I recently read somewhere that when parents who have multiples come home from the hospital and feel like they have landed on another planet.  This made me laugh out loud and want to shout “amen to that”.  I knew it would be a different experience once my twins were home.  After 5 ½ years of it just being the two of us, I was prepared for a little change, but oh what a change it was.

Don’t get me wrong.  After our fertility journey and the wonderful news of our twins on the way, I was elated.  I was equally elated when they came home from the NICU and we were finally a family.  My husband and I learned to develop an awesome sense of humor about many things.  Like the first hour home when they started crying at the same time and we both said “oh, we are in trouble” at the same time and burst out laughing.

We learned quickly to prioritize things in our household.  By this I mean taking care of the basics and letting everything else wait.  The basics for babies are food, clothing, diapers and sleep with a little play/snuggle time thrown in the mix.  If they were fed, had on clean clothes, dry diapers and were either looking at a colorful toy, listening to us read or sleeping soundly then we had done our job for that time period.

By time period, I mean every 3-4 hours when the feeding cycle would start all over again.  Our days were broken down by these time periods and the only thing we had to accomplish during that time period was to ensure that all the basics were met.  If all those things were taken care of, then our job was done.

Everything else was secondary.  After food, clothing, diapers, sleep and play/snuggle time we were able to discern what needed done next.  This usually consisted of food and a nap for us and either putting a load of laundry in the washer or switching it over to the dryer.  Or one of us might make a quick trip to the grocery store while the other one did double baby duty.  Baths for babies and the two of us fell somewhere among that mix.

We also learned to let a lot of things go or wait until absolutely necessary.  We learned that a little dust on the TV or on the hard wood floor was ok and that it would definitely wait there until we were able to get to it.  Magazine subscriptions were let go for that first year to avoid the anxiety of having them pile up in the magazine rack, begging to be read.

Gone were the days of handmade baby quilts for shower gifts and the store registry became my friend when shopping for friends who were expecting.  Scrapbooking is still a sweet memory for me, but I’ve learned to jot down 2-3 sentences in a notebook when I take pictures so that someday when I get to it I will know why I took the picture of both of them sitting on top of the end table or feeding each other chips at the table for the 1st time.  The boat didn’t get de-winterized that first summer after they were born and it ran fine the next year.

Me, the gal that likes all her ducks in a row, learned to let things go.  It wasn’t easy, but it was necessary for my sanity and necessary for me to keep my focus where it needed to be: on taking care of my sweet, little babies.

Even now, two years later, I still have learned to prioritize things and let some things go.  If the choice is reading books with my children sitting on my lap or having them play off by themselves while I dust the house, I opt for the books every time.  It isn’t just a cop out for not cleaning…honest!  It is the fact that in another three years they will be in school and I will have all the time in the world to clean.

Three years from now it won’t matter how clean my floors were, how dust free the TV set was or whether or not ALL of their toys made it back in the toy bins every night.  What matters now and will still matter then is that I made sure that all their basic needs were met, that I learned to prioritize what was most important for their lives and ours and that everything else could wait until we were able to eventually get to it.  If all this was done, then our mission was accomplished here on Planet Multiples.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 3:00 am 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.