Monthly Archives: April 2012

Identical Doesn't Mean Identical

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If I didn’t know from an early ultrasound that my daughters were identical twins, I would have just assumed that they were fraternal. I’ve known fraternal twins and different aged siblings who’ve looked more alike than J and M do, at least to my eye. We still get asked if they’re identical occasionally, but most people are surprised to learn that they are.

The sisters are hard at work playing with their food.

M is in the green, J in the orange.

As M likes to point out, her widow’s peak hairline makes her face heart-shaped, where J’s is oval, thanks to her ruler-straight hairline. J is built like a soccer player, all lean muscle and power, while M has a typical dancer’s frame, birdlike and flexible.

J inherited Daddy’s single dimple, but M didn’t. J’s cowlick is profoundly untameable, while I can get M’s hair to hang down nicely with a little effort. On the other hand, I can part J’s hair in the middle, put it in pigtails, and have her hair stay generally well-behaved all day. M’s part, on the other hand, clings stubbornly to its location. It’s stronger than any combination of hair elastics, gel, bobby pins and effort I’ve been able to come up with. I’ve stopped fighting it, even if it does cause her pigtails to noticeably differ in thickness.

M was born with a facial cleft, which hasn’t needed any surgery so far. I hope it stays that way. Rather than the more familiar cleft palate, her frontonasal dysplasia is higher up in her face, and is the cause of her defined widow’s peak. It also causes her eyes to be more widely set than her sister’s and impacts the symmetry of her nose. She hasn’t had any complications from her condition, so we don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. On the rare occasion that a child asks why M’s nose is funny or little, I say that it’s so we can tell her apart from her sister. That answer has always satisfied diminutive inquisitors.

Every now and then, though, I catch a glimpse of Sister in the face of one of my daughters, and the sameness makes my breath catch.

Mischievous grins make J and M look much more alike.

I’ve come to enjoy the opportunities I get to share the science of twinning with strangers. I’ve learned to explain in a few words that identical twins are identical(ish) at the level of DNA, but are otherwise completely distinct people. Still, I’m taken aback every time I participate in the following exchange:

Stranger or acquaintance: Are they identical?
Me: Yes.
Stranger or acquaintance: No, they’re not!

 

Do you know whether your multiples are identical or fraternal? Does it make any difference?

 

Sadia is a business analyst living in El Paso, TX. Her twin daughters, J and M, will be turning 6 next month.

Discipline and Love

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“Why are you acting like you love J and not me?” my 5-year-old M asked me this morning, her voice full of tears.

That was quite the knife through the heart. Within minutes of learning that there were two little people growing in my womb, I had promised myself two things: I would never play favourites, and I would treat our children as individuals.

I wasn’t playing favourites today, of course. M would be allowed to snuggle up against me with her blankie too, once she’d served her well-earned 5 minutes in time out.

Here’s what led up to this moment:

We had a small quantity of chocolate milk in the fridge, a spring break treat. I had split it evenly between two cups, and offered them to the girls to tide them over while I prepared breakfast. J took a cup from me and downed the milk in one swallow, while M tensed every muscle in her body before wailing, “But I wanted that cup!”

I offered her the other cup. I offered to pour her milk into the cup J had just emptied. She didn’t want milk at all, she informed me, because J had the cup she wanted. This sort of interaction was par for the course at age 3, but not now. Instead of having the milk go to waste, I offered it to J. That was when M started pummeling me with her fists. Instant orders to time out prompted her accusation of my not seeming to love her.

M has been having some major self control issues all week. It’s been a stressful time for the whole family. J is more in touch with her emotions than the majority of adults I know, including me, so she’s been weathering this period unbelievably well. M, on the other hand, is either unaware of what’s really bothering her or unwilling to talk about it. I sat her down with crayons and paper yesterday, and drawing seemed to help some, but she has a way to go.

While she has a legitimate reason to be generally upset, this doesn’t excuse rudeness or hitting. She’s a month shy of turning 6, and we’ve been working with both girls on a variety of tools to help them maintain their composure and handle their emotions since they were 2. Deep breathing, playing with water in the sink, and taking some alone time with a book or toy are standard ways that both J and M deal with overflowing anger to make their way to a productive solution.

She finally calmed down. I explained to M that it was because I loved her that I took the time to help her behave like a grownup. If I didn’t love her, I wouldn’t care how she behaved. Surprisingly enough, she accepted that response.

A little later, M asked to play a game on my iPad. I told her that I wanted to let her play, but the fact that she wasn’t controlling her body well made me worry that she would break the thing. That cued another tantrum and time out. Once she returned, I told her that if she went 3 hours without a tantrum, I would have enough confidence in her self-control to let her play a game. Classic bribery, I know, but we work with what we have.

She made it 45 minutes until the next tantrum hit. She begged me to lower the bar. A tantrum-free hour should be enough, she thought. I do not negotiate with tantrum-throwers, so I held my ground.

It was afternoon before she asked if it had been 3 hours; I’d been head down in work and hadn’t thought about her request for the iPad game. I realized that she’d been playing nicely with J for 5 hours, blowing bubbles in the yard and inhabiting up an elaborate make-believe world that involved pirates and restaurant owners.

It wasn’t until I sat down to write this post that I noticed how M had worded her pain to me. (I jotted the sentence down immediately for use in this post.) She had asked me why I was acting like I loved J more. She didn’t actually accuse me of not loving them equally. Even in her deepest frustration with me, she was confident in the content and equal partition of my love, even if she didn’t like how I expressed it.

I think M’s going to be all right. We’ll get through this. I just need to take my deep breaths, play in the water, and take some alone time every now and then.

What’s your approach to fairness in parenting? How do you balance the needs of multiple children?

Sadia telecommutes from El Paso, TX to her job in Austin and is thankful that her 5-year-old identical twins can entertain one another 8 hours a day.

Family visit

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My wonderful mother came for a (too short of a) two week visit with my favorite (and only) sister’s almost 7yr nephew. Oh the fun we had! The kids don’t have many cousins to play with on a regular basis so to have one living in the house for a whole 2 weeks was beyond amazing for them.

I was slightly worried how the whole language barrier would go but turns out kids are pretty good communicators with couple words, gestures and primal noises. It took them about 10 minutes after we arrived from the airport to be playing ‘jungle’ in the basement (and the pace never slowed down after that). By the second night Daniel requested that we make a bed for him in the kids’ room.

Nathan was in awe of this older boy who knew how to climb trees and dive and speak Finnish flawlessly. It was fun to watch him soak in the ‘wisdom’ Daniel so openly shared. They planned jokes on the rest of us with such a speed and creativity that I had forgotten existed.

Prior to the visit I had worried about spending tons of money on admissions to several of our planned activities. I was thrilled to find out that through our library we could get discounted admissions to a whole lot of places. I met a mom from CA at the aquarium who told me that their library has a similar program. So if you’re planning excursions with a load of neighborhood kids or your own you should totally look into that. Our budget throwing $95 admission fee to our Zoo became pocket chance when we flashed our library pass and were charged only $12.

I had hoped that having a Finnish speaking child in the house would produce some language development in my kids but to my disappointment I don’t think they now speak one more word of Finnish than they did before the visit. Daniel however developed his understanding of English by quite a bit and would tell me sometimes when I started to translate something that ‘I already know what that means’. We have a month long trip planned to Finland in the fall. Who knows, maybe by the end of that trip my children will dazzle me with their ability to form a whole sentence in Finnish! Until then we have many memories to cherish and are looking forward to making new ones.

How do you find deals on fun things to do with the family? 

Hanna is trying to foster the sense of Finnish heritance in her kids (and her totally awesome American husband) in the outskirts of Boston. 

Reunited

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I got the best news in a long time today. A college friend’s twin boys were reunited at 2 months old. Her second NICU baby got to come home from the hospital, 7 weeks after his brother.

In the middle of the joy I felt for my friend, though, I felt an upwelling of the sadness, anger and helplessness that tainted the joy of my own babies’ release from the hospital, over 5 years ago. Homecoming is one of the ways that the NICU experience can differ for parents of premature multiples in comparison to preemie singletons. Many twins and triplets are released from the hospital simultaneously, but many are not.

Our daughters were born 7 weeks early, but had few problems apart from their small size. J had a hole in her heart, which eventually resolved itself, and M had a facial cleft that turned out not even to require surgery. Neither of these conditions required hospitalization, so they were textbook “feeder growers,” newborns who were hospitalized until they had fattened up enough to maintain their own body temperature and had the strength to suck enough nutrition to keep them healthy.

Our girls didn’t need any assistance breathing; they’ve been verbal and long-winded since the start. They were keep in warm isolettes, and fed a mixture of high calorie formula and my breast milk through feeding tubes inserted through their noses and threaded into their stomachs. Every three hours came a diaper change, weighing, blood sugar measurement, temperature measurement and feeding. We watched every number as they rose and fell, and I promised myself I would take notes when they got home so as not to double feed one baby and starve the other. J and M were cared for by the same nurse, so their schedules were offset by 15 minutes. One benefit to having NICU babies was that they were on a clockwork schedule by the time they came home.

There were 3 criteria to be met, we were told, before the girls could come home. They had to weigh 5 lbs (2.25 kg), be able to maintain their own body temperature, and take 8 meals in a row by mouth, drinking at least 31 mls of formula/breast milk each time. Every now and then, when J asks for her “warmed up milk, please,” at breakfast or dinner, I wonder at the way she guzzles 8 oz of milk down and think back to the days I tried to get her drink 1 oz by force of will alone.

We wanted all the girls’ energy to go to growing at first. Somewhere in the first week, I think, they were introduced to doll-sized bottles. It took a few tries to get them to suck, first 1 ml, then 3, more and more each meal. They finally made it up to 31 mls at a time, but couldn’t keep it up two meals in a row. It was just too much work.

M couldn’t finish her bottle at every feeding, but she made an effort. Once, I was even allowed to let her suckle at my breast, although the nurses took her away before she exhausted herself. J was less predictable. She’d suck like a champ and then suddenly get distracted, seemingly more interested in playing with the bottle than drinking from it. Two weeks in, she broke our hearts by refusing two meals in a row and being put back on her feeding tube. It was the only time I saw my husband so upset that he couldn’t stay in the NICU to monitor every last detail of our babies’ care. A friend took him out for a beer.

When our girls were 2 weeks old, the hospital staff pronounced them to be the healthiest babies in the NICU. They could afford to be downgraded to a less fancy-schmancy NICU within the same hospital network. We talked it through and agreed to free up their beds. However, when the paperwork arrived, we were asked to sign a waiver releasing both the hospitals and the ambulance service of responsibility for the babies during their transport. There was no way we were signing that, so the girls stayed put.

Two days later, M was ready to come home. She hadn’t quite made the weight cutoff, but they couldn’t see any reason she wouldn’t be just fine at home. She passed the carseat test, and home we went.

It takes a lot of blankets to secure a baby of less than 5 lbs in a carseat.

J was still on her feeding tube. I felt more torn as a mother of twins in that moment than I ever did before or since. I was celebrating the health of one of my daughters, but leaving the other alone at the hospital, without even her sister with her. My husband was away for an army training exercise, and I was still recovering from my C-section. Fortunately, my father-in-law was able to stay for 3 weeks, and drove us the 30 miles to the hospital every day so that I could deliver breast milk and steal a few moments with J. I couldn’t stay too long, though, since M was in her carseat in the hospital parking garage with Grampy.

After 5 long, agonizing days, J was ready to come home. It finally felt like my life as a parent could start. My friend just ended 48 days of that waiting, and I hope that her heart can finally begin to heal.

Did you get to bring your babies home at the same time?

Sadia’s daughters, M and J, are still short for their nearly 6 years, but Sadia is short for her nearly 33, so it works out nicely. They guzzle milk, grow, and keep each other busy in El Paso, TX.