How the hell do you prepare a baby bottle?

Now that I reflect upon it, I can't understand how come I got to thinking that I did not even know how to prepare a baby bottle. For months I prepared up to 16 a day. Our motto was: "Prepare bottles, feed bottles, wash bottles". I had the terrible feeling that I did nothing else all day but go around showing my bare breasts and feeding them. And in only two days I understood the sentence that everybody told me: "You'll spend a fortune on milk".

When I got home I realised that those babies had to eat. In hospital, the support "bottles" were already prepared for you, but at home you have to prepare them yourself. When we were left alone and I became aware of this, I had an attack of powerlessness, anger and desperation. How did we have to boil the bottle? Which teat would they like the most? And which measurements of milk did we have to prepare? All this was something that I didn't understand and which I was obsessed by. Everyone told me: "You'll see, if she is still hungry she'll ask for more". But I was fascinated by this sort of "faith" that everyone had in my ability to notice these things. At that point, I could not see anything and I burst into tears because I didn't know how to prepare a bottle. Luckily, it was Jordi -my husband- who told me that it had no secrets for him and did it. 

2 girls. 8 bottles. 16 baby bottles a day. Yes, of course, they were small but 16 bottles a day is quite something. And the other big question- which milk to buy? We bought the same one which we were given in hospital (but note our total lack of knowledge about types of milk, which are better and why, etc.) I don't want to advertise the product for free, but the first 900-gramme Enfalac 1 tin cost almost 24 euros. Do you remember that it was 16 bottles a day? It can last up to 3 days. 31 days, divided by 3, it's 10.3 tins. 10 tins by 24... What???!!! 240 euros a month just on milk???

The twin invasion which multiplies your expenses by a thousand also makes your inventiveness and wit multiply by thousand. On the one hand, the peace and quiet of being at home and the fact of slowly taking control of the situation helped heaps in my breastfeeding and I combined breast milk with formula. When the time was come, I could not rely on other people's experiences, their tips or philosophies. I smoothly did whatever I came up with. On the other, the fact that helped us stop the increasing expense in milk tins was finding out about the twins' partners in their world conspiration. We learned how to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies.

The rugby position and other obsessions

No mother, sister, auntie or girlfriend can prepare you for the moment in which you find yourself getting to know your newborn baby. Babies, in this case. Throughout my four day-stay in hospital, I made a mental list of a hundred things that could have been dealt with in the pre-natal classes and which were never touched upon- but which I then came to regard as vital. At that point, I couldn't get my head around trying to understand how the classes could have been so poorly organised.

I was coping with everything well enough for the first two days- it was an intensive course of getting to know and recognise my two daughters and their most essential needs. The basic one, the one that worried me the most, was feeding them. You might not believe it, but during my pregnancy I became obsessed with the "rugby position" to breastfeed twins. I looked up some information but luckily, I did not become hooked on the internet to search for more tips- I 'd have gone nuts and often, the articles were not too reliable. What I loved was a National Geographic documentary about a simulation of twins in the womb. Watching how they already interacted in the belly was so exciting- did the girls do the same?

I've lost track. Oh, yeah. Breastfeeding. In this regard, alongside many other aspects of the pregnancy and the upbringing of the kids, we were clear that we would go with the flow of what we were experiencing. Without getting ahead of ourselves. Without getting obsessed and leaving aside certain comments or suggestions. The only problem is that it's very easy to say but hard to do, right? It was complicated for many reasons. When we left the hospital I still did not have any breast milk. I couldn't bear to hear how the little ones cried because they were hungry. We complemented breast milk with formula. On my third day in hospital, I got really down because I was told that I was discharged and I did not picture myself at home AT ALL. Fortunately, a lovely nurse- who must have seen me in big trouble- called on an amazing midwife who helped us with breastfeeding a lot. Perhaps if I had had her from day one, things might have turned out differently.

But you can't go back and change the past. You act the way you do at a given moment and given the circumstances which surround you. What did I worry so much about? The girls were well (their sugar blood tests had been within the normal range, which worried us because I suffered gestational diabetes) but I panicked over the idea of going home. Hours before I was discharged, I already had an endless list of questions to ask. I took notes as if I was in a press conference- looking at things from a journalist's perspective. I was looking forward to going back home, but what would life be like with them, outside the hospital?