Parenthood is hard work, as Zoe Saldana and Marco Perego can attest.
The Infinitely Polar Bear star appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! Thursday, where she gushed about their 6-month-old twins, Bowie Perego-Saldana and Cy Perego-Saldana. "It's great. It's a blessing. We know because people keep telling us," Saldana joked to Jimmy Kimmel. "No, we're very, very happy. It's just like whatever you do—if you change a diaper and you put one down, it's like you have to do it all over again. That's when they're in a good mood. But if they're having a tantrum and it's at the same time..."
She then offered a recent example, saying, "Sleep training twins is no joke because you put one to sleep and you lay him down, and the other one has been asleep, but then that one wakes up and the other one wakes up so then everybody's crying, then my husband and I are crying...You're like, 'Oh, my God!'"
"It's overwhelming because there are so many different methods," she explained. "Just the other day, my sister, who has a 9-month-old, shared with us the method that she did. She brought the piece of paper and grabbed us both with a bottle of vodka. She goes, 'What do you guys have?' That's how her and her husband did it. Because the moment you hear your child cry, it's like it rips the guts out of you. And it's like, we have two. It's crazy. So there's a bottle of Skinnygirl and we had the monitor with the volume all the way high. We have this little note thing, this log that you have to be logging in all the time. We put them down, say 'mommy and daddy love you' in Italian and Spanish—well get to that later—and then we walk out and they're having a meltdown. So then you have to time it, then you go in. And my sister, I'm like, 'Can we go in? Can we go in?' 'OK, go in now.' And we go in and I'm like, 'What do we do?' No eye contact, just say 'mommy and daddy love you'—in Italian and Spanish—and she would come pull us out. So by the third time, it had been 45 minutes already. We were kind of buzzed. It's heart wrenching. My husband doesn't drink and he's like, 'Gimme that bottle!'"
"So then we go and we just finally abort. We abort mission. We take our kids. I take one, he takes the other, and we're both crying. The boys' bodies are, like, their bodies are weeping...and you go, 'Oh, my God, he's never going to forgive me for this.' And then, Marco and I are talking in the room going, 'It's not for us. It's too archaic. There has to be a more gentle method. They did it because they're insensitive. They don't care about their children.' My sister's outside with the monitor at full volume—and our best friend! They were just like, 'We get it.'"
Kimmel suggested having the twins sleep in separate rooms. "They wake each other up. I don't know. They were born together. It's unnatural to separate them," she said. "In my mind, it just makes sense."
The actress also revealed that her twins will be trilingual.
"I don't know what they're going to speak because right now we're talking to them in English and Italian and Spanish," Saldana said. "What's most confusing is my mom would like to be called a certain way as a grandmother. In Spanish it's mama. So I'm mommy. And then his mother is la nonna. I'm like, 'How are they going to do this between la nonna, mama and mommy?' I kind of have a feeling their first is going to be 'English.' Like, 'Ugh, English! English! This is America!'"
Saldana recently made headlines for revealing in InStyle's July issue that her husband had added her surname, which Kimmel couldn't believe. "Nobody laughs!" she said. "Men don't laugh in the room."
"Did you make him do that?" Kimmel asked.
"No! Oh, my God! Why does it mean a woman has to like hold a gun, like, 'You're gonna be Saldana!'" the Avatar actress said with a laugh. "I took his. Why doesn't that make it in the news? We hyphened." Regarding their sons' names, she joked, "I was a gentleman and I allowed the boys to Perego-Saldana."
"You have a very confusing house," Kimmel said with a laugh.
Saldana agreed and shared another anecdote from earlier in the day. "It's so funny. I was telling Marco about [the show] today. He goes, 'Who's the guest with you? Who's the musical guest?' Because he loves music. And I'm like, 'It's Tyler, the Creator.' And he goes, 'Ooh, I love ip-op.' He can't pronounce the h," she said while imitating his Italian accent. The late-night host joked, "Foreigners are adorable!"