When parents of newborns get home from the hospital, they can tell you all about how tired they are and how they had trouble remembering if their baby’s last feeding was at 3:00 am or 4:00 am and whether or not there were 8 wet diapers and 2 messy diapers or 7 wet diapers and 3 messy diapers.  When you start multiplying that all by two, three, four or more, you can begin to imagine how hard it to keep track of schedules when your life is filled with multiples.

After my twins were born, I was visited in the hospital room by a parent from the local parents of multiples club.  She gave me a lot of good reading materials, tips and a chart to use to keep track of my children’s feeding, sleeping and diaper schedule.  Up until that point, it had only vaguely crossed my mind that I would need to keep track of some of those things in the back of my mind.  Before the twins, I had a mind like a steel trap.  After a few nights of sleep deprivation, my steel trap eroded and remembering whether or not I had eaten or brushed my teeth was a difficult task.

My twins spent their first month in the NICU where nurses and doctors kept track of all of their daily goings on, from feedings to diaper changes and everything in between. Once I got home it was all up to me. I was thankful for the chart that I was given in the hospital and I had my husband make lots and lots of copies of it.  I didn’t follow it religiously or live by the chart, but it came in handy when I had to feed them every three hours around the clock for the first two months to help them gain weight.

In the beginning I didn’t have them on the same schedule and I was trying to teach them how to breast feed, while supplementing with a bottle and pumping in between.  So my life was like this: attempt to breast feed then give bottle to baby one, attempt to breast feed then give bottle to baby two and then pump for 20 minutes.  When that was all done I would have about 30-45 minutes before starting all over again.  If you do the math, you can see that I had very little sleep during those two months because I also had to eat and take a shower and maybe have a little time to talk to my husband.

The chart became essential because I couldn’t remember what time I did the last feeding and which one I started first on that go round.  Plus, when I went to the doctor’s office they always wanted to know how much each of them was drinking.  I didn’t have to try to keep track of ounces for two babies.  I just wrote the ounces down on the paper and had my husband add it up for me throughout the week.

I didn’t stress as much about the diapers as the feedings because I knew that they were both going on a regular basis, but if you have triplets or higher order multiples, keeping track of the diapers is harder and the chart comes in more handy for that as well.

One way to simplify your life when your multiples come home is to post the chart in an easy to get to place such as the nursery or the refrigerator door.  It only takes a couple of seconds to write down a time and the number of ounces drank or whether or not they had a dirty diaper.  If your steel trap erodes like mine did, you will be thankful for all the help you can get.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 9th, 2006 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Multiples. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.