[Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered]
by Diana Day
The Australian Multiple Birth Association, supported by the Australian Twin Registry, is holding its first annual TwinsPlus Festival in Canberra, Australia on March 11.
AMBA is a network and resource for multiple birth families.
The Australian Twin Registry, according to its website, is the largest in the world with a whopping 30,000 sets of twins registered.
You can find out about other twin festivals on the Center for the Study of Multiple Birth’s website.
by Diana Day
Djuna thrills to the scale of the Sharp & Fellows #7 locomotive at Griffith Park’s Travel Town Museum
Photo by Dwayne Booth (a.k.a. Djuna’s Daddy)
We just got back from Travel Town in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park! It’s our favorite place to take our 2 1/2-year old daughters. This section from an article I wrote recently for the Daily Breeze, a local Southern California newspaper, sums up why we all thrill to the scale of Travel Town, a museum full of real trains on real tracks:
When our twins turned two, we took them to a seaside amusement park to celebrate. After about an hour of loud music, scary rides, gross hot dogs and tears, I turned to my husband and said to him, “Remind me. Why didn’t we go to Travel Town?â€
“It’s mellow, it’s peaceful. … It’s a nice, relaxing place to come with your family on the weekends,†said Kurt Ulbrich, operations manager of Travel Town Museum, located in Griffith Park. “It’s kind of a unique museum. … It’s more hands-on than your average museum,†he added.
Travel Town Museum has been a destination for Southern California children since its founding in 1952 by Los Angeles Recreation and Parks employee and rail enthusiast Charley Atkins. The museum is mostly outdoors, some of it under an elegant European-style pavilion, and boasts an impressive collection of authentic locomotives, freight cars, cabooses and more, dating from the late 1800s to the 1940s.
“It was originally considered to be a ‘railroad petting zoo.’ That’s what they actually referred to it as in correspondence,†said Tom Breckner, Management Analyst II of Travel Town Museum. …
“The scale of the locomotives is thrilling for kids,†Breckner said. “It’s something special to be in that space, to look through the windows and imagine yourself a railroader traveling down the tracks … that’s always something that will be accessible [at Travel Town],†he added.
Dinah and Djuna, since they have been able to walk, love to run alongside the huge trains, yelling, “Trains! Trains!” They love being boosted up into the great engines and to look out the windows at all the friendly park patrons below.
In an increasingly virtual world, it’s a great opportunity for kids to experience a real train in a full-on sensory environment, to balance little sneakers on real train tracks.
And even though the giant scale is exciting, of course the girls love something just their size at Travel Town — the miniature train ride and the indoor play area complete with a Thomas the Tank Engine train table.
And they don’t mind the hot dogs either.
by Diana Day
Considering that the media overplays certain predictable twin and multiple stories, it’s nice to see a couple of different types of articles in the last few days.
One story circulating is about whether twins and multiples should be separated in school. The article has a good review positions pro and con and brings up some issues I had never thought of (since my twins are not yet school age), like the possibility that having twins/multiples in different classrooms with different teachers and different assignments creates havoc at home.
[Check back soon here on BeTwinned.com to see what Dr. Eileen Pearlman of Twinsight.com has to say about separating twins in school and about the development of twin/multiple identities in general.]
Another recently published article is about increasing birth rates of twins and multiples. The article is superficial and laden with generalizations:
Twins tend not to be the very top achievers in their fields, many observers have informally noted, although no one has actually studied this. We have had no twin presidents, for example. Bill Gates isn’t a twin; Picasso wasn’t a twin, nor was Bach or Marie Curie. On the other hand, twins do excel in athletics, perhaps even beyond what their numbers would indicate, with well-known examples such as gymnast Paul Hamm, an Olympic gold medalist, and his brother, Morgan.
The article also deals too quickly with the topic of how these increasing rates will affect society. But, it was nice to see some positive press: “There is also anecdotal evidence, according to Segal, that twins, because of their unusual side-by-side upbringing in which so much is shared, tend to be concerned with fairness and sensitive to the needs of others.”
Even though the reporting on the second article is not first-rate, I note it here out of curiousity … maybe we are about to see a little surge in informative mainstream news about twins and multiples.
by Diana Day
My daughters have this little catch-all phrase they use to ask my husband Dwayne and I to clean up or fix something: kemp-kemp. I’m not sure what it’s derived from, perhaps “clean up” or something like that.
It infuriates me, and I don’t really know why.
I think it makes me feel overly bossed around. Being bossed around by 2 1/2-year old twins is the story of my life now, but I am normally at peace with it. I figure it’s the job of a 2 1/2-year old to boss a little; after all, they are still learning the finer points of courtesy. But for some reason, the “kemp-kemp” command is more than I can swallow.
This morning, as Dinah and Djuna were eating their cereal, if the tiniest pin prick of a drop of milk splashed on the table, they delighted in calling out, “Kemp-kemp, Mama, kemp-kemp!” I felt myself getting irritated, so I put on my cleverest Mommy thinking cap and decided to put a paper towel under their bowls so they wouldn’t be so bothered by the little drops.
Djuna loved the paper towel, but Dinah was dead-set against it, so I removed the offending obect. As soon as I turned my back to put Dinah’s paper towel back on the kitchen counter, she called out, “Kemp-kemp, Mama, kemp-kemp!” As if it’s not enough to have to wipe up every little drop of spilled milk, I have to endure it from a toddler who is, essentially, saying, “Waiter, get a move on!”
But, we all made it to naptime, exhausted. Looking at my disaster of a house, I realize that I have to kemp-kemp just to navigate safely through the ocean of toys to the kitchen so I can make myself a relaxing cup of cocoa.
So, kemp-kemp it is. And then cocoa.