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| Enjoying rare one-on-one time with Leens |
At 3:39a.m. last night, I lay on the bed in the bedroom nursing Carmen. Most nights, one baby will wake up hungry first and I'll feed her, burp her, then wake up the next baby and do the same. I quickly learned that when I feed one I have to feed the other, even if it means waking them up. Often, in the beginning, I would let the second baby sleep thinking "I wonder how long she'll go if I just let her sleep". Always a bad idea - the second baby is up shortly after and I'm waking up twice as often.
So there I lay, feeding Carmy quietly in the dark, when suddenly Lena begins to stir. Waaaaaa! She's awake and hungry. This is the One Thing About Two; I've learned to tune out my babies cries in situations where I just cannot meet their needs due to the oneness of me and the twoness of them. For a long time I felt inadequate as a mother in these situations. I want to give both of my children what they need when they need it, but quite often I cannot. Especially when they were newborns as newborns have no patience. When newborns are hungry (which seems like all the time), they get very worked up about it if they are not fed immediately.
I quickly learned that in a situation such as this (when I am nursing one baby and the other is crying), there is simply nothing I can do. The second baby will have to wait. Instead of stressing out, worrying about them, becoming pre-occupied with meeting the second babies needs, I tune out their cries. I know they are safe and their needs will be met shortly, but in the meantime they will have to wait. I try my best to enjoy the current moment with the first baby, as I do not want to rob them of this time with mommy just because their sister is waiting in line. For far too long I would become preoccupied with the second baby crying and try to rush through what I was doing with the first baby, but I realized that when I do that, we all lose.
When I just try my best to ignore the cries of the second baby, I focus on the first baby and our moment together. The first baby has the luxury of relaxed time with me (the crying of her sister never seems to faze her!), enjoys her long nursing session and is thoroughly burped and put back to bed. The second baby always looses no matter how you slice it, but at least once the first one is properly dealt with, the second one gets my full attention.
One thing about two is that all of us need twice as much patience.
5 comments:
I should mention that I've tried tandem breastfeeding and due to a few different complications decided it doesn't work for us. Besides, I love the one-on-one bonding time I get with each girl as I nurse them individually.
You are an amazing woman & mom Loranda, and your babies are going to grow up into such beautiful girls! :)
... and an amazing writer. And an amazing cook
I have done tandem from the beginning because feeding them separately simply takes too much time! What I found tricky though was putting them both down in their cribs after they had already fallen asleep at the breast. Its kind of hard when you're alone to move two babies at the same time without waking them! Practice makes perfect though and now it seems easy!
The nice thing about letting one scream while you feed the other is that they learn to be patient and they learn to share, because they've had to master both out of necessity. I remember agonizing over this at first, but you get used to tuning out the screams. Another up side is that they tune them out too, and now my girls will sleep through anything! One of them can wake up screaming and it'll wake me up down the hall, but when I go in to their room, the other is still fast asleep. We can watch movies at full volume or listen to music and they sleep right through it. The more noise they get used to now the better. There are actually a lot of ways in which having twins is easier than having a singleton, other than the ways in which it's way, way harder. :)
Love reading your blog, Loranda! I look forward to each post :)
Jenny
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