Monthly Archives: June 2012

Paired Imagination

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I’m not a huge fan of driving—I put off learning how to drive until I was 25—but I do love overhearing my daughters’ conversations in the car.

Yesterday was Movie Day at the summer day camp our 6-year-olds are attending. The kids were invited to bring pillows and blankets, and the older kids were put to work first thing in the morning dividing a massive quantity of popcorn into single servings.

J and M decided to take their bedtime friends with them for Movie Day.

Posed toys

The girls asked me to photograph their toys to acknowledge their first day of school, and added hair accessories before posing them, to mark the occasion. The blue Care Bear is M's Fuey, the other J's Fuzzy.

Before getting into the car, J had a serious discussion with her lovey, Fuzzy, about what she could expect at school.

“This is the first time she’s gone out to the world,” J explained to me, dead serious.

“Fuey’s been to school with me before, but this is a new school for her,” M added.

In the car, there was a discussion of how to ensure the toys’ safety. The girls finally settled on using the tightening straps on their carseats as seat belts for their toys.

“Fuzzy needs a baby seat,” J explained. “She’s only zero. She’ll be only zero forever.”

“Fuey only gets to 7 years old,” M chimed in. “Right now she’s 6, no 5. When she has a birthday, she’ll be 6. On her next birthday, she’ll be 7. But the next birthday, she’ll still be 7, because of magic.”

“Yes,” J agreed, “Magic keeps Fuzzy zero. It’s okay, little Fuzzy. You’ll like my friends.”

I know that most kids build extensive and vivid imaginary worlds, but I love that I get to hear my girls doing it. In addition to their toys having very real personalities, both girls have distinct imaginary friends who, on occasion, they lend to Sissy for the purpose of populating a game. My favourite of their imaginary friends is Dustin, M’s friend, named after a coworker of mine. He has a habit of refusing to answer to “Dustin,” instead choosing alternate names to go by on a nearly daily basis.

What do your kids’ imaginary worlds look like? What do you overhear them discussing?

Sadia, her twin daughters J and M, and her grandchildren, Fuey and Fuzzy, live in El Paso, Texas.

Breaking Lockstep

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Today, I took J to the dentist to get her newly erupted adult molars sealed. While she was in the capable hands of the dental assistant, M and I sat in the room and read silently.

J is helping out at the dentist.

This sort of this is the norm for many families; while one sibling is involved in a procedure or activity, the others have to wait it out. For us, though, this is new. All our twin daughters’ preventive care and major milestones have come on nearly identical schedules. They crawled within a week of each other and both walked within a month of their first birthday. They both needed speech therapy, progressed through it together, and graduated on the same day. They have matching cavities.

J, however, now has her first molars, and M doesn’t. They have intensely different personalities, but I can’t help thinking that this divergence in their dental schedule marks a shift from the lockstep development timeline they’ve shared thus far.

Do your multiples reach milestones around the same time? Which ones?

Sadia’s identical daughters, M and J, are 6-year-old rising second graders in El Paso, TX.