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When you find out you're pregnant and expecting a baby, one of the first things you might think about is how sleep-deprived you might soon be. When you find out you're actually having twins and will be bringing two babies home, that concern compounds.
While you're going to be tired no matter what, there are things you can do to help make your sleepy set-up more efficient, so that you can gain even a few more minutes of sleep during each cycle of wake-play-sleep, which, as silly as it sounds, can make a huge difference in your demeanor.
If you're planning on breastfeeding your babies, their food source is always nearby and ready to go, but if you're planning on expressing milk or doing formula feeds, it takes time to get bottles ready. Something that can save you time is having a feeding station set-up right by your babies' sleep area.
During the newborn stage
When you're getting ready to bring newborn babies home, one of the things that's top-of-mind for parents is ensuring their little ones have a safe sleep.
What that safe sleep space looks like can differ from family to family. Some have a separate bassinet for each twin at first. Others like the idea of having a double bassinet made specifically for twins, like the Joovy Room2 Playard.
Deciding on the right bassinet set-up for your twins can be a tough decision AND a big investment. The Joovy Room2 Playard paired with Joovy's Twin Nursery Center Bassinet, which is sold separately, was a homerun in our household.
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Joovy Twin Nursery Center Bassinet
A Double Bassinet Accessory for Your Playard
This is the Joovy Twin Nursery Center Bassinet. Add it to Joovy's Room2 Playard, and you'll have the perfect bassinet set-up for your twins.
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Joovy Room2 Playard
Extra Space for Your Extra Baby
This is the Joovy Room2 Playard. Combine this with Joovy's Twin Nursery Center Bassinet Playpen (sold separately) for the ultimate bassinet set-up for your newborn twins.
Not only does this bassinet set-up give your babies each a safe space for sleeping side by side, it also allows your twins to sleep within arm's reach of one another, so parents can do overnight feeds with ease and without waking anybody up for back-up.
Set things up so you have a full feeding station by the bassinet for overnight feeds. That way, you're not hurrying downstairs to grab things when it's time for a feed. When you hear your babies stirring ahead of their overnight feeds, you can roll out of bed and everything you need will be within reach.
If you're doing formula feeds, you can premeasure the amount of water in each bottle before you go to sleep, so that all you have to do is add a scoop of formula and mix things up when it's go-time.
And having your babies in a double bassinet, so they're side by side, allows you to make a bottle for one baby while holding the other baby's bottle in place for their dream feed.
If your babies are at the point where they go through more than one bottle in a feed and need a top-up before going back to sleep, you can measure out their first feed, as mentioned earlier, and then you can also pre-measure their top-up amounts of water in second bottles for each of them.
That way, the secondary bottle of water can just be poured right into the feed bottles when it's time. Again, all you'd need to do is add the scoop of formula, and you're good to go.
Once they're in their nursery
The day our twins outgrew their double bassinet was a sad one, but it led to bigger and better things—their own cribs, sleep training, and spectacular stretches of uninterrupted, quality sleep that we hadn't seen in months.
Having the right set-up in your nursery can play a role in how successful your sleep sessions and overnight feeds will be.
Aside from continuing to have a feeding station with everything you need nearby (we set up our station right outside of their bedroom door, you'll want to think about how you want your twins' cribs to be placed when you set up the sleep environment in their nursery.
When we dropped overnight feeds (you can read about how we weaned our twins off of overnight feeds, here), I was glad we had set up our babies' cribs on opposite walls, so we could keep them in the same room during sleep training.
When we were still doing overnight bottle feeds, I do remember thinking we should have set the cribs up to be within arm's reach of each other so one person could reach to hold a bottle for each at the same time, but I'm happy we ultimatley went with a set-up where their cribs aren't within reach of each other.
While having their cribs on opposite walls no longer had them within arm's reach for overnight feeds, they were older and could be set up with their bottle while the second baby's bottle was being mixed.
Having the cribs further away from each other was also key in keeping our twins more than an arm's length away from each other, so they they couldn't grab at each other in the night.
While it would have been cute if they were able to reach and interact with each other, I'm pretty sure they would have constantly been poking each other in the eyes, biting each other's fingers, or tapping each other and laughing about it instead of getting drowsy and falling asleep, so it was better for us to have them not be able to reach each other from their cribs.
Having them a bit further away also helped them sleep right though any wake-ups their twin might have had overnight.
There are a lot of different cribs to choose from. We went with the Graco Solano 4-in-1 Convertible Crib, which has a built-in drawer underneath that is handy for seasonal clothes and bedding.
My sister, who also has twins, loved this crib for her babies, too, because this crib grows with your babies as they transition from newborns to toddlers. The crib is designed so the front panel can be removed and replaced with smaller safety guardrails, so it can grow with your babies as they transition from newborns to toddlers.
In addition to our crib set-up in their nursery, we also made sure to find a huge, comfy chair (a chair-and-a-half, actually) that would fit in their nursery without completely taking over the space, so that we could do bedtime stories, snuggles, or feeds in it if they were awake.
Set up for success
Having a feeding station set-up right by your babies' sleep area can be a game-changer. While it's a small thing to incorporate, having fewer steps when it's time to feed your babies makes things monumentally easier.
In our case, it not only stopped the twins from waking each other up when they got hungry because we were able to get their bottles ready in seconds instead of minutes, it also helped whichever parent wasn't on baby duty to hopefully sleep uninterrupted during those overnight feed sessions.
What did you do to make overnight feeds easier with your twins? Let us know in the Comments section below or connect with us on Instagram to share your thoughts!
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