I remember when the twins were teeny babies and I would take them out, the first questions people would ask were “Are they boys or girls?” and “How much did they weigh?” After that, the women would ask in hushed tones, “You’re not…nursing them, are you?” Why, yes! Yes I was. And so I had to say so, and accept my new reputation as some sort of Hard-Core Breastfeed-or-Die type.

I was fully prepared to bottle-feed, and in fact I had pre-purchased a small supply of bottles and formula in case it was an emergency and I couldn’t nurse them even one more single second. But as it turned out, neither twin ever took a bottle. It happened this way not because I am so philosophically firm on the issue of breastfeeding, but because I am lazy and breastfeeding was genuinely easier for me.

It wouldn’t have been easier, though, without two things. The first thing was the training the nurses gave me at the hospital. They let me get all the way to 4:30 in the morning the first night without intervening: I’d said I wanted to feed the twins separately at first, and learn to feed them together later, so they let me go to it. All night long, I was feeding one baby while the other baby cried, back and forth between them.

I was actually more incredulous than miserable: still high from the birth, and from the feeling of not being pregnant anymore, my feeling was more, “Um, this isn’t going to work!” than “Open that window so I can leap out.” At 4:30, the nurse came in. “So,” she said. “Would you like me to show you how to tandem-nurse now?” I did not fall to the floor and cover her white sensible shoes with kisses, whatever you may have heard. But I did say, “Um, yes. Please.” So she showed me how to stack pillows and how to arrange two babies and how to sit properly so I wasn’t dying from discomfort, and that was the first thing that made everything easier. From then on, I breastfed both babies at the same time, so I was never jittering one leg nervously as a baby screamed and I mentally begged the other baby to hurry up and finish already. Also, it takes half the time of feeding babies one after the other.

The second thing that made everything easier was a gift from my cousin Lee: a tandem nursing pillow. It was inflatable, which turned out to be one of its best features: I could make it a little firmer or a little softer depending on the babies’ sizes and positions. It came with an inflatable back pillow, which made me much more comfortable. And it propped both babies to exactly the right height, so that I could even take my hands off them and read a book while I nursed them. I could theoretically nurse both babies at the same time using piles of pillows like they did in the hospital, but that was much more difficult to arrange.

I got so comfortable using that pillow and scooping up babies and having peace and quiet while they nursed, it never seemed like the right time to start fussing with bottles. The one time I really, really wanted bottles, though, was when we were out. How do you breastfeed twins discreetly in public? The answer is that you do not. What you do is you nurse one baby discreetly while the other one wails, drawing attention to you sitting there with a huge squirming lump under your shirt. It confuses people: there’s the crying baby who clearly wants to eat, so what are you doing? They come in for a closer look. The baby unlatches to see who that is coming over, revealing half a boob. Jesus.

Oh, did I mention that breastfeeding twins burns about 1000 calories per day? Yes. It is glorious.