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.
