How To Bottle Feed Twins
The recommendation for bottle feeding is that each bottle should be made freshly for each feed. However, this is not practical with Twins. You can expect to feed on average 6-8 bottles per baby when your twins are newborn.
You will need a large steriliser and a good supply of bottles. The sterliser will be on constantly and it makes more sense to make batches of bottles and keep them in the fridge; they are never sat there too long in any event. A batch of 6 bottles is only 3 feeds which may only cover a 6 hour period in any event depending how frequently your babies feed at first.
The other recommendation is not to heat bottles in the microwave. Once again, waiting for bottles to warm using a bottle warmer is time intensive when you have twins and both babies are crying for their milk. You can heat bottles in a microwave if you exercise plenty of care to ensure that they don’t overheat or get hot spots. It’s a question of personal responsibility.
There is another alternative to small bottle heaters called the Beaba Bib Expresso Feeding Bottle Warmer. It heats baby milk in just 30 seconds which could be very useful for parents of twins. The idea is you make the feed by pouring the water in to the top of the machine which heats to 37°C in just 30 seconds. You pour the formula straight into your ready sterlised bottle and place bottle on machine to dispense the water resulting in one complete feed ready to go. Of course, you need to do this twice. It can be used for reheating bottles, food jars and breast milk and even has a microwave steriliser and bottle storage compartment.
The biggest problem with feeding twins single handedly is not the making and preparing of the bottles (although this is time consuming) it is actually feeding the babies at the same time. More often than not I was alone with my Twins so I had to find creative ways to feed them both at the same time. I have heard stories of parents feeding them one at a time but there is no way on earth that would have worked with my Twins. I would not have been able to choose who went first or listen to the other one cry during the process. It would have made a normal challenging Twin feeding time into a completely miserable one.
How To Bottle Feed Twins At The Same Time
Often I would use their car seats to feed them in. This way I could sit on the floor in between each of them and hold a bottle in each hand. If we were upstairs I would create a pillow prop on the bed and once again sit in between them holding both bottles in. It was difficult when one baby finished their feed or stopped in the middle due to wind and often I propped the bottle up with a small pillow so one baby could continue to guzzle while the other one could be picked up and winded.
There are two things that I will say about Twins and Bottle Feeding. Firstly, they learned to hold a bottle/beaker very early on out of sheer necessity and secondly enjoy the feeding times where you can sit and feed one baby comfortably in your chair whilst your twin feeding helper of the moment feeds your other Twin!
There is a great product on the market at the moment called the Bloom Fresco High Chair. It can be used from birth through to school age. Although an initially expensive item particularly when you need two, they would provide a fairly comfortable option for bottle feeding twins at the same time. Twin Mum could sit on a chair in between or in front of two babies positioned in the cradle option of the Bloom Fresco High Chair and feed them both quite comfortably.
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