[OC] What is it like raising twins?

We had twins in 2021. The 1st year was rough – we had no family support and it was hard to get through. Also the babies were born small (less than 5 percentile for weight, both of them) and we were VERY meticulous about keeping feed records. This continued for 9 months at which point we abandoned meticulous record keeping.

The twins are now shortly turning 5 – life is great!
I recently came across of this dataset again that I had downloaded at the time and generated this beautiful graphic out of it.

Buckle up – Here's what ~9 months of sleep deprivation looks like as a dashboard [Observations are my own and not AI generated].

The numbers:

• 4,782 total feeds across two babies (Jun 2021 – Mar 2022)
• 395 liters consumed combined — baby boy drank noticeably more (209L vs 185L)
• ~8–9 feeds per day, every single day, for nine months straight

The graveyard shift (12–5am):

• 477 feeds happened between midnight and 5am
• That's a feed in the dead of night every single day on average
• Baby girl figured out how to sleep through the night around October 2021. Baby boy kept us up through January 2022. The bar chart showing this drop-off is maybe the most satisfying graph I've ever seen!

Wild stats:

• Both babies hit their personal record of 4 feeds in a single night in early July 2021 – the hardest month
• Baby boy's biggest single feed was 240ml on Christmas Eve 2021. Apparently he wanted to carb-load before the holidays
• The longest stretch without a feed was 13 hours – baby boy, Christmas Eve night, right after that gigantic feed. An actual gift.
• The radar chart of feeds by hour of day looks like a perfect sleep-deprivation spiderweb

Formula vs pumped breast milk:

• Baby girl: 64% pumped, 36% formula
• Baby boy: 58% pumped, 42% formula
• Huge respect to the person doing the pumping. The data doesn't show that part but I know and have seen what kind of toll it took on her!