‘They’re still not sleeping through the night.’

The Valley Twins and Triplets Mothers Club filled up the back room of the Mandarin King restaurant in Northridge one evening last week for its monthly getaway.

About 60 women attended the event Wednesday evening, leaving their twins or triplets and husbands at home.

It’s not that the men weren’t invited, one of the members said. But someone has to take care of the kids while mommy gets her break.

“I call it my monthly Vitamin B-12 shot,” said Nancy Klinger, a past president of the club.

Klinger, like most of the other mothers, wore a cascade of black plastic medals pinned to her dress. The large one on the top was engraved with the club insignia and a mommy with a girl hanging from each hand. Below that dangled a row of small plates, the first indicating her past service with the club and the last four bearing the names of her children, the twins Sabrina and Alexandra (born 3-8-82) occupying a single plate above the fifth child, Colin, born in 1984.

“That was my surprise,” Klinger, a workers’ compensation hearing representative, said. “When I found out I was pregnant again, the one thing I wanted to find out was how many?

“I came here when my girls were 2 months old. I was hanging by a thread.”

Her twins were still waking up every hour, crying for their meals, she said. She and her husband kept a chart on the wall to remember which one they had fed last. She was doing seven loads of laundry a day and 128 bottles a week. She was frazzled.

At first she was afraid to go. She would get in the car and wait, trying to build up the courage.

“I’m not going. I’m too tired,” she would tell her husband.

“Yes, you are,” he would say.

Finally she did.

“I’m glad,” she said. “Where else could you go and find 60 other women and they all have the same problem you have?”

On her first night, she was astonished. “Oh, my gosh,” she thought. “They all have their hair combed, and they’re dressed well, and they look like they’re having a good time.”

After that she made a habit of calling another member for help when things got out of control. Now things are under control, and she has moved up to the role of adviser.

But she’s still attracted by the bubbly social contact of the monthly outing.

On Wednesday night this began at 6:30 with a social hour and a “swap ‘n’ sell,” during which the women exchanged pleasantries and outgrown clothing.

The conversation grew even livelier during dinner when president Jackie Kirschner, a pastry chef, conducted the business part of the meeting.

Kirschner occasionally shouted, “Ladies, please,” for an important announcement but generally made no attempt to control the chatter and table hopping.

Actually, the commotion didn’t seem to interfere at all.

With a grace and efficiency that would shame a lot of government agencies, the women read the correspondence, planned a garage sale, distributed secret-pal gifts, welcomed six new members, sang “Happy Birthday” to five, decided to send for free medical consent tags for kids, corrected errors in the newsletter and announced a studio call for twins age 8 to 12 to work on a television show called “The Cavanaughs.”

Twins, it seems, are sought for film work because they can be swapped to double the time that state law allows toddlers to labor on stage.

At times the room fell quiet all of its own, as when Klinger handed out the new-member-of-the-year award to Barbara Gebhart, hospitality co-chairman.

Gebhart, an attractive young woman in white cotton pants, broke into tears and was barely able to give her speech.

“I love you all,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without this club. This is one of the happiest times of my life. I can’t wait to tell my husband.”

It was so quiet that everyone heard Klinger give in to a little sob.

Each new member introduced herself, invariably in terms of her level of fatigue.

“They’re still not sleeping through the night,” said the mother of one 5-month-old set. “I’m not too happy about that.”

She was happy, though, that the kids had gotten a part on the television series “Hotel.”

“Is James Brolin gorgeous or what?” someone asked.

“He’s beautiful, and he’s also very nice,” she said.

“Things are a lot better,” another mother said. “It’s the cumulative effect. I’m still tired.”

“You’ll be tired until they start going to school,” someone shouted.

A third mother said hers were sleeping through the night but had started “climbing and crawling everywhere.”

That set off dozens of climbing and crawling stories.

“Has he stood on the door of the dishwasher and jumped up and down on it?” one woman asked another.

At about 9:30 everyone quieted down for the speaker, Bibi Walton of Women’s Action for Nuclear Disarmament.

After that some of the women went right home. But a few stuck around.

“Some of us sit here until 1 in the morning,” Klinger said.