How to Handle Your Twins Swapping Food and Drink at Mealtime

Your twins will trade food and drinks during meals and snack times.

So how do you know how much each child has eaten or had to drink?

We’ve sat our twins in booster chairs next to each other since they started eating solid foods.

Due to their proximity to each other, they tend to swap food, sippy cups, spoons, and anything else on their trays.

Your twins may very well do the same.

One option to make sure each kid gets what she needs and nothing else is to sit them on opposite sides of the room.

Unfortunately, this makes it a little more inconvenient to single-handedly meet the needs of both kids at the same time.

Our girls have shown that they will eat what they want and leave the rest. If they want more food, we’ve taught them to use baby signs to indicate as much. (If, by the way, you want some sanity in communications with your little ones read Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk.)

So even if there is food swapping going on, your kids will eventually be able to self-regulate their intake.

However, we found our girls were still swapping sippy cups. This created a problem because we wanted to make sure that they got the amount of milk they needed or the vitamins we snuck into their juice.

Our solution to managing the swapping: different color cups.

It seems simple because it is. Remember, just because your babies are twins doesn’t mean they have to have everything be identical.

Use color differences to your advantage at meal times and you will be able to easily see the status of each of your kiddos.

Picture by Bruce Tuten