Every now and then someone says to me ‘How can you possibly AP twins?’ and often I wonder that too. My twins were not born gently (anything but at 29 weeks gestation after a very medical pregnancy that saved their lives), they were not even held or touched for the first weeks of their lives, they didn’t have an ‘in arms’ period, their first food came via an IV line, later an NG tube, after that a bottle and only after that from my breasts and even then they were comped with formula. They didn’t sleep in our bed (but did sleep in our room) they spent time crying on their own because evolution didn’t come to my rescue and grow me an extra pair of arms…. But they were loved, treated with respect and understanding as humans, weaned to 100% breastmilk (no more comping but they were eating solids) by 12 months and self weaned at 2.5 years….

I often feel like I am too mainstream to be AP and too AP to be mainstream. Sometimes it makes me feel a bit lost but I try hard to remember that it just makes me, me. Parenting the best way I know how to stay attached and in tune with my kids – four year old twins and an 11 month old.

I am really enjoying reading this blog!

I hope they welcome you back.

At API, our focus is, as you mentioned, on the attachment, and the Eight Principles are tools to help us get there, not laws written in stone that must be followed regardless of your individual situation. We welcome everyone who is interested in learning more about the benefits of attachment.

Personally, my hat is off to all of you mother of twins out there. I have a hard enough with my two littles ones, and they arrived 19 months apart

AP has a lot of value, but it shouldn’t be a set of laws. It should be a goal – attatchment – with a set of best practices – breastfeeding, co-sleeping, sling-wearing, gentle sleep experiences – and with an acknowledgement that the practices that are generally best may not be best for every individual situation. Even practices that are generally bad may, occasionally, be correct for an individual situation.

I was in a situation where the generally bad practice was correct. I spent two months trying to be a good attachment parent, before I realized that I was trying to keep a title without actually doing what I think needed to be done to keep the attatchment.

So I broke the rules. I ignored the AP experts, in the way the AP women told me to ignore “experts” when my maternal intuition told me to do something different. I did what I thought was right, and the result was WONDERFUL. The actual advice of the AP philosophy worked, and by working to maintain attatchment with my children I was able to do the right thing, even when so many I asked for advice said it was the wrong thing.

But I lost my “AP” badge and was essentially kicked out of the online AP community by about a third of the moms I had come to know and respect.

After reading this post, I’m hoping that this blog may be a crack in the door so I can get back in the club. I like the goal of AP, and I like the recommended practices. I don’t like the assumptions some AP moms seem to make that if you didn’t do things the official AP way (if you didn’t follow a best practice), you just didn’t try hard enough. Sometimes continuing to try without succeeding is just too harmful, and my lingering regret is that it took me two months to learn that lesson. Some damage was already done, but it was repairable. And at least things didn’t get worse.

I still really miss the AP community. I still miss sharing the joys of a parenting philosophy that says parents can be attatched and still be strong parents – in fact, it makes them stronger as parents! I want to tell those parents who I used to think of as friends how independent and strong my children have become in the year and a half since that incident. I want to discuss the joys (and occasional frustrations) of nursing twin toddlers, who are weaning in such different ways. I want to seek out AP twin moms and AP working moms, I want to know if anyone doing AP has the dad staying home because they believe full-time parental care is valuable but can’t manage full-time maternal care. I want to know if other AP twin moms saw their kids start sharing toys months before they started fighting over them, without much coaching.

Maybe I’ll stop by the online group that used to be my favorite again. Maybe they’ve mellowed out. Maybe AP, as a movement, is starting to mature and be less defensive – much like the breastfeeding movement seems to have done.

Just like if I ever joined a twins group (Still haven’t – I’m such a slacker!) I’m certain there are plenty of folks I’d have lots in common with other than the fact that we both had twins. I’ve been building my community of moms (my village) in bits and pieces wherever I go. So far, so good!

I’m glad I could help open the door to this club for you!

Part of the reason I wanted to start this blog is to show that there are many, many ways of practicing Attachment Parenting, and that intuition and responsiveness to each unique child’s needs is at the heart of it, not how many years you breastfeed, how many groovy slings you have to carry your baby in, or how long you co-sleep.

Any parent who is interested in learning more about the many benefits of attachment, and getting tips & techniques to help promote that attachment, is welcomed here and at API support groups around the world.
Julie

But about 75% of my favorite parenting techniques overlap with AP theory anyway. I do what feels right and what I judge to be right based on the information I have (which includes knowledge of myself and my kids) and it comes up mostly AP, lots of the time.

So thanks for letting me in the “club” with this post!

Claudia.

Sarah: Thank you! Yup, take what works for you and yours and do the best you can. And what works changes, too, as the kids age. Lots of stuff no longer works on my eldest daughter. Le sigh!