Double Trouble: Twins and How to Survive Them. Emma Mahony

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СКАЧАТЬ her to walk around the house with it strapped on like an ocean-going liner. Poor husband. The V-shaped cushion always comes out as a best buy for twin mothers because it allows you to breastfeed both babies at the same time (the double football hold), no-handed. Even if you bottle-feed, you can prop up both babies facing each other while you hold the bottles. Oh, what versatility! As well as being on sale at WI meetings for oldies who like to read in bed, it is also found at John Lewis stores and catalogues such as Perfectly Happy People (see above).

      The baby change station

      If you only had one baby, you might get away with not having to invest in a baby change station (the cheapest being a canvas and metal foldaway number costing around £30 in IKEA). However, if you don’t invest in one with twins, you would spend triple the cost at the osteopath after 100 nappy changes in the first week alone. If you can possibly afford it, buying one for upstairs and one for downstairs will also see you through the blizzard of nappies in the first few months.

      Bath safety seats

      Bathing twins in the early days is a two-person job unless you invest in bath seats. I bought two from Cheeky Rascals (£12.95 mail-order: 01428 682488) and I credit the purchase with helping my twins love water. The seat, which has recently won Parenting magazine Best Buy, is made of moulded plastic and props the baby in a semi-upright position. The baby is supported under the arms and legs, which are free to flail about, but cannot slip downwards. Once the twins get used to the water (my little girl used to scream when first immersed for about a week), they can splash around to their hearts’ content. In the early days, this means you could down a whole cup of tea. Well worth every penny.

      The real nappy issue

      You may be wondering at this stage what on earth makes one nappy brand better than another (the answer is whichever has a freebie of some wipes attached to them). Or you may be thinking that you’d like to do your bit for the environment and use real nappies. Whatever your view, you are entering a fiercely competitive world where the big brands like Pampers will be vying for your loyalty along with the little local nappy laundering services. Whatever you decide, remember that you will only have time to research the options before the babies are born. After that, it will be whatever the local store has in stock.

      Biodegradable disposables

      There is only one brand of disposable nappy that is biodegradable, and it is called Nature’s Boy and Girl. They are unisex (useful for boy/girl twins) and sold in all the big supermarkets, but sadly not in smaller chemists. Invented by a Swedish woman called Marlien Sandberg, the nappy is 70 per cent biodegradable, and a new prototype – 100 per cent biodegradable – may even be in production at the time of reading. For those too overstretched to want to wash or fold nappies, these are a good compromise. You are doing your bit for the environment, and can sleep at night knowing that of the 800,000 tonnes of nappy waste collected every year in UK landfill sites, at least your babies’ contributions will be rotting down. The shocking alternative is the knowledge that the very first disposable nappy ever made has yet to biodegrade.

      Real nappy laundering agencies

      For the first nine months of the twins’ lives, I opted for a nappy laundering service, which delivered 100 nappies for the babies every week and took away the soiled ones. As well as the laundering service, I also rented 12 plastic pants to put the nappies in, and they worked well with no problem of rashes or leakages. I even quite liked the chore of folding these white cotton nappy liners; it gave me a whiff of what it would be like to be a real earth mother. However, my main problem was the smell. The buckets that had to wait for a week for collection began to pong so badly that they eventually had to be put at the end of the garden near the compost. And if I forgot to put the nappy bucket out for collection, then the garden became a horsebox. The total cost was around £8 per week per baby, around the same cost as disposables. For your nearest nappy collection and delivery scheme, call The National Association of Nappy Services (0121 693 4949).

      Real nappies to buy

      In the year 2000, there were 10 companies selling cloth nappies; today there are about 22. Some mothers go for buying and using the cloth nappies because it works out cheaper in the long run. Friends of the Earth estimate that cloth nappies cost an average of £400 per baby over a two-year period before a baby is potty-trained, including the cost of washing powder, electricity, water and wear and tear (estimated at £40). Disposables cost £1,200 per baby for a two-year period – no small figure when doubled.

      These days ‘real nappy systems’, as they are grandly called, have come a long way from the terry-towelling-and-safety-pin days of our mothers. Lively animal prints make them a little more fun to hang out on the washing line, and the Velcro or popper fastenings are a doddle to do. Catalogues such as PHP (0870 6070545), Cheeky Rascals (01428 682488) and Little Green Earthlets (01825 873301: www.earthlets.co.uk) carry a range, but for background information contact The Real Nappy Association (0208 299 4519).

      One of the biggest manufacturers, Kooshies (0870 607 0545), often provides a sample pack for interested mothers. Those wishing to turn their interest into a lifetime of placard-waving on behalf of the environment can also get the low-down on the impact of disposables on the planet from the Women’s Environment Network (0207 481 9004).

      The wonderful world of double buggies

      If you thought buying a car was difficult (am I a hatchback sort of person or a sports car kind of girl?), then the double buggy showroom will send you rushing to the nearest shrink. Double buggies seem to cost about as much as a car, need at least an O-level in engineering to put up and down, and generate very little interest in the male species. If you do have a man with strong opinions about what you should buy, think twice about doing as you’re told against your better judgment. Exactly how much pushing up and down the pavements and hills will he be doing with it? A Saturday stroll is quite different from a slog back from Sainsbury’s with the weekly shop.

      One reason why the world of double buggies is so complicated is because manufacturers are always bringing out new pushchairs with fabrics and features that instantly make last year’s model look like stale buns. We have a video in our twins club library called Coping with Twins (don’t bother, it’s from the 1970s), which shows a mother trying to ram a new double buggy through her front door. Under the helpful banner of ‘make sure your double buggy can fit through an average door’, this poor woman is trying to negotiate a vehicle the size of two shopping trolleys up the front step. Meanwhile, her twins are lying down on their fronts in the buggy, with their heads bobbing up and down like nodding dogs.

      In a recent local twins club survey, two mothers groaned about how the Mothercare Urban Detour model was 82 cms wide and didn’t fit through their front doors. The thought of unloading your twins in the rain, and taking the shopping off the back of the buggy while finding the keys in the bottom of your handbag is no small consideration, so don’t rely on manufacturers to build to standard-width doors. At the risk of making the book instantly out of date, because by the time you read this some company will have just brought out a model with a pump-action pellet gun to zap other buggies out of the way, let me offer the results of our own twins club survey a little later on (see pages 56–7). In defence of being yesterday’s news, note that manufacturers’ ‘new ranges’ tend to offer cosmetic changes, such as different fabrics, rather than radical design improvements.

      The first three months

      The pram СКАЧАТЬ