When talking recently to a woman in her sixties (I assume) about bringing up our twins, I was told that my habit of letting one of them often sleep in bed with us was on the road to ‘spoiling’.

Oh dear. To spoil sounds like something really very terrible – think of ‘spoil’ and think of rotten fruit, fetid meat, mould-covered cheese. When, rationally, I know that taking a baby to bed so that we all sleep better is not such an awful practice as letting food go off in the fridge, why did I find myself justifying in almost apologetic tones our current habits?

Whether it is possible to ‘spoil’ a baby is not a new debate. Don’t pick her up when she cries, or she will have ‘won’. Don’t take her to bed with you or she will want to sleep there until she is six years old (as one doctor said to me). The only way to get her to sleep through the night is to close the door and let her sleep a couple of nights in a row – that will learn her …

This adult application of adult rationale to a baby’s requirements, I find disconcerting. How does a baby know that the closed door and lack of response to her heartfelt cries means that she should sleep through the night all of a sudden? How do we know it will not terrorise her with nightmares of abandonment for years to come? Most likely not, but equally as likely that a baby can learn anything by being left to cry alone in a darkened room. Indeed, if babies do learn anything from such an experience, I would much prefer mine to know that I will always answer their cries regardless.

Perhaps it is time to let go of the desire to seek everyone’s approval. And, rather, to answer back and say, well I think it a terrible shame when people don’t enjoy their babies at their most vulnerable and tenderful stage.

As we lay in bed last night discussing at length once again exactly how we would handle one or both babies when they woke up in the small hours, from what time we would feed them rather than just comfort, whether we should put them back to sleep in the cot or let them sleep in our bed and then further investigating the whole round of possible short, and long term, consequences of each action, it occurred to us that much of this thought would have no affect on the behaviour of our babies.

It is tempting to see life as a project. Each challenge is to be analysed and solutions carefully plotted and planned. This works to a point, when at school or university with exams to pass, and again when applying for jobs or reaching a target figure. And, usually, in the aforementioned circumstances, your labour and intellect is rewarded – with good marks, a great career move or, even better, a bonus payment. You might recognise this as the classic behaviour of the slightly over-anxious, high achiever, into which category many of us fall.

All well and good, you may think, this approach has taken you a long way in life … until you start having babies. What we have realised over the last few months is that babies do not much respond to analysis or to tweaking improvements. There is no revision guide or project plan to which you can adhere to ensure your success. Sure, put them to bed half an hour later, having jiggled a grumpy baby on a large inflatable ball for those thirty minutes and they may once or twice wake up half an hour later correspondingly. But then there will be plenty of other times when they maddeningly wake up two hours earlier just for the hell of it, despite your sterling efforts on the ball and you know you would have been better off putting them to bed when they were tired and giving your thighs a break. All this analysis can leave you lying frustrated in bed at three o’clock in the morning listening to the beginnings of hungry whinging in the neighbouring room, thinking ‘they surely can’t be hungry again, it is not in the plan’.

But a baby is a baby is a baby, as unpredictable as the weather in June – midsummer and raining again. A little person who, just like you and I, sometimes sleeps peacefully all through the night, and other times wakes up inexplicably thirsty, but unluckily for us, is not yet tall enough to reach the tap.

The baby book business is almost entirely simply that – a business – (unless I ever write one and then you all, of course, must go out and buy it, whether expecting children or not). Read as many as you like, but if your baby finds it hard to go to sleep, beyond what your common sense would lead you to do anyway, the books are not going to aid him or her in slumber.

So tonight perhaps we will use the time to talk about more interesting things, like which type of vegetable to try pureeing next, or possibly falling straight to sleep so we are not quite so tired when we are almost inevitably woken up. 

Have you ever considered when serving salad in which hand it is easier to have the fork and in which hand the spoon? This dilemma will only be interesting to you if you eat a lot of salad. The same is true once you have children, though this has nothing to do with forks, spoons or salad (well, not yet). This is about having a point of reference.

Before our two were around, I was never really interested in people’s stories about their children’s developmental achievements. I would smile in an appreciative but unengaged way when told so and so could now hold a little teddy bear or was starting to try and roll over. In truth, I thought, well surely all babies do that some time or other, what’s the fuss.

Now that I spend all day, every day gazing adoringly at my babies, it is almost all I think about and I absolutely love talking about it. I exchange excited updates over the pram with other parents. “It is soooo exciting,” I trill, “Do you know so and so actually grabbed hold of the leg of the bumble bee on the play mat! Amazing!”

I can’t help myself. Having seen these babies start as tiny little worms that have just popped out into the world, blinking at us and wriggling half-heartedly in their dazed newborn way, to now seeing them interact and play and get better at using their hands by the hour, is just incredibly exciting. Every child must go through these stages, but it is that experience of going through each tiny (or huge) step each day that fascinates.

And now I have a point of reference and a level of understanding for any other parent going through, or about to go through, the same thing. In the years to come I will now listen fascinated and thrilled when I hear of each baby’s new ability because, unlike most salads, these things really are miraculous.

Relentless is one word for having twins. Days pass in a blur from feed to feed, nap to nap, walk to walk, at least one baby almost always on the arm – interspersed with the usual pleasures of course, such as a baby smiling charmingly at you or squealing with pleasure as I blow a raspberry on his or her tummy. Those quiet, rare times when both babies sleep are either when strolling round the park or doing something useful at home. I reach the end of the day without a moment ‘for myself’.

That is until we perfected our bedtime routine. Now, we find ourselves hands empty, flat quiet at 8.30pm. This sudden arrival of spare time initially left me feeling disconcerted. Surely there was something I should be doing, I thought whilst wandering aimlessly from room to room, or at least one baby about to wake up and need to be rocked for a while. But no, on they sleep, and we have done everything we need to do to make the following day run smoothly. Twiddling my thumbs, I realise I no longer know what to do with myself.

The possibilities line up – read a book, check emails, have a bath, simply sit on the settee … So tonight I painted my toenails and read an article in the New Statesmen. That idea for my first novel can wait until tomorrow, depending on the success of bedtime.

Aside from the odd bold dress and sparky history essay, I have never considered myself to be particularly provocative. Little did I expect that my time to shock would start in motherhood.

The first was pushing our almost newborn babies around in the pram. Passersby peered in, as they do with twins, and exclaimed with astonishment how small our babies were. At first we wondered if this was because our babies were indeed relatively small, but having subsequently compared birth weights with other babies we realised they were really not so small to merit such surprise. Then. as our babies grew and received fewer gawping mouths, we began to look around at other babies in prams and recognised that no other parent seemed to be taking such a new baby for a walk. They were all a few months in, these sturdy looking little things. We had been the only people to venture out with two week old babies – that was the difference.

Next came those dastardly daring trips outside without hats. The sun was shining for much of the summer and every now and again, one of our babies ended up being carried in a sling without a hat. We hugged the shade as much as we could, but for fleeting moments at five o’clock in the afternoon their little heads saw the sunlight (our protective hand still shielding their eyes). The admonishing looks we got from passing mothers for that … Now, I am aware that little babies should be kept out of the sun. Who would want their beautiful new skin to run the slightest risk of sunburn. But here it appears that even a few seconds is beyond the pale. So I shocked again and must look harder, it seems, for a tiny parasol attachment for our slings or run the risk of becoming a social outcast.

The most recent incident was at a mums and babies group. There we were sitting around merrily chatting, babies in the middle on towels and prams stationed at the other side of the room, when one of my babies produced a little bit of milky sick. I sighed, realising that the cloth I usually use to wipe up such things was far away on the other side of the room and sitting holding one whingy baby, as I was, would make it hard to reach. I then saw that one of my other baby’s socks had fallen off and had a flash of inspiration that I could use that instead. As I reached towards the very clean sock, baby balanced on my knee, another (always impeccably organised) mother saw what I was up to and darted horrified to the nearest set of paper towels. ‘You can’t use that’, she exclaimed, ‘don’t you have a cloth?!’

Perhaps we must invest in more baby paraphernalia or I should always have a muslin cloth tucked fashionably into my back pocket. Perhaps I should have responded with the fact that having twins makes you ever so slightly carefree when it comes to what you use to wipe up a tiny bit of baby sick. Either way, I prefer our adventurous attitude to having babies.

There is a certain street camaraderie between twin mothers. I have fallen into conversation and become good friends with at least three other mothers over our twin prams. Walking together and thereby taking up the whole pavement offers a wonderful opportunity to share stories and ask for advice. Best is to know someone with twins a few months older and someone else with twins a few months younger – both a supply of tips and that feeling of being an expert.

One thing all the twin mothers I know have in common is their insistence on a routine. Before our babies were born I pooh poohed the idea of sticking to a very strict routine. It sounded to me like a waste of time and energy trying to force babies to do certain things, such as eat and sleep, when they were simply not in the mood. So we have lived haphazard through these last three and a half months, babies doing what they want, when they want, only a vague eye on the clock as evening approached to introduce the idea of bedtime. But talking to these other twin mothers who seemed so enamoured of their routines, I swallowed my scepticism and began to think there must be something in it.

So, partly out of interest and partly out of a desire for a more predictable life, we introduced our own strict(ish) routine last Saturday. A week later and with two content babies in bed, I must humbly admit that it seems to be working. We all get up at 7am, go out for a walk so the babies can sleep in the pram for an hour at 9am and I can buy a coffee somewhere on the way. The rest of the day involves a lunchtime nap and then a final walk and nap around 4pm. Bedtime starts at 8pm. Pushing the pram around the park in the rain early in the morning makes me feel somewhat like an English governess, but at least we all get plenty of exercise and fresh air …

Who would have thought we would all be such creatures of habit? I shall be advocating this to the latest additions to the twin mum circuit – well, at least until the weather really turns.

We went on our first family holiday last weekend to the coast of the Baltic Sea. Only two nights away and a short three hour drive from home we thought this a safe trial run before we undertake anything more daring. And, having been seduced into buying a pram with all terrain suspension and incline safety belts, we were keen to test its full capability – if the family in the twin brochure could push it on the beach, why couldn’t we?

Lovely as it was to be by the sea, we quickly realised that pushing a twin pram on sand is not easy. Life is not a brochure, it seems. All the while the babies slept soundly, lulled by the sounds of the waves, but a few slow steps later we looked around us to see no other prams on the beach, not even single ones. That was our first lesson in babies and beaches.

When the rain and grey clouds finally broke on the Monday morning of our departure, we learnt our second lesson – babies, sun and sand are an even trickier proposition. Beaches offer little shade, no matter how you position your parasol or strandkorb (for those of you in the know) and even if you do find a small spot you cannot lie your baby on a matt on the sand, unlike in a park, as sand will blow in their little eyes. Half an hour in we packed our bags, again having looked around to see no children as young as ours, to then sit relieved in the cool of the car, steering ourselves homewards.

So that was our adventure. To have our twins lovingly admired by every middle aged lady on the beach was a treat. To be somewhere different was even more wonderful. Our babies returned sandfree and we rather pleased with ourselves, despite the quickfire lesson in parenthood.

Though loving parents, these last two nights we have successfully experienced a wonderful phenomenon called ‘bedtime’. After nights of walking around our flat as gloom gathered outside and the clock ticked around to eleven, or worse, midnight, wakeful babies on our shoulders, we decided to introduce a much earlier bedtime for our twins. We shifted their final feed by a few hours and firmly put then down in their cot. though waiting until they were suitably sleepy of course. And, incredibly enough, it has worked, so far at least. This evening we both ate with two hands (rather than with at least one baby in our arms) and without rocking a small baby chair with our feet. Now we sit on the settee absorbed in our laptop windows to the outside world. Even more exciting is the prospect of our early night still to come – it is the small but significant achievements in life after all.

It is dramatic the shift from working full time to being at home with your babies. A precious experience, and one I could never hand over to any nanny or childminder. I love seeing my babies change daily and grow more and more excited by my presence. If there is anything to make you feel really, really special, it is your baby’s beaming smile.

But this is not to say that I don’t think longingly about work, surprising as it may sound for those still tortured by their daily grind. Applying your mind to a task, planning it carefully, and seeing it through is, in retrospect, the easily controlled, quickly satisfying reality of having a job. Your working days (mostly) follow an expected shape. You buy your coffee in the morning, browse through emails, deal with a few colleagues, perhaps meet a client, walk out for lunch, go slow at your desk whilst digesting, take a back seat in a meeting, get excited about a new project, think about wrapping up for the day, and over and over and over. What’s more, however long your hours, you are at liberty at some point to go home and slump in front of the TV.

My new days are chaotic and full of plans that are half seen through or given up on for want of letting the baby sleep a bit longer. There is no going home at the end of the day, or slumping for more than a minute or two. In this new order, or lack of it, I realise I must give myself fully to one sole purpose – keeping my babies happy and thriving. This is my current full time job, my interest, my desire. Each day, and new stage of development is a project, and successes, such as a baby joyfully seizing and shaking a rattle for the first time or sleeping an extra half hour at night, are to be celebrated just in the same way as the well struck deal or challenging sale.

So here’s to tonight.

Yesterday I cycled for the first time since last October. The wind tugged at my hair and my leg muscles remembered their existence. The twin’s father pushed them round the supermarket whilst picking up what we needed for dinner. I proudly turned into our road, fresh faced and exhilarated and saw him and our green pram on the pavement. We all walked home together and though that evening we did eat until well past 10pm, the cycling was lovely.