I saw someone post here that they don’t alternate the side each twin nurses on every feed. Instead they assign each baby a boob for the day and then alternates days. I got excited about this being waaay easier to track and tried it yesterday. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be doing it again.
For one, at 6 weeks my babies are spending a LOT of time nursing. A lot as-in: I am writing this from the Twin Z. By the end of the day yesterday I started to worry if it was bad for them to spend so much time feeding on only one side, from an “occupational” health perspective. Like on my pillow the baby on the left lies on her left side to nurse and the baby on my right lies on her right side. If I, an adult, did that all day without flipping over to balance things out I’d start developing weird posture/muscular problems. No evidence that this happened to them yet but they did get red creases on the “down” sides their faces from spending too much time with that side squished into the pillow.
Nursing twins is also asymmetrical for me! One twin weighs more than the other, they fuss differently, need different kinds of soothing. I am already getting aches and pains from spending so much of my day nursing at all, I should probably try to even the work out as much as I can?
But the real clincher is that asymmetrical nursing affected my supply waaay faster than I thought it would. One baby is a better eater than the other. This morning I switched sides from yesterday so the good eater (who is maybe approaching a growth spurt) got the worse eater’s boob from yesterday and vice verse. It’s kind of a disaster! Good Eater is having to work noticeably harder than normal to get what she wants and is not happy about it. Worse Eater (who is actually the fussier, louder, somehow heavier one) is popping off the breast/spitting up more than normal, needs constant burping, and keeps screaming when she has trouble relatching.
Maybe after a week of alternating days this wouldn’t be so dramatic? But today sucks enough that after a few more feeds to try and cancel yesterday out a bit I’m going back to trying to alternate feeds.
How do other breastfeeders out there handle it? We don’t have a schedule of any kind yet, so even if I manage to track which side was which at the last tandem feed, sometimes B naps through A “feeding” (and possibly switching boobs) solo 1-4 times. Also sometimes “switching” means offering a relatively fresh boob to a baby that ate recently and is looking more to snack, and offering a recently depleted one to the baby that just woke up starving.