When having twins you get a lot of negative comments one such comment was: “You’ll be bottle feeding then.” Well actually there is no reason why you can’t totally breastfeed 2 babies at the same time and I have known twin mothers who have achieved this. However, for me when I tried this I found it fiddly and very tiring; after a couple of days I introduced the formula feeds. The easiest way to do this was to use ‘Tommee Tippee, closer to nature’bottles. One of my twins would be breast-fed whilst the other had a bottle of formula milk. At the next feed they would swap. Every day they were having 8 or 9 feeds a day, 4 would be formula and 4 would be breast milk.
You may wonder why mixed feeding is a good idea, well the main benefit of mixed feeding is no longer being tired, breast feeding uses a lot of calories and takes a lot of your energy so being able to have a break now and again would mean I could recharge my batteries which was a massive bonus. Secondly, I could have help with the feeding routine, my friends, family and husband could do the bottle feed whilst I breast fed the other. On a practical level it worked well but also from an emotional level also. It’s hard as a twin mummy to find time to spend quality time with each child individually and this short window of feed time would mean I would get that one-to-one with each child as I alternated their feeds. Also I knew that I was doing the best thing for my babies whilst keeping my sanity at the same time! Of course the main benefits for the babies is that they got the goodness and immunity from the breast milk and it was topped up by the formula.
I know breastfeeding specialists would tell us this creates a problem with babies latching on to breast feed, in all honestly my babies never had a problem with this and had mastered both techniques equally as well and thrived brilliantly. Professional advice is very good and should be listened to but in my opinion nothing should intervene with Mothers instincts!
