Double Trouble

by Sarah V. Richard

I didn't find out about the twins until my second doctor's visit. My first visit had confirmed what I already knew, and the doctor showed me a picture of a single circular ovum. Single being the key word here. Okay, I thought. I can handle this.

At the next visit, the doctor is boxing off two pictures on the sonogram. What are you doing? Stop! Oh, no! TWINS? There's not a single twin in my family! Besides, I grew up with four younger brothers. Hadn't I suffered enough?

During the next doctor's visit, I asked the doctor if she thought both babies realized they were together inside my stomach. She didn't hesitate answering, "Absolutely." The next night I felt both babies jump after bumping into each other.  If they didn't know about each other before then, they definitely knew they were roommates now.

With each passing ultrasound, I wondered what my twins thought about the situation as well. They were named Baby A and Baby B by the doctors, but once the doctors confirmed they were girls (did you really think I'd wait to find out the sexes? I had enough surprises with this pregnancy!), I thought it would be cute to call them Tara and Kara (and I'm Sarah), but I figured they wouldn't forgive me once they were teenagers, so the father and I settled on Tara and Abigail.

I was finishing my last semester of college during my last trimester of the pregnancy. My brother thought I was crazy for considering a career in teaching. He couldn't understand how I would even think of trading in two kids for thirty, but I must admit college was an excellent source of training for motherhood. Four hours of sleep was the norm for most college students, so making the transition to sleepless nights as a mother was not very difficult for me.

People ask me all the time if they are identical or fraternal twins. The doctors never told me, but once I held Abigail in the mirror and asked her, "Who do you see?" She told me Tara, so now I tell everyone that they are identical.

The only pets I allow them to have are fish, (the last thing I need is another baby to take care of.  The twins and their dad are enough for me.) but once the twins thought they were being helpful by feeding our new fish - the whole bottle of fish food! The next day I discovered that they fed the fish again - half a bag of cheese curls... I moved the T.V. stand that they were using for a stool so this would stop once and for all... (Not that my intervention was going to matter. The twins make stools out of everything: dragging over a chair, scooting over a box, pushing over their toy chests, stacking up their toys...)

They still aren't potty trained. As much as I would love to stop buying diapers, the cost of diapers is being quickly replaced by the cost of toilet paper anyway. My twins are much more interested in flushing the toilet and getting the "telescope" (the brown paper roll) out of the actual tissue than they are potty training. Oh, and that bite-size potty I bought them...they use that for a stool, too.

They love their alphabet flash cards. I try to take advantage of their interest for reading by teaching them the words on the flashcards, but it doesn't always go as planned. A few weeks ago, I held up the letter "B" with a picture and the word balloons and asked Tara to identify the letter and the word. Tara's response, "That's the letter B - B for party!" Well, in a sense, she was right. Balloons are for a party.

When they don't want to walk, they both tell me, "Momma, my legs fell off." I really try not to give in, and tell them, "Tough cookies. Hold my hand and walk." Their response? "But, Momma, my arms fell off." Can I win?

The moral of my story?  If twins are anything, they are double the fun as opposed to double the trouble!