quick clicks

twins today articles

twins today q&a

community & groups

research baby names

prepare a birth plan

content channels

ip channel rss feeds

read birth stories

read parenting stories

recommended books

e-newsletters

safety recalls

ip diaries

ip store

mom of the month

dad of the month

editor's letter

letters to the editor

Preparing for Twins

A Dad of Multiples Shares His Advice on the Early Days of Fatherhood

By George Ayres

One morning after disappearing into the bathroom for exactly three minutes, my wife hopped into the kitchen pointing at her home pregnancy test. There it was – the color we had been hoping for – the thin blue line telling us our lives would never be the same again.

But it wasn't until a few weeks later when our doctor saw two heartbeats on the sonogram screen that we began to realize just what kind of event we were in for. That moment took us by surprise, and it was not until the shock wore off that we realized we would soon have twice as much to celebrate.

To say I was nervous was the understatement of the year. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't picture myself as the father of two babies. I had no clue how to prepare for such a life-altering event. I didn't know how to hold a baby, what to feed them, and I knew absolutely nothing about changing a diaper. People would ask me what I thought about the big news. With hopeful anticipation, my answer was always something like "overwhelmed" or "inundated" or "staggering."

The first thing my wife and I did was start reading. We read everything we could find on twins. Our stack of baby books grew upward from the floor almost as fast as my wife's stomach grew outward. With the abundance of multiple pregnancies, books as well as the Internet provide vast amounts of information on twins.

We talked to as many parents of twins as we could, asking all the pertinent questions, and as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months, we tried to imagine ourselves in their places, knowing deep down that we were in for the most tiring, yet exhilarating, time of our lives.

Early on I learned that the more I became

Want to see more?

• Early Arrivals: Our Experiences With Premature Twins
• Two at Once: Becoming a Parent of Twins
• Separation Anxiety: A Dad Reflects on Choosing Separate Classrooms for His Twins
• Talk about it!