Four Things I’ve Learned in Two Years as a Twin Mom.

Today is Labor Day and it’s officially the last day of summer. But for me, it’s more than just the end of a season. It’s the end of an era.

Tomorrow, my twins will start full-time daycare after being home for the first two years of their lives. I’ve been their primary caregiver, but thankfully, I’ve also had help from part-time nannies and my mom, aka Nana.

Two days later, my oldest starts kindergarten.

And the day after that, for the first time in 104 consecutive Fridays, I won’t be wearing my stay-at-home mom hat. Instead, I’ll be working in a quiet house.

To say it’s a big week of transitions would be an understatement.

I feel relieved, I feel grateful, I feel depleted, I feel excited, I feel reflective…

Here are four things I’ve learned in the last two years as a twin mom, mom of three, working mom and business owner.

1. Crying is okay.

I remember that “deer in the headlights” feeling I had the first time I was home alone with two inconsolable newborns. No matter what I did, it wasn’t enough, because there were two of them and only one of me. If I picked one up, they would stop crying but then the other would cry harder. Sometimes all I could do was set them on their Twin-Z pillow, sit right there in front of them, and ride it out.

It was the start of me realizing that I wouldn’t always be able to stop the crying, at least not right away, and that was okay. But I could make sure they knew I was there. And sometimes that had to be enough.

Other times, I was able to send an “SOS” text to my mom or my neighbor, and with two of us, we could make the crying stop sooner.

Eventually, as they got stronger and were able to hold their heads up, I learned how to pick them up and hold them at the same time.

Now, as toddlers, if one of them is crying for me, but I’m occupied doing something for one of their siblings (or maybe even myself), it doesn’t feel like a fire that needs to be put out immediately.

“Mommy hears you, mommy is coming”.

That’s not to say I don’t get incredibly overstimulated at times. I do. And it’s not to say that my kids are constantly crying because I’m some sort of unfeeling monster. They’re not.

But as any parent knows, things can go from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds. And these moments of peak intensity tend to sprinkle themselves throughout each day.

They are always cared for and responded to. But sometimes they must wait until I can get to them - and that’s okay. They are more resilient and adaptable for it.

Not only is that a convenient theory for moms of multiple children, but I believe it to be true.

Knowing this about them makes me far less nervous about how they’ll do at daycare tomorrow, when they are with 8 other kids of various ages, and only one caregiver.

Crying is communication. It’s not an emergency (or at least, it very rarely is).

2. I can’t do it all (and therefore I shouldn’t feel guilty asking for help).

In the first six months or so of my sleep consulting business, I felt extremely guilty for having a part-time nanny. I wasn’t bringing in a full-time income yet, so I was constantly at war with myself.

I should be able to get everything done while they sleep, so many other moms run their business that way.

Who do you think you are?

But the thing is, I wasn’t trying to have only a part-time business. I’d gone and quit my full-time job! And I needed to replace all of that income ASAP. That meant putting in a lot of work early on, even when my efforts weren’t immediately matched with more income.

Setting up my website and back-office systems, creating content, showing up on social media, making connections, creating templates for my sleep plans. Even sleep consulting itself took up a lot more time in the beginning when I had less experience.

I spent far more time doing research, consulting with mentors and colleagues, and double checking my notes from training before writing a sleep plan or responding to a client question.

Now, with over 250 clients under my belt, I feel very confident in my base of knowledge.

It’s also helped that my twins have grown from newborns to two-year-olds at the same time as I’ve been working with so many families. Experiencing every age again (times two) from the lens of a sleep consultant, makes it so much easier when clients come to me at various ages and stages.

But I wouldn’t have gotten to this point, this quickly, if I hadn’t had part-time help all along.  And now part-time help just isn’t enough. But even before I reached that point, I stopped feeling guilty for hiring a part of my “village”.

There is a direct correlation between the amount of help I have and my personal well-being.

Over the past two years, the amount of childcare help I’ve had has fluctuated from as little to 10 hours per week to more than 25 hours. The correlation is undeniable. I’m happier with more help.

There’s so much noise about always being “fully present” with your kids. But honestly, as a working mother, I have to call BS.

If you are trying to do full-time work with only part-time help, you’re probably only going to be able to be present with your kids part of the time. And the other part of the time? You might be a bit distracted, or you’ll be distracting them (maybe with screen time) so that you can do what needs to be done.

And that doesn’t make you a bad mom. It just means you’re not superwoman.

For this reason, I am fully celebrating this next chapter of full-time childcare with zero guilt. It will allow me the time I truly need to work not just in my business, but on my business, while also allowing me to close my laptop at the end of each workday and be fully present mom.

Will it still take discipline and boundaries? Of course. Will I always do it perfectly. Doubtful.

But it finally feels like I’m being asked to do what’s possible, not what’s impossible.

Stop holding yourself to impossible standards. Your kids don’t.

3. Every child is unique. No, seriously.

I always wondered if my oldest really was a “bad sleeper” or if I was just an inexperienced mom that had no clue how to set him or myself up for success in that area of parenting.

Having two babies at once is all the proof I needed that it’s not nature or nurture, it’s both.

I believe that every child can learn to sleep well, but some really are naturally better sleeper, meaning they have less learning to do.

Also, I no longer have the terms “good sleeper” or “bad sleeper” in my vocabulary. Instead, I use the term “sensitive sleeper” to describe a child who doesn’t sleep well.

Some babies really are more sensitive than others when it comes to sleep. These babies will require more from us as parents, whether that be sticking more strictly to a schedule, modifying their sleep environment, or adjusting their routines to support better sleep.

Frankie has always been a more solid sleeper. She’s the kind of baby that, if she’d been an only child, I wouldn’t have really understood the need for sleep consultants.

Her twin, Cole, started out as a far more sensitive sleeper. But over the course of two years, there’s far less contrast between them when it comes to sleep (still plenty of contrast in their personalities!)

This is how I know that with consistency, you can absolutely mold your child into a better sleeper!

Through experiencing the true uniqueness of two babies simultaneously, I’ve been able to forgive my “new mom” self. Yes, I was inexperienced. What new mom isn’t? I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But I also had a challenging baby!

I did the best I could with what I knew at the time, and most importantly, I asked for help when he was only 5 ½ months old. For that, I am proud of my first-time mom self.

The next time that God gave me a sensitive sleeper, I had the knowledge and confidence I needed to be able to handle him!

4. It gets easier then harder and then easier… (the ebb and flow never ends).

At this same time last year, my twins had just turned one, and I was really thriving. In recent months, I’ve missed that version of twin-mom-me. I was making it look easy! Because for a while, it was “easy” (relatively speaking).

The newborn stage was obviously hard with the round-the-clock feedings and a 4-year-old big brother who was adjusting to a lot of change. Heck, as parents we were adjusting to a lot of change. Going from one to three kids over night is no joke.

The older baby stage (6ish-14ish) months was a real sweet spot in my twin parenting journey. I credit a lot of that to the good sleep foundations I laid from day one.

But sometime between the ages of one and two, things got hard again. They were both walking, and constant dangers to themselves. They went through the 2-1 nap transition at different times, messing with the predictable and synchronized 2-nap rhythm I’d grown so accustomed to. They began asserting their independence more. The whining, the biting, the power struggles.

My patience has run out more times than I’d like to admit.

I continually remind myself that this isn’t supposed to be easy.

No one ever said, and I never thought, that having twin toddlers (plus a six-year-old) would be easy.

Just acknowledging that it’s hard and that it’s supposed to be hard, helps some days. Other days I feel resentful of people who, from my perspective, have so much more ease in their lives (knowing that we all experience our own struggles that no one else knows about).

I know I will thrive again. I’m really hoping that this next chapter of full-time daycare and school will give me that chance. The chance to lose the emotional and the physical weight of the last two years (unfortunately for me, I gain weight when I’m under extreme stress).

I also know it will get hard again. Because that is life. It ebbs and flows.

It’s more about learning to enjoy the phases of relative “ease” because they never last forever.

But neither do the hard times. They either grow out of it or I grow from it, and things get better.

And that’s what we’re constantly doing, both my kids and me. Learning and growing.