Get a good obstetrician or midwife. If you live in the Boston area, it would be hard to imagine a better person than Dr. Beth Hardiman. Don't be afraid to switch if you don't like the person you have, even late in pregnancy. On the other hand, if you know you don't like your person, switch sooner rather than later. It's unlikely that things will improve with time.
Get a good pediatrician lined up in advance of the birth.
Assuming that you plan to breastfeed (which you should unless there is a medical problem), get a lactation consultant lined up before the birth. Maybe everything will be fine, and you won't need that person, but it's more common to have some level of difficulty that you could use help with, and it will be better to have the person on call to start with. We didn't do this, but eventually we found Beth Sargent of Newton, and she was very helpful.
If your babies are slow to learn to nurse, you should have a low threshold for using a breast pump (which you can rent) and feeding them the pumped colostrum or breast milk. You can use a syringe if you don't want to confuse the babies with bottle nipples. Otherwise it's very easy for poor nursers to get dehydrated (and somewhat more likely for them to get jaundice), and then you end up with extra hospital stays, formula feedings, IVs, and so on.
Arrange for lots of support from friends and family beforehand. It's hard to imagine just how much help you'll need if you have twins. Three full-time parents haven't really been up to the job: we have still needed lots of help.
Think about getting a baby scale. Perhaps they can be rented. It would enable you to tell whether your child is gaining weight properly, and so be reassured when everything is right. A very accurate scale will allow you to determine how much your child takes in an each feeding, but then you should not be concerned if the amount is quite variable, but only if the average is too low.
Get tested for hepatitis B. Current standard procedure is to vaccinate all newborns in the first day against hepatitis B. The purpose is to protect them in case they contracted it from their mothers, but doesn't it make more sense to have the mother tested and save the child a possibly painful shot?
"Feeding on demand" doesn't mean feeding your child between 1 and 2 hours after the last feeding. It means anywhere between 15 minutes and 4 hours.
For example, when Jocelyn had had phototherapy and her bilirubin level had come down to the point that she no longer needed it, the pediatrician in charge at Norwood hospital wanted to keep her there for 6 hours with no treatment and then check to make sure she had not rebounded. There wasn't any reason for it, and when we complained he said that if we really wanted to we could take Jocelyn home and bring her back later for testing. What was he thinking when he didn't tell us to do that to start with?
We switched pediatricians after the 4 month appointment. The precipitating event was that we asked our doctor about local anesthetics for vaccinations, and he said not to bother because "no one ever came back to complain to me about the vaccinations I'd given them as an infant". That seemed to us to be saying that he didn't care whether they hurt or not.
See also above about hepatitis B immunization.
The advantage of the bassinet is that you can carry it around (make sure you get one with a handle). It fits through your doors without disassembly. So you can decide to put the baby in the nursery or in your room or napping downstairs while you work on the computer or whatever with no effort, trying out different arrangements. We swapped off who had the babies at night and so we would carry the bassinet into the other person's room, complete with sleeping babies. When they got too big for carrying in there, it also had a wheely base, and we would wheel it around complete with sleeping babies.
kdo@cosmos.phy.tufts.edu