Just found out we are….any tips?

I've always wanted to – does that count?

Yep, have identical boys now aged 12, only advise is sleep now whilst you get chance!!
Oh and don't dress them the same.
My 2 hate being referred to as "the twins" or being called "twinny" by people at school.

This thread promised so much…

Anybody had Twins?

Yes – 1990 in Tenerife – they were very naughty 😉

Here you go….

Now back the original question. I'm over the moon, the missus is crapping herself!

Did you find out at the scan? We have ours on Thursday, nervous and excited. Good luck with it all.

Ahh, I like twins!!

Congratulations UncleFred!

Yep 1st Scan, the sonographer's measuring the baby, then has a bit of a look around and finds the other one!!! I reckon she knew already though as she wasn't surprised. She'd done a pee test before the scan. I reckon they can tell from the test it's multiple..

I've never had twins though I nearly had kittens at our Electric bill last quarter! 😯

Yes we have twins – just turned 1 yr old. Email me (in profile) with any questions you have and I will do my best to answer them.

But my best tip is do not listen to the rubbish you will be told from parents to singletons – it needn't be that much harder and it really is wonderful.

There are a few other parents to twins on here, but I can't recall their names.

Yes I have twin girls aged 9 – no other kids so nowt to compare it to – good luck you'll have a ball 🙂

Ohh, and congratulations 🙂

Yep. Twin girls – they were 21 a week ago. It's great. The first few months are really hard work. After that they have a playmate on hand all the time. Simples.
It helped having a big brother who was/is their hero.

We have 17 month old twin boys…… get ready for hard work!

MrsUncleFred does need to rest as much as she can and start on the supplements if not already

We have, a boy and girl. Will be 5 in 2 weeks time. Have to disagree in part with mastiles. We also have a 7 year old and the twins were much, much harder. First 6 months was hell at the time but I can hardly that now. Now they are brilliant. They communicated with each other perfectly long before they could speak. It was amazing to watch. Now they each have a buddy/soul/playmate all the time. And they both love their Islabikes:-)

If you decide to use disposable nappies you will save a fortune by buying them at Costo. We used buy 1000 odd at a time when they had special offers on.

whenever the women at work were pregnant I used to joke with them that it was twins and the second was hiding behind the first… if I ever have nippers that joke will come back to haunt me!!

best of luck

A friend has them. They seem OK now they're older but when they were toddlers they were properly hard work. They were like a tag team, one would distract the adults while the other would get up to mischief, no need to talk about it, THEY HAVE A LINK!!!

There was a period where we would get lots of phone calls from a small child who had mastered the speed dial on their phone and would either breath down the phone really loudly or would shout things at us like 'CAT!' or 'GUNARR!'. We never worked out which one did what though.

yep, twin girls now almost 8 and a half.

get some sleep, save money, get baby stuff, get some more sleep repeat to fade.

Ours were born 8 weeks early which provided scary and emotional stuff at the time now I look back on it. It's a very hard but rewarding thing to do, this was especially the case for my wife who decided to stay at home and bring them up…childcare for two is expensive!

For sure twins are a lot harder than singletons. Our son arrived 4 years ago and bringing him up has been a doodle (no doubt helped by the twin experience)

Congratulations and best of luck. hope the above helps

Yep, twin girls here, turned 8 in May.
What can I tell you? Ours were hard work for quite a few months then learnt to sleep fantastically!
Ours now play amazingly well for 90% of the time and bicker with each ither the rest if the time.
We've found that doing school work at home is difficult as they just want to play all the time.
It's an amazing experience that I'm glad I'm having the chance to experience but accept every offer of assistance ans sleep as mch as possible because you cant go for too long on 3 hours sleep a night!
Oh and after the age of about one I would only get them matching toys or the fights will be horrendous ….. this only counts for twin girls I think.

Hi Congratulations

Yep, we have twins. They are 18 months old now. My biggest singe piece of advice would be that it is in no way as daunting as it may seem now so relax. If they are your first then you, as with me and MF will have no singleton frame of reference as PaulMc does, so you won't know any different. I remember vividly being sat in the Radiographers room and being overcome with panic, but it's great now.

Admittedly you will not get a lot of sleep / social life / riding in the first 6 months, but if you establish good routines you will be fine IME, some of these routines (eg an afternoon nap) may take months and months to establish. I'm not in any way advocating Gina Ford style upbringing (google her if you are in the dark) but for your own sanity you do need to find some structure for your days / weeks e.g set bed time routines, set meal times.

Once they begin to play and cause mischief you will be so glad that you have 2 and not just one little person tearing the house up. Its awesome.

I can also recommend a croozer kid for 2 for the back of the bike, here's my 2:

If they are your first then you, as with me and MF will have no singleton frame of reference as PaulMc does

I think this is a very good point – as I have no other experience, I can only go by my experience but we have actually found it easier than we thought we would. (And I wasn't wanting to properly panic the OP either).
Being cute

Bride of Chucky

A mate of mine who is a twin himself made a good point. His mum was able to dump them in a playpen for hours because they could play with each other. We couldn't dump our single daughter in the playpen if she didn't want to be on her own…

His mum was able to dump them in a playpen for hours because they could play with each other.

That really can be a help – although we never do it 'for hours'.

Yeah ^ this self-contained playgroup is a great thing and certainly helps at times, but we've made sure that when ours started school they were split up as much as possible, otherwise they tend to play together rather than making new friends. Not an issue after a year or two though.

If you have another child be prepared for them to be left out at times. our eldest daughter who's two years older does complain that she's sometimes not allowed to play the same games – this can cause resentment.

Oh yeah, try as hard as you can to stop people calling them 'the twins'…. everybody will do it.

Oh yeah, try as hard as you can to stop people calling them 'the twins'…. everybody will do it.

100.001% agree – I even try not to refer to them as twins when people ask about them – I just call them sisters.

(Fortunately they are non-identical so it is easier to do that).

Uncle Fred – congrats.

We're expecting twins too at the moment, and just going through all the thoughts about baby buggies, cots, sleeping arrangements, feeding, dressing, nappies….making lists and watching eBay seem to be prevalent!

In a way, we are anticipating the first few months to be really, really hard, but the bonus of having a playmate all the time from birth is brilliant, especially as these will be our first kids. I'm guessing that keeping an eye on two kids gets progressively harder, as well as little things like popping down to the shops, as you can't just put them in a baby sling?

We find the hardest thing is giving each other time off – it is almost impossible to get them to bed unless we are both doing it – that means we never start cooking our own dinner till about 7.30pm at the earliest. Mornings can be equally hard – we occasionally give each other a lie in and feed the girls in their highchairs, but it is hard on one person to cope with two screaming hungry babies.

Best twin pushchair is a Chariot Cougar bike trailer/pushchair. Not cheap tho but a dream to push and it's also a trailer 🙂

We find the hardest thing is giving each other time off – it is almost impossible to get them to bed unless we are both doing it – that means we never start cooking our own dinner till about 7.30pm at the earliest

Ha, now that our three are getting 'bigger' the Laura and Chloe (twins) reckon they don't need to go to bed until 8.00 and Jessica reckons she should go to bed later 'cos she's older…. which is fair enough.
So by the time they've actually stopped messing it's about 9:15 and time to start cooking 😉

Which leads me onto another thing… sleeping arrangements. Laura and Chloe have always shared a room, which is great, but every night they will play and chat for about 45 mins before actually going to sleep 👿 …… but that's probably a great thing for them too!

On a serious note you should be prepared to split night time duties between you and your wife. We either split the night into two shifts and sometimes slept in separate rooms to ensure the other partner got some sleep, or took one baby each and dealt with them all night. Happy days 😐

As I've already said, accept every offer of help you get. It's easy not to but you will probably regret it.

We fancy a trailer type one but needed one that would fit in the boot of our car.

We ended up with a Lebruss Zoom (travel system that takes carrycots). Fantastic design but quite long and hard to push.

Now they are older and there is no need for them to lay flat/portable car seat not an issue, we have got an Out n About 360 – sooo easy to push and folds down well (fits in the boot of a medium-size family car).

But the whole pushchair thing is a real minefield – be sure to research properly and check the one you want will fit in your car.

we've got 4 year old twin boys. As others have said the first 6 months can be hard, we found night feeds took about an hour wth feeding / changing / settling them down, and you need to take shifts or you end up like a zombie. But they can entertain each other for hours it seems and ours are best friends. Our eldest sometimes feels left out as he's not a twin, but gets on great with them.

We had one of those out and abouts 360's and they are great – some of the twin pushchairs are eithre too long to drive easily or too wide to get through doorways.

You or your wife will consdier murdering the next person who says either 'double trouble then' or 'you've got your hands full there' to you at some point as well 🙂 And we've never referred to ours as the twins or anything, we always use their names

We fancy a trailer type one but needed one that would fit in the boot of our car.

Chariot fits in the boot of the Prius. Folded it's fairly long and wide, but very flat. So other stuff goes on top of it.

Only with two small swivel wheels on the front. I guarantee there will be no other easier pushchair to push 🙂

next person who says either 'double trouble then' or 'you've got your hands full there'

Gawd yes!

Molgrips – it doesn't fit into our Mazda 3 unfortunately. At least I am sure it shouldn't or I will be annoyed with myself.

We've got twin boys, turned 5 this week.

Watch that 'keeping each other company' thing as they can also use each other as lookout or nominate the other as the guilty party, (depending if they are in sneaky twin loyalty mode or not).

When they were younger we had to buy extra large stair-gates as they would help each other over six-foot-wall-assault-course style and escape.

Definitely harder work than a singleton, but not as hard as doing the singleton thing twice if that makes sense.

We've got twin boys approaching 2 and a 4 year old daughter, nothing much to add to the above really.

The first 6 to 18 months have been hell, despite the fact that they generally slept well, having the older one too has made it hard as she craves the attention, if these are your first then great, enjoy them!

Now they're walking and communicating more they're getting easier and do play together a lot, although they do tend to egg each other on to mischief.

Definitely second the routine thing, although it doesn't suit everyone's personalities (if you're not used to routine/are disorganised!). it can seem harsh but in our experience it generally makes the children happier if they have a routine and you also generally know that they're getting grumpy because they're tired/hungry. I would advocate Gina Ford, but not religiously, get the book, take what you need and see how it works.

With regards to buggies, we got a mountain buggy twin with the twin carrycot (pick one up cheap on ebay if you can) for when they were smaller which was great, the buggy is ideal now, robust and easy to push but can be a pain in small shops etc but any twin buggy would.

Also, as mentioned above, get two toys the same, the fights over toys can get vicious.

Also second "double trouble" and "you've got your hands full there", drives me potty, can't people be more imaginative?!

Molgrips – it doesn't fit into our Mazda 3 unfortunately. At least I am sure it shouldn't or I will be annoyed with myself.

Hmm, it may do upright. If you didn't try it out you should be annoyed with yourself 🙂

When they were younger we had to buy extra large stair-gates as they would help each other over six-foot-wall-assault-course style and escape.

Hmm, surely if they are old enough to do that then they are old enough to be trained not to go down stairs?

Molgrips – there were many options we were considering so I did an initial sift based on what would and wouldn't fit based on manufacturers measurements.

Still – I am happy with the Out n About – it is a great buggy, it just won't attach to my bike.