by J A Wright

Created on: August 23, 2009

Parenting twins from the outset was hard but delightful, breastfeeding two is a challenge, having two wake at night is just plain torturous and juggling the logistics of two babies is frightening some days but it's when they become mobile that life takes a turn for the loony bin. Toddlerhood and twins are two words which provoke feeling of exhaustion, hilarity and creative problem solving.

Some prime examples:
Their father found to his shock one morning that Twingle 2 can get out of her cotbed - she was 14 months old and so NOT ready for a bed yet.
Twingle 2 is very energetic, excessively curious, excellent at meddling, fantastic at emptying drawers and boxes, loves switches , gadgets and climbing and can mountaineer anything like a mountain goat - she really needed to stay in a cot a while longer and we hadn't anticipated that problem yet.
She only had smaller toys in her cotbed, a lesson learned from my own childhood, so we knew it wasn't a one off from climbing on a pile of toys.
Our girls are very tall and the recommendation that the cotbed sides should be up to 75% of their height was quickly not being met. Having said that, we think her method of escape was a bit more white knuckle than a normal climb, we think she jumped and hurled her top half out over the rail. She could get her foot onto the rail too but not quite high enough to climb out yet.
What could we do?
For safeties sake we put a mattress on the floor beside her cotbed in case she launched herself out again. We could have done with an extra rail to attach to the cot side but my googling for such an item yielded no results.
Someone jokingly suggested a dog crate and the idea of such constant safety was tempting for a just a second, they only come in shades of black or brown though.
She's just not the kind of child you let loose at night. Twingle 2 takes my knickers off the radiators when they've been washed and runs round the house with them on her head! Does that seem the actions of a child who should be allowed to roam free? Nope!


I had got to the stage of considering the virtues of putting extra strong velcro on the back of all her pyjamas and sewing a corresponding a strip on her sheets.

So, faced with a problem solving test worthy of Mensa I googled myself silly and found all sorts of things I never knew existed, including giant sized cots with roof bars for giant sized babies.... the erm... adult variety. Realising the internet would not be my saviour I had to think of what

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