Category Archives: Other people

Public Versus Private

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This is more of a reflection on being pregnant for the first time, than it is related to multiples, so take from it what you will. I am 16 weeks pregnant with twins, now, and there have been plenty of things that have been surprising thus far. (Who knew that a pregnancy symptom was getting bloody noses? Or your gums bleeding like crazy when you floss?) There have been plenty of things that haven’t been so surprising, too. (It taking a while to set in that there are babies growing in there, not just unexplained weight gain, etc.)

Of course, I knew that people would walk up to you and touch your stomach without hesitating or comment on how big or small you are. But, I didn’t know how uncomfortable I’d feel in that spotlight. It could be that I’ve been a therapist in the realm of eating disorder treatment for 7 years and have it quite engrained in my head that you just don’t comment on the size of other women’s bodies, positively or negatively. It could be that I’m a feminist and believe that women’s bodies are private property. Sometimes there isn’t even a touching of the stomach. But, I’ll run into one of my parents friends who I know knows that I’m pregnant with twins, but I haven’t seen since. And their eyes immediately go to my stomach. I’m sure I’ve done this a gazillion times to other pregnant women, too. It’s natural. You hear they’re pregnant, and the first thing you do is look to see if they’re showing. And if you hear they’re having twins-all the more reason to see if they look bigger than you’d expect. But there’s something in that gaze that feels invasive to me. It feels like implied judgment-are you eating enough for three of you? You don’t look as big/little as so-and-so did when she was pregnant with twins… I know, I’ll need to get used to this.

Another thing. Thanks to you all, I was prepared for many of the intrusive questions: “Do twins run in your family?” “Did you do fertility treatments?” And for the unwarranted commentary: “Better you than me.” “Double trouble,” and the like. I don’t think I was prepared for how many people, most of whom don’t even have multiples, would “warn” me about how hard it will be. I want to make a t-shirt, or a stamp for my forehead that reads, “Yes, I know it will be hard. Please be excited for us anyways.” I’ve already got the list in my head of things never to say to infertile women. (“Don’t worry, you’re young.” “If you just relax, it’ll happen.” “At least you don’t have cancer.”) And now I’m starting to compile a list in my head of things I’ll try never to say to a pregnant woman. My number one: “You’re tired now, just wait!”

The upside to all of this is that I’m probably developing a thicker skin. And I suppose a positive way to look at the very private experience of being pregnant becoming public is that many of these people are simply trying to help take care of me and my growing babies.

What would you put on the list of things you’ll never say to a pregnant woman?

And the Older One Is …

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J was pulled out of my body a full 2 minutes before her sister M, because it was her amniotic sac that had ruptured while M’s remained intact.

I didn’t tell the girls their birth order for 6 years. When people asked them who was older–why is that no one ever asks who is younger?–they’d simply say, “We’re same age sisters. We’re twins. No one’s older.”

Not every curious stranger was satisfied with this answer, although it did stop the majority of them from pushing for a definitive response. When I was interrogated further, I had a canned answer for my inquisitors:

I’ve avoided telling the girls who was born first, because people automatically assign birth order stereotypes to children. They expect the older one to be more mature, more responsible, sometimes even smarter. That makes sense, I suppose, for kids born at different times. I know from my own experience that being an older sibling makes you grow up and take responsibility. My children are the same age as one another. The random order in which they were removed–by C-section, mind you–from my womb shouldn’t dictate how people see them. They’ve got enough stereotypes to contend with being identical twins.

I once got a response to my spiel that got my then-husband’s blood pounding. This friend of a friend said something along the lines of, “That’s stupid. Why would anyone assign birth order stereotypes to multiples?” The girls’ dad whispered in my ear, “I dunno. Why would anyone ask what order they were born in? That’s stupid too.”

For 6 years, cute innocent answers from little girls and canned responses from mommy kept me from needing to tell M and J who had been born first. They did refer to each other as “big sister” and “little sister,” based on height differences. My daughter M tells me that the trick to telling apart the 3 sets of identical twins split between her class and J’s is that, “the shorties are all in my class.”

One day, though, my Grand Plan for Birth Order Question Response stopped working. I was distracted, filling out paperwork in a waiting room, while several garrulous women pushed J and M for an answer on who was older. I heard J say, “She’s older,” and turned to see her pointing at M.

“No,” I told her firmly. “You’re the same age. J, you came out of my belly first.”

I thought this was the beginning of the end. All the birth order stereotypes of the universe were going to descend on my daughters and smother them.

Two days later, the question came again: “Who’s older?”

J’s answered floored me: “I came out first, but we’re the same age.”

As in most matters of parenting, I needn’t have worried so much.

Do your multiples know their birth order? Are their personalities typical of the older child/younger child dynamic?

 

Sadia overthinks her parenting decisions in Austin, TX, where she takes a break from single mommyhood by going to her full time job in higher education information technology.

Can I Hold Your Baby?

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Hi all! I’m Rebecca D, a middle school teacher by trade and SAHM for the year. My fraternal twin boys are 5 months old. We live in lovely San Francisco.

When I was pregnant, I became quite the neighborhood fixture with my daily walks. I trundled up and down the block (sometimes aaaallll the way to the ice cream shop), happy to finally be out of the house, yet already looking for a bench to sit down. You know the drill, twin mamas. Yay, I’m up and going somewhere! Let’s do this!! Please get me back home immediately, everything is uncomfortable and I can’t make it another step.

My point is, I had a lot of time to get used to the attention – from the horrified stares to the kind smiles. Once the boys were born, of course, we couldn’t go into a store without hearing the usual exclamations/questions/weird things people say to babies. And everyone, EVERYONE, thinks one of my kids is a girl. I think the general public has a secret wish that all twins are boy/girl. But I digress.

I expected these things, and have become accustomed to them. It can be sort of nice or damned annoying depending on how much I’m struggling to remember what the hell I came into Smart and Final for.

But there is one comment that is increasingly catching me off guard. People totally ask me if they can hold one of my babies.

Do parents of singletons get this too? Or is it just a twin thing, ’cause we like, have a spare?

I was at the library today for Baby Rhyme Time, aka Somewhere to Take Your Infants (it’s pretty great. And free.). I had one of my boys in the Bjorn and I was holding the other on my hip. We were singing and dancing along with the rest when another mom commented on their cuteness (aw thanks), asked if they were identical (one has red hair and one has black hair so…no), and then asked if I wanted any help (I got this, lady). A few minutes later, she turned around again and asked if she could please hold one.

Is it just me? But hell no. I’m not handing my infant over to a stranger, no matter how many I have.

The thing is, this happens on a regular basis. Yet I cannot imagine someone asking a parent of a singleton, someone they have never seen before in their lives, if they could hold the baby.

So I have to know. Do I live in the most baby-crazy community in the entire world and folks are just looking to get their fix? Is their cuteness so irresistible that people are drawn to my kids like moths to the flame? Or is this just another strange thing that twin parents hear because we happen to have more than one?

Multiples and Age Hierarchy

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My ex-husband and I decided early on not to tell the girls who was born first, because we thought that introducing an older-younger sibling dynamic to our twins’ relationship wouldn’t be healthy. Reanbean has written on this topic on HDYDI before.

Bangladesh is so tiny as to be nearly invisible on the world map.My family hails from Bangladesh, a tiny country in South Asia, surrounded on three sides by India, and on the other by the Indian Ocean. The culture is a very hierarchical one, and birth order is of great significance. Our having twins seriously messes with that hierarchy. I have a cousin living in Missouri who 9-year-old son is constantly perplexed by how to fit his twin cousins into the family hierarchy. He pesters me relentlessly to tell him who is older, to which I consistently respond, “They’re the same age.”

His question is a practical one. Kinship terms in Bengali hang on birth order. A paternal uncle who is older than your father is your Chacha; one who is younger is a Kaka. A younger sibling calls an older brother or male cousin Bhaiya, while the older sibling just uses the younger’s name. The female older sibling term is Apa. I recently learned that I’ve been committing a major faux pas by calling my brother-in-law Dula Bhai. Since he’s married to my younger sister, I should refer to him by name even though I’m younger than he is.

My refusal to label my daughters as older and younger has really messed with the family order on the Bangladeshi side. I feel for my cousin’s son and his confusion. I’ve been calling my brother-in-law the wrong thing for 3 years now.

Not long ago, I found myself unable to deflect the birth order question. I’ll tell you how it went another day. The result wasn’t the one I’d expected.

 

Sadia is a single mom of 6-year-old monozygotic girls living in Central Texas.

Trust

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I recently had to take an emergency trip from my home in Texas to London, where I was needed to help care for my 2-year-old nephew. A co-worker pointed out that this went against the norm. It’s normally the UK that exports its nannies to the US, he said.

It didn’t make sense to bring my daughters with me, financially or practically. I didn’t want them to miss school. We wouldn’t even get to see London because I was going to have to focus on my nephew. Besides, I wouldn’t be able to get them passports in time. I cut it close with my own passport as it was. It had expired, but, fortunately, I fell within the criteria for an emergency travel credential, a passport substitute, good for this trip only. I drove 300+ miles roundtrip while my first graders were at school to obtain it.

I had to figure out how my daughters would be cared for while I was away. Their father lives 600 miles away and wasn’t going to be available. I don’t have any family nearby. What I do have is the village that it takes to raise a child, the people who are more family than family. These are the people who love J and M nearly as much as I do, from choice, not obligation.

I sent out two text messages, one to our babysitter Angie, and one to our former neighbour Heidi.

Angie used to teach at the daycare J and M attended for over 4 years. She’s known the girls for over half their lives, and is a trained childcare provider. She’s creative, funny, and affectionate, but doesn’t accept any disobedience or lack of discipline.

Heidi’s daughter is two months younger than my girls, to the day, and our girls have grown up like sisters, at least sisters where one sister can’t tell the other two apart. Heidi used to be the person I’d call if the girls wanted to play outside while I was in the middle of cooking dinner. As early as age 3, I knew I could trust them to go out the front door by themselves as long as Heidi knew they were out. I’d just usually end up stretching dinner to feed both families. I taught Heidi’s daughter how to bake, and she taught mine how to navigate the swampy area behind our first home. All 3 girls have known all their lives to listen to both sets of parents as if they were their own, and that the different rules of each house started at the edge of lawn and extended from the sidewalk to the back yard.

Both Angie and Heidi immediately said they could help care for the girls whiIe I was away. I went with Angie, because she could come and stay at our house with the kids, minimizing the disruption, avoiding the packing, and saving me having to find someone else to feed the cats and discipline the kitten. Her nannying schedule worked out to be a perfect complement to the girls’ school and after school care times.

I didn’t just want a babysitter for the kids, someone who would just ensure that they were safe and on schedule. I wanted someone who could fill in as Mom while I was away. Someone who would address their concerns about my absence openly and completely. Someone who wouldn’t take shortcuts to get through the evening, but would instead carry forward the work of raising the girls, discussing the choices they’d made during the day, challenging them to be responsible, building their confidence while emphasizing humility. What a gift to have two such people actually available to us on a week’s notice! There are still others in our community who would have gladly done it, had their work or childcare obligations allowed.

While I was in London, I videoconferenced with the girls on Skype every day, some days twice. I could tell that they were comfortable and happy. Their smiles were genuine, their stories from their day those of typical 6-year-olds, and their trust in Angie palpable. A couple of times, they had worries to discuss with me, but for the most part they wanted to hear about my day, be silly with their cousin, and confirm that I was okay before getting back to their busy lives of art projects and games of pretend.

Angie was the first person I gave a key to my home to after I bought it. There is nothing more precious to me than my children. I’d never leave my kids with someone I wouldn’t trust with my house keys. Anyone I can trust with them, I can trust with all that I own. After all, I’m trusting them with my life.

 

Sadia lives with her 6-year-old daughters in the greater Austin, Texas area. Her trip to London was her first to her home country in over a decade. She was too busy with a toddler and bureaucracy to see much of London.  Still, she was reminded that snow needn’t be too deep to crunch underfoot, that people walk on the left there, and that British biscuits are a far superior comfort food to American cookies. She heard a lot more Portuguese and Spanish than was spoken in London in her childhood, and was happy to learn that 11 years had put no dent in her closeness to her cousins or closest college buddy.

The Soda Culture

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The first graders at my daughters’ school took a field trip to see Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. I’m all for field trips. If this one got kids excited about Dr. Seuss and reading, so much the better.

There was one thing about the field trip announcement that bothered me, though. The movie snack pack would include popcorn, soda and a treat.

This note describes a school field trip to see The Lorax.

Am I alone in the universe in thinking that giving 5- to 7-year-old children soda to drink crosses a line? The popcorn, and even the candy, don’t bother me much. We eat both these things at home, in moderation. Adding soda to that, though, seemed like too much. All the more astonishing to me was that my girls weren’t even offered water, even though I’d jotted a note on both their permission slips requesting water for them. At lunch, too, they told me that they were only offered sodas.

J and M’s first exposure to sugary sodas was soon after we moved to El Paso. They were given it at daycare. They then stopped going to daycare, and fast. Once they’d had a taste, I didn’t think that forbidding sugary drinks would accomplish the goal of good decision-making. Instead, we struck a deal. When I drank soda, they could drink soda. This has been keeping us all honest. We limit ourselves to a sweet drink, other than juice or milk, once a month, just as we limit chocolate and other candy to once or twice a week.

Obviously, kids drinking soda is part of the culture here, but is it any surprise that we have an obesity problem? How can I encourage the kids to choose healthy options when their peers often don’t?

How do you go about bucking trends or local culture when you want your kids to choose differently?

Sadia, her husband, and their twin 5-year-old daughters, M and J, are still learning about the culture of the Borderlands, following a move to El Paso from Central Texas in August 2011.

Home Economics

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Our daughters’ elementary school has organized a raffle to raise money for travel to Austin. I’ve never felt strongly about raffles one way or the other, but when my daughter J told me, “My teacher said I MUST bring a dollar tomorrow to get a new bicycle,” my reaction was strong and immediate. “No way. Besides, you already have a perfectly good bicycle.”

By the time I got around to discussing this matter with my husband, I’d figured out what bothered me so much about the raffle. Moving to a house with 300 fewer square feet than our old one helped me realize how much more stuff we have than we actually need or even use regularly. The kids have too many books and toys in their room to keep tidy, and the last they need is more stuff. We don’t want the raffle prize.

Even more important, though, is that the idea of a raffle, betting a small amount in the hopes of winning big, is in direct opposition to the ethic of hard work. We don’t want to teach our children that success comes by way of shortcuts, but rather that rewards are earned. If they want to participate in the raffle to support their school, I’m all for that, but not if they’re just in it for the prize.

We’ve taught our children that giving to others is important. On their 5th birthday, we requested canned foods for donation to the local pantry in lieu of gifts. When a neighbour asked J what she wanted for her birthday, she said, “A toy would be fine, but it’s nicer to bring food for hungry people.” If we’re going to support the school, I’d rather donate money outright than buy a raffle ticket, and will ask the principal about how to go about doing that instead.

It isn’t the school’s job, of course, to teach our children values. Teaching kids what is important falls entirely on the parents. However, the sale of raffle tickets and junk food to the children at school makes it that much more important that we explain to them how we choose to financially support the institutions we care about. I can’t help feeling that these fund-raising approaches fly in the face of the educational mission of the school. No one teaches home economics in school any more, but I would imagine that a key lesson would be to invest wisely, and that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

How did you/do you intend to introduce the concepts of money and responsible finances to your children?

Sadia’s identical twin daughters attend public school in El Paso, where her husband is a soldier. When not over-thinking every tiny aspect of the girls’ lives, she works full time as a computer geek.

MLK Day Is More Than a Day Off

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Growing up in the UK and Bangladesh, I was raised on Mahatma Gandhi’s life story and words as the embodiment of a worldwide move towards civil rights and mutual respect between people and between peoples. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. embodied those same values, and today’s US-wide commemoration of his achievements is a reminder to discuss his legacy with our daughters, now aged 5.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t taking full advantage on an extra day off work and school. We let J and M stay up an hour past bedtime last night to watch The Empire Strikes Back for the first time. Do you remember the first time you heard the line, “Luke, I am your father.”? It was quite something to see the looks on our girls’ faces! We’re showing the Star Wars films to the girls in the order in which they were released. We’re old-school nerds like that.

Before I read Nurtureshock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, I hadn’t given much thought to talking to the girls about diversity. I figured that our multicultural, interracial, international, interfaith marriage would speak for itself. Bronson and Merryman’s chapter on talking about race influenced me deeply, however, and I committed to discussing these issues with our daughters.

M was the one to bring up MLK at dinner last night. “We watched a movie about King Martin Junior at school,” she told us.

Dr. King

We clarified Dr. King’s name, and talked about his accomplishments. We boiled it down to something pretty simple: Dr. King helped people understand that everyone could be friends, regardless of the colour of their skin. “Oh!” observed M, “Like we’re a family, but you have dark brown skin and me and Sissy and Daddy is peach?” She has previously described her very fair-skinned White grandmother as “pink.”

Sadia and family

That seemed like a decent enough introduction to the lessons of MLK Day, so we left it that for dinner time. Later, however, J brought up MLK, and I had a burst of inspiration.

Me: You’ve always had a sister, right! And that’s pretty special. Does that mean you can’t have friends who don’t have sisters?
J: No. [Classmate] has no sister, and he is my friend. I don’t know very much about having no sister and brother except you have to play by yourself and that is sad.
Me: You and [Classmate] are different when it comes to having brothers or sisters, but you can learn from each other.
J: I love [Former neighbour] and she has no brother or sister.
Me: I love her too. It would be pretty sad if you only had friends who were exactly like you.
J: I would miss [Former neighbour].
Me: What Martin Luther King, Jr. and his friends taught us was to be friends with people who are different in all kinds of ways.

I could use that reminder myself. It’s time for me to stop complaining about how rude and insular people are in our new town, and make a real effort at understanding the culture here. It’s time for me to embrace differences. As is so often the case, teaching my children reminds me to a better person.

In what ways has raising your children reminded you of your values? Are you a better person for being a parent?

Sadia is working US army wife and mother of 5-year-old twin girls. She and her family recently moved to El Paso, Texas.

Teach a Child to Grocery Shop…

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My husband has a very physical job, and our daughters, M and J, are incredibly active kids. It takes a little more effort on my part to fit exercise into my day, since I have a desk job, but I do my best. I will admit that I haven’t been good about working out since we moved to El Paso, so I’m thankful for Goddess in Progress‘s weight loss contest giving me the push I need to get back in shape. I like aerobics and Pilates, with the guidance of exercise videos in the privacy of my home. The twins and our cat join in with differing levels of effort.

Alongside intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, social responsibility, and self esteem, my husband and I believe that it is our responsibility to teach our children about physical well-being.

Unfortunately, our daughters’ school isn’t helping. Although they have daily physical education, they’re teaching the kids all about junk food. Cookies and slushies are available to purchase at lunch time. No carrots. No sliced apples or bananas. After school, there are cupcakes and cookies on sale, tempting the kids right before they exit the school and are handed over to their parents. On Halloween, each child was asked to bring a bag of candy for the school trick-or-treat event. Every classmate’s birthday heralds cupcakes with neon icing.

The other day, J volunteered to accompany me to the grocery store while M stayed home with Daddy. As I reached for the box of Cheerios M had requested, J asked whether she could choose her own cereal.

“Sure,” I told her, “But you have to choose one that has 6 grams or fewer of sugar per serving. Any more than that makes it a treat cereal instead of a breakfast cereal.”

I showed J the nutrition facts on the side of cereal box I was holding, pointing out where the sugar grams were. She picked one brightly coloured sugary cereal after another, rejecting each one for having too much sugar. I suggested that she’d have better luck if she looked at some granola boxes. She finally settled on Kashi Honey Sunshine.

6 grams of sugar“Mommy,” J asked me, “can I teach M how to look at sugar next time when she comes shopping with us?”

She had her chance tonight at dinner, when M asked for a third serving of Welch’s sparkling grape juice. My husband told her that he thought she’d had enough sugar for the day, and offered her water instead. J showed M how to read the label and exclaimed, “38 sugars! That’s a whole bunch.”

“That’s true,” I told her. “This juice is a treat. We drink it for the flavour, not because it’s feeding our bodies. It’s fine to have a treat every so often, but it’s very important to make sure that we get all the different things our bodies need. We need protein to be strong, and fiber not to have hurty poops. Our body needs some fat to stay healthy, but not too much.”

For the rest of meal, the girls pored over the nutrition label on the juice bottle, asking about the different nutrients. My favourite was J’s reading of calcium as “Colosseum.” There was something quite lovely about the image of ancient architecture bolstering our bones.

I taught myself about healthy eating in my early 20s. Both my parents developed high blood pressure in their 30s, and I didn’t want to go down that path. Rich, fatty Bengali curries with massive quantities of rice must have contributed to their cardiovascular issues and my father’s subsequent Type II diabetes.

It certainly helps that both my husband and I love to cook. It’s hard to put too much junk in our bodies when we’re aware of every ingredient we eat. We don’t tend to count calories, and we’re not averse to eating out, but we try to be responsible, while allowing ourselves our treats. I’m fond of chocolate, and my husband of red wine.

I hadn’t planned to teach our girls to read nutrition labels at 5. I imagined that the model we set at home would show them how to make good food decisions. Peer pressure, though, is a strong force, and M told us today that she had bought 6 cookies at lunch to share with her friends. We don’t want the girls to feel like they need to diet or deny themselves the occasional sweet treat. However, we do want them to understand that while eating is a social and pleasurable activity, nutrition is the primary role of food. Food for taste alone is an extra, and to be taken in moderation.

Are you surprised to hear that junk food is being sold in elementary schools? What would you do if you discovered this in the school your children were to attend?

Classroom Placement: Part III – Full Circle

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This afternoon, I received an email from my daughters’ school informing me that a spot had been secured in Mrs. G’s 1st grade classroom for our daughter M. She starts Monday.

Mrs. G is a great teacher, and a warm and lovely person. I once ran into her at the grocery store and we chatted for an hour. I’ve met her granddaughter, a sweet, well-behaved little girl. In the classroom, Mrs. G is loving but firm, supportive but demanding. Still, my head began to pound as I tried to think through the repercussions of this placement.

Our daughter J, you see, is already in Mrs. G’s class. At the recommendation of J’s kindergarten teacher, and following much agonizing soul-searching, we decided to allow her to skip 75% of kindergarten and 25% of 1st grade to join Mrs. G’s class midstream. M stayed in kindergarten for a further 9 weeks, which brings us to today.

Having M skip to 1st grade mid-year is a no-brainer. The academic work is no challenge for her, and her wonderful kindergarten teacher took the time to make sure that M is emotionally ready. M even spent some time in the 1st grade classroom before the holidays to confirm that she wouldn’t be overwhelmed. My husband and I have already talked through the consequences of J being a year younger than her peers, and having one fewer year in school. The same concerns apply to M. Weighing everything, we decided to let J move on up when her teacher recommended it, and we’re simply doing the same with M. That headache has, for the most part, dulled.

The source of today’s headache is that M and J will be in the same classroom. A lot of thought went into our choosing to exercise our right to have our daughters placed in different classrooms when they entered school. In a nutshell, we thought that the girls needed to establish themselves as individuals, both in their own perception and in that of their peers. Texas state law gives us the right to demand that our daughters be separated, but I recognize that the school has already gone to lengths to accomodate the girls’ learning styles, prior education and emotional maturity.

I may be worn out by the emotional drain of trying to make the right decisions for our daughters in uncharted territory. I certainly don’t have any desire to fight the school. My husband and I spoke briefly this evening, and agreed that the basic goals of splitting the girls into separate classes had been accomplished. They have separate friends. They know that they are liked as individuals, and not just as a set. They have learned to rely on friends for companionship, and to do so without Sissy to fall back on. J and M understand that they don’t have to do everything together.

There’s an entirely new set of concerns now. Mrs. G’s class is J’s territory. Will M be treated as her own person by the other kids, or will she simply be seen as J’s twin, the target of all the attention and assumptions about twins we were trying to avoid?

The girls are a little hesitant about the change. M doesn’t want to leave her kindergarten teacher, whom she loves dearly. J isn’t quite ready to share her spot as class cutie. She was a little miffed at her classmates’ excitement when M visited last month. She told me that she felt that the girls who told M she was cute were “M’s 1st grade girls.” They usually tell J that she is cute; she’s the class clown. She didn’t say that it had upset her, but I could read between the lines. Mrs. G told me that she had sat M next to another child during the school day, but recess and lunch are a different matter.

Mrs. G is someone we trust to teach our children, so it’s time for a leap of faith. We can always request the school to place M and J in different classrooms next year.

What do you think? Should I be asking the school to accomodate M and J’s placement in separate classrooms for the rest of the school year?

Sadia and her husband parent their 5-year-old daughters in El Paso, TX as full-time volunteers. They each have income-generating careers on the side, she in IT and he in the military.