How to do Nighttime Feedings When Twins Are Not in Your Room

This question comes from Kate. She says, “How do you do nighttime feedings if the babies aren’t in the room with you?”

If you decide to arrange things such that your twins sleep in their own room, then the sky’s the limit on how you can take care of them during the night and how you decide to feed them.

Nighttime Feedings in the Family Room

Our girls, we put them in their own room right after we got home from the hospital. When it was time for nighttime feedings, my wife would take one girl and I would take the other. We’d stumble into the kitchen and one-handedly prepare the bottles of formula, and then we’d go into the family room, in our sleepy trance, and we’d feed them.

Now, we had a night-light on the stove in the kitchen to help us with the bottle preparation, but we kept all the lights off in the family room while we did the feeding so that the twins could be kind of sleepy and could relax and would easily go back to sleep after we were done.

If your twins are not in the same room with you, try taking them to a common room, like the family room. Or you can even feed them in their room, if you want to, if you have the furniture to support that. Odds are, you may have just a single rocking chair in your babies’ room, and so it may be easier, if both parents are helping with the feedings in the middle of the night, to take them out to a bigger room where there’s more seating for the adults.

This question was originally addressed on the Dad’s Guide to Twins Podcast episode 26: Transition from Work to Home, Twin Differences, Nighttime Feedings.

Picture by Ruth Lozano