves.

You’ll keep your sanity with any infant if you can get your baby on a predictable schedule. This is even more true with twins.

Should you keep your twins on the same schedule? The answer is, “It depends.”

It depends on a few factors, but primarily comes down to the time of day and how many helpers you have.

I’m a big fan of The Baby Whisperers’ EASY steps. The “Y” in EASY is for “your time.” Once the baby [E]ats, has some [A]ctivity time, and goes to [S]leep, [Y]ou can relax a little.

We’ve found that getting the babies to sleep at the same time is the biggest factor in keeping them on the same schedule.

Nighttime Schedule

Caring for twins overnight is a handful, to say the least.

If you don’t have a 1:1 adult to baby ratio with twins at night, you’re going to run yourself into the ground very quickly. Stop right now and get help.

My wife and I found it worked best when one daughter woke up hungry, to wake the other daughter and feed her at the same time. This helped us avoid servicing one baby, getting her back to bed, with us crawling into bed just to be pulled back out to help the other baby. (Or trying to remember who’s turn it was to get up with which baby in the middle of sleepy stupor!)

Daytime Schedule

If it is just you (or your wife) taking care of the babies during the day then it might be to your advantage to have the twins on a slightly staggered schedule. This allows the caregiver to be able to feed and diaper one baby at a time. This will mean that there will be a little less time for you, and it may feel like you are on a never-ending cycle of feeding, changing, and napping babies all day long. But it is a little easier as you’re getting used to caring for two newborns.

If you’ve got a helper, keep the twins on the same schedule and do everything in tandem. As you grow in your caregiving skills and/or after help goes home, you may find that you’re able to keep the twins on pretty much the same schedule. It is possible to feed them at the same time or in rapid succession and get them down for naps at the same time.

Schedules Change

The older your twins get, the easier it will be to align their schedules. Just remember–about the time you get comfortable with your routine, something will change. Roll with it.