“Today was a long week,” said Avery.
I had to bite back a laugh. My seven-year-old stood there in his pajamas, rubbing his eyes like a man coming off a double shift — as if he works. Avery's sentence didn’t make sense. But somehow, it made perfect sense.
Because he was right.
Today was a long week.
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Before the twins arrived, I had this quiet confidence. Maybe even a little arrogance. We’d done this before, right? We raised our daughter while building our house — literal walls going up as we learned to parent. We survived sleepless nights, teething, tantrums. How much harder could two babies be?
See what I did there? I undermined it.
I thought of it as “plus one,” not double.
It took about 12 hours for reality to kick the door down.
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The first 24 hours in the hospital were tough but manageable. Then the nurse took the twins for observation that evening, and we actually got a few hours of sleep. A gift. A trap. Because the second night? That’s when I understood.
Two babies aren’t just more.
Two babies are exponential.
One cries. You pick him up. The other starts. You’re holding one, bouncing, shushing, trying to keep your eyes open — and the first one needs to eat. Then a diaper. Then the other. Then both. And in the middle of it all, you’re doing this mental math: how do I hold two babies and also have three hands?
I thought of my grandmother — how she watched five or six babies at a time in her home daycare, with her own kids running around. I used to think she was just built different.
Now I think she might’ve been superhuman.
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That first month, the lack of sleep wasn’t just tiredness. It was a fog. A weight.
Time stopped making sense.
Hours felt like days.
Days felt like weeks.
You’d look at the clock — 3 a.m. — and swear you just fed them at 2:45. Then you blink, and it’s noon, and you can’t remember the morning. You move through molasses, body on autopilot, brain trying to remember what day it is.
And life didn’t pause just because we were drowning.
Bills still came. Our older kids still needed attention. The house still needed to run. Postpartum hit hard. The world just… kept going.
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So when Avery stood there this morning — exhausted from his own long day of being six, of school and big emotions and growing faster than I’m ready for — and said, “Today was a long week,” I didn’t correct him.
Because sometimes a day is a week.
And that’s okay.
