Well, You Asked...

So my sister emailed Mama Bear and I recently on behalf of one of her friends who is going to be having twins. Since we lived the chaos of twins, her friend wanted to pick our collective brains about what to expect, what was needed and all that fun stuff. So, here was my response (some names were changed to protect the innocent). Let me know if it was too much. My sister thinks it was over the top. But I can tell you it's all the truth.

Dear...

The first 2 -2 1/2 years are absolute hell. I'm not just saying that to scare you -- I mean it!!!

Think about what it's like to have have one baby and now times that by two. It starts with lack of sleep, piles and piles of dirty diapers, endless amounts of bottles, creative ways to feed two babies at once (utilize the boppy), and countless trips to the doctors office (who, by the way, if he was ever on time it would be a sign of the apocalypse).

And that's the easy part!

Just when that ends, they turn into toddlers!!! Avoid this at all costs!!! Once they learn to walk, your days of leaving the house are over. Avoid teaching them to walk until they are at least 30.

One goes up the aisles, the other goes down the aisles. You now have to decide who you are going to grab first. Some argue this is life's first lesson in teaching them who you love more. Usually it's the one nearest to the sharper items (at least it was in my case). But once you get him, don't just put in him the stroller, DUCT TAPE HIM TO THE SEAT!!! Trust me when I say he will find a way out when you turn to get the other child.

Then, this one touches this, that one touches that. "No" become the word you say the most. There was one point when someone asked me if we were Japanese, because I was in the store saying "Junior No! Peanut No!" the person thought our last name was "No."

When you leave the store, you learn that your children just broke their first law and you became an accomplice to a crime, as they have that cute little toy you walked passed hidden in their stroller. You know, the toy you said he couldn't have, took from him and put back on the shelf. Well, somehow he got it back. How? I still don't know, but he did.

When you get home and want to relax, you plop in a movie. You shut your eyes for just a minute only to open them to the toy hammer being slammed on your head.

Before you know it, you're in your own house looking for your son. You go upstairs, downstairs, in the bathroom, in your room, check under beds, behind couches and then you happen to look out the window and notice he's half way up the block walking to the playground. You go to get him and when you get inside, the other one has the phone in her hand. You grab it from her and hang it up. As you are in the middle of screaming at them, the police show up at your front door. Apparently she called 911 by accident when you ran outside.

After you convince the nice officer you are a sane individual, the day is over and as you lay in bed you realize you have to do it all again tomorrow.

Only one thought got me through this. I knew one day they would have to change my diapers -- and that is going to be my ultimate revenge.

Seriously, though, congrats on having twins!!!

Papa Bear

Sleep Part 2: Sleep Safety

Last week I wrote about how sleep deprivation can take its toll on parents. This week I’m going to touch on how sleep can actually be dangerous – that’s right dangerous!

You might think I’m crazy. How can sleep be dangerous?

Well ladies and gentlemen, allow me to explain.

It all started simple enough. You’ll remember the end of my last post mentioned that the kids, especially Peanut Bear, woke me up in the morning by sticking her little fingers in my eyes, mouth, ears and nose (that’s right, I said nose), and take my word for it things quickly escalate.

By now you know I worked mostly nights and operated on very little sleep (sometimes just a few hours) when the kids were younger. As a result, I usually found myself dozing off, mostly during the daily dose of Baby Einstein.

I figured I would place the kids in the Boppy, put the gate in the doorway of the room, pop in a Baby Einstein and lay next to them on the floor. Well, I quickly learned that I needed to do one more thing before lying down -- and I learned that the hard way.

One day I went through these steps and before I knew it my eyes were closed. It was a light sleep as I could still hear the TV, but that was about it. The kids were just starting to crawl and that’s why I put the gate up (safety first is what I always say). It was shortly after my eyes closed that I was awoken by Peanut Bear hitting me in the face with a toy!

I don’t remember what the toy was, probably because she gave me a concussion, but I do remember telling myself to never complain about an alarm clock again. I mean, have you ever been awoken by toy hitting you in the face?! Trust me when I say it’s not pleasant.

Then there were the times Mama Bear insisted on having Peanut Bear sleep with us at night (you’ll find most sleeping stories that end with a Papa Bear injury have to do with Peanut Bear).

It seemed harmless enough. I mean, how much damage can a 1-year-old do when asleep?

Well, ask my nose.

See, Peanut Bear had this habit of violently swinging her arms outward when asleep, and it seemed that my nose was always at the end of that swing. I can’t tell you how many times I was smacked in the face over the course of a night. I started sleeping with a pillow over my head just for safety.

You’d think that Papa Bear’s Little Girl would threat him a little better, even if it was in her sleep. But I have to admit, it wasn’t Peanut Bear who put the biggest hurt on Papa Bear.

One night Junior Bear, who was about 2-years-old at the time, got a treat and slept in our bed. Junior Bear, though, doesn’t like sleeping under covers for whatever reason and he does move around a lot (which is an understatement) and this led to one of the worst experiences in my entire life.

At one point, Junior Bear – my offspring, the boy who will one day carry on the proud Papa Bear name, the boy whose dirty diaper I used to change changed – lifted his leg and kicked me in the privates!!!

I woke up in such pain, screaming at the top of my lungs. It gave a whole new meaning to a starry night.

Mama Bear couldn’t believe what happened. She, of course, got a good laugh at my expense. But this leads me to wonder why she never gets this treatment from the children?

Sleep Part I: Learning to Operate Tired

I once had a boss who said only one thing to me that turned out to be right – and it had nothing to do with work. He told me when I announced that my wife was pregnant, “You will now learn how to live just about the rest of your life tired.”

Boy, was he ever right.

Now, I could go on a completely different tangent on that boss and how wrong he was so many other times, but that’s a story for a different blog. So, for the sake of the PBM we’ll focus on this one thing he said to me that actually made sense.

I, like many first time parents, learned very quickly how different life is with kids and how tired you quickly become. The first night we brought the twins (Junior Bear and Peanut Bear) home from the hospital, my wife and I stayed up all night just starring at them as they slept. We were so paranoid that something bad would happen that we just sat on the edge of the bed and looked at them.

So, from that night nearly six years ago, I have been playing catch-up in the sleep department.

After we realized nothing would happen to them if we fell asleep, I can remember that we set our alarm clock for every three hours to feed them. The docs at the hospital told us the kids needed to have a bottle that often, so we carried that schedule into the wee hours of the morning. Also, since we had twins we also wanted to keep them on the same feeding and sleeping schedule, otherwise we might’ve been feeding and staying up around the clock.

Then, as the kids began sleeping a little longer and required only one overnight feeding, that’s when things really became interesting (for me at least). Since I was home during the day, I took many of the overnight feedings to allow Mama Bear the consecutive hours of sleep leading into work.

At this point, let me add that we formula fed the kids. We heard all the stories and got all the pressure from the nurses at the hospital on breast feeding, but with twins and a working mom, it just wasn’t going to work.

Here is my contractually required tangent…

Honestly, though, is everyone who is pro-breast feeding part of some kind of cult? I can’t tell you the pressure we felt from the nurses at the hospital. It honestly got to the point when I had to kick the nurse out of the room because she was making us very uncomfortable. I repeat, I kicked a nurse out of our hospital room!!! True story: At one point she told us our kids wouldn’t be smart if Mama Bear didn’t breast feed. Really?! Seriously?!

Trust me, for how much formula costs and how much we went through the first year, I would have much rather Mama Bear breast fed (if memory serves correct we spent around $3,000 in formula alone the first year), but breast feeding just wasn’t realistic with our situation.

Anyway, where was I?… Oh yeah, lack of sleep and overnight feedings.

As I said earlier the big theme of the first year with twins is keeping them on the same schedule. Same schedule and life is easy (relatively speaking), different eating and napping schedules and life is miserable.

So once we realized we could wait for Peanut Bear and Junior Bear to wake up to feed them, I would feed the kid who woke up first, then wake up the other (if they didn’t wake up on their own) to feed him or her, just to keep them on the, that’s right, same schedule. However, I realized that this wasn’t the best way to waste an hour of my life at 3 am. So, I had to come up with a different plan and that’s when the boppy became my best friend.

I would take both kids to the couch, put one kid in the boppy on my lap with the head on my right thigh to feed with my left hand, and the other kid on the boppy on the couch directly next to my right thigh with her head closer to me and fed with right hand.

The only downside -- I became such a pro at this set up I often fell asleep in the middle of the feeding. And since I rarely noted what time it was when I got up to begin the feeding, I had no idea how long I was asleep. I guess it really didn’t matter, but it was very frustrating when I put the kids back into bed only to have them get up an hour later hungry again.

Then there were the feedings at 6 am-ish. Mama Bear would more times than not take these feedings. She was up already getting ready for work and she would knock out the feedings to help out.

Now, don’t get me wrong, this was a big help, but there was a big down side – Papa Bear wasn’t ready to get up yet and the kids often were. At first this wasn’t a huge problem, but as the kids got older and I started working until 1 am every night, it really became a problem for Papa Bear.

Mama Bear would put the kids in bed with me and turn on TV so they could watch whatever was on PBS or Disney Channel or Noggin while I slowly got going. It was great when the kids fell right back to sleep, but when they were really ready to get up, I paid the price.

Often times, Peanut Bear, more so than Junior Bear, would find my face absolutely fascinating. While I was trying to sleep, she would put her little fingers in my ears, eyes, mouth and nose (that’s right, my nose).

Does anyone have any idea how annoying it is to have someone else stick their fingers in your face, especially when you’re asleep? It was so annoying for the seriously sleep deprived Papa Bear.

Now that the kids are older, it’s nice to be sleeping through the night…well kind of. Next week, in Part 2 of this series I’ll talk about how sleeping can be considered a contact sport -- in our house at least.

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