[Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered]
Nearly 100 families attended a recent convention held by the Triplet Connection in Phoenix, Arizona.
Parents had the opportunity to talk with veteran parents and to learn parenting tips and time and money management.
If you missed the convention this year, don’t fret — check out the Triplet Connection website for information about next year’s event.
At last, I’ve seen the answer to an interesting question I’ve often wondered about. Read the first item in this Q & A from Northeastern Pennsylvania’s TimesLeader.com to see the explanation of why identical twins don’t share the same fingerprints.
I interpret this doctor’s response to mean that even though identical twins are created from identical genetic material, differences — like fingerprints — occur as that material interacts with the environment and within each individual.
The Manitoba Human Rights Commission has decided it will hear the complaints of twin Canadian teens who want to play hockey with the boys.
Check out the most recent news & video and the news from May when the story first broke.
And check out this news item about twin British teens who have qualified as soccer referrees. Be sure to scroll down the page to see the sweet picture of the girls in their uniforms.
by Diana Day
While nesting and neatening last night, I found two wooden nickels.
Just before going on a trip by myself, without my husband and our two-and-a-half-year old daughters, I tend to nest.
I think it’s a morbid impulse. I neaten and spruce things up so that if something tragic happens to me, I’ll leave behind a tranquil domestic scene as a reminder of me or as a comfort — I was here. Dwayne, I was your wife. Dinah and Djuna, I was your mother. I loved you all more than you’ll ever know.
I realize that a tranquil domestic scene is not typical when I am here, so I don’t know how my family will suddenly associate neatness and classy candle arrangements with me if I am gone. And I also realize that I have less chance of being tragically killed on an airplane than I do navigating the Los Angeles freeways like I do every day, but there I go, neatening anyway.
The wooden nickels I found during last night’s pre-trip domestic binge are souveniers from the “Train Ride to Santa” at Griffith Park’s Travel Town. We went for the first time this past year and loved it.
It was a nighttime event in a place we only ever go in the daytime, so that alone made it magical. We got to ride the little train to Santa’s Workshop through lights, fake snow and holiday music. Somehow the Travel Town staff had turned the desert into a winter wonderland.
We could redeem the wooden nickels for free train rides at Travel Town, but I don’t think we’ll ever use them for that. Not now, anyway. Finding them so suddenly made my heart leap into my throat.
I put them in my pocket, to take with me.
Doctor and mother of twins Barbara Barnett with some tips about when to call your doctor about a suspected ear infection.
by Barbara Barnett, M.D.
One of the toughest questions for me to answer is how parents know when to take their children to the doctor. If you wait too long, the window for precious treatment time is lost. However, if the child presents too early, an accurate diagnosis may be difficult.
Consider, for example, acute otitis media, better known as an ear infection.
Ear infections are the most common bacterial illness in children — over 5 million cases of acute otitis media occur each year, with 10 million antibiotic prescriptions and about 30 million annual visits to the doctor’s office. Fifty percent of antibiotic prescriptions for preschoolers in the U.S. are prescribed for ear infections. (F.Y.I. The average preschooler carries around 1 to 2 pounds of bacteria! These bacteria have had 3.5 billion years of experience resisting and surviving environment.)
An acute otitis media infection usually has an abrupt onset of illness. Middle ear fluid collects, and then the signs of a middle ear inflammation begin. The most common symptoms of an ear infection include fussiness, fever, pulling/rubbing at the ears, or changes in sleep or appetite.
New guidelines suggest starting antibiotic treatment only if symptoms do not improve within 48 to 72 hours. Surprisingly, 80 percent of children with acute otitis media do get better without antibiotics!
And for those children who do end up needing antibiotics, about 15 percent suffer from diarrhea or vomiting, and up to 5 percent have allergic reactions.
So don’t be surprised if your children’s doctor recommends “watchful waiting” for 48-72 hours. Fortunately, after 24 hours of watchful waiting about 60 percent of children feel better.
When in doubt, however, it’s always best just to go ahead and call your doctor.
By Diana Day
The first in an occasional series about potty-training my two-and-a-half year old daughters.
They haven’t even looked at a potty once, not once, since they got their prizes.
I thought I was being clever by promising that Dinah and Djuna could have a reward for making the smallest step forward toward potty-training. All they had to do was sit and “try” to go, and they’d be able to pick out lunch boxes to pretend to go to school with. (Our girls learned about school from Blue’s Clues, and though they won’t start nursery school until this coming fall, they already love to play “going to school.”)
They had been interested in the toilet and in the concept of peeing for awhile but wouldn’t dare to sit on it until I offered the reward.
Djuna was very motivated by the lunch box offer and was the first to allow me to lift her onto the potty without a diaper on. But Dinah was afraid. I asked Djuna to tell her that there was nothing to be afraid of, and she did so, charmingly.
It was one of those moments when you feel the magic of having twins — Dinah, with her sister’s encouragement, agreed to take off her diaper and sit on the toilet.
The next day, we went to Target and chose the lunch boxes. I was in favor of the lunch boxes with the embroidered flowers and the velcro holder for a drink bottle, but Dinah chose the baseball-shaped lunch box, and Djuna chose the football-shaped lunch box.
And now they love to say “bye-bye” and “I’ll see you later” as they trudge through the house carrying their lunch boxes and wearing their rain boots.
The potty, however, is a distant memory.
by Diana Day
Since I can remember, my two-and-a-half year old twin daughters have selected toys in pairs or have playacted in pairs.
For example, one of the first “skits†they perform is the Charlie Brown and Lucy football scene – you know the one, where Lucy tries to get Charlie Brown to kick the football? They each take a part, act out the scene, complete with a miniature football prop, and then they switch parts. They also play Zak and Wheezie (the two-headed dragon) from Dragon Tales, Pip and Pop, purple twin otters from Bear in the Big Blue House, and Thomas and Gordon, two of the main characters from Thomas the Tank Engine.
One of my favorites is when they act out Thing 1 and Thing 2, Dr. Seuss’ rambunctious pair from The Cat in the Hat. Dinah decided one day that she was Thing 2 and that Djuna was Thing 1. When they play Thing 1 and Thing 2, they run around the house pretending to fly a fishbowl on a kite string. Fun.
[Note: In fact, the appearance of Thing 1 and Thing 2 in The Cat in the Hat is a metaphorical description of carrying, giving birth to and raising twins:
“I call this game FUN-IN-A-BOX,”
Said the cat.
“In this box are two things
I will show to you now.
You will like these two things,”
Said the cat with a bow.
“I will pick up the hook.
You will see something new.
Two things. And I call them
Thing One and Thing Two.
These Things will not bite you.
They want to have fun.”
Then, out of the box
Came Thing Two and Thing One!
And they ran to us fast.
They said, “How do you do?
Would you like to shake hands
With Thing One and Thing Two?”
(And then Thing One and Thing Two proceed to create delicious havoc in the house.)]
As far as toy pairs, Dinah has enjoyed her “Maggies†for ages. Maggie is one of Fisher-Price’s ® Little People, and Dinah has three of them (in case we lose one). She always plays with two Maggies at a time. She never refers to them as twins though, so my husband and I have never been sure if she perceives her Maggies as a pair. We just know that when she plays with Maggie, she has to have two of them.
Dwayne and I don’t know if they playact pairs because it’s a natural choice — there is always a sib around to take the other part — or if they actually perceive themselves as part of a duo, and therefore integrate duos into their play.
With two-and-a-half year olds, I guess it could be anything, for any reason.
by Diana Day
Daddy reading to Djuna
and Dinah
I had the opportunity to meet movie producer Bonnie Arnold the other day at a press junket for the upcoming DreamWorks animated feature Over the Hedge (very cute movie, funny, well worth seeing … best for kids who can handle the loud, raucous scenes and the scary bear, very effectively voiced by Nick Nolte; I’ll link to the feature I’m writing when it comes out on May 19, the day of the movie’s release).
Bonnie Arnold produced Toy Story, one of my all-time favorite movies. For having produced such a classic movie, she didn’t appear to have too many secrets of success. She really had one message: tell a good story, and try to work with other people who want to tell a good story too.
In journalism school, learning to tell good stories is a recurring theme. Years ago, in the early 90s, when I was learning to teach kids how to read, it was all about story structure and how kids come to us primed for enjoying and retaining the basic structure of a good story.
But seeing my kids learning to love a good story is more thrilling than seeing it as a writer or as a teacher.
My daughters Dinah and Djuna, 2 1/2, both love to “read” their books. We have truckloads of books and magazines in the house for them to enjoy, and we are starting to appreciate our local library now that the girls don’t run up and down the aisles, giggling wildly. My husband and I read to them at every naptime and bedtime and every time they ask during the day.
They both read stories from memory, as so many kids do. Djuna almost always starts off her retellings by saying, “One day … .”
From a reading specialst’s point of view, this amazes me and proves everything I learned in my teacher’s training. Kids do come with a knack, an instinct, for internalizing story structure.
“One day … ” is the beginning of every story. First, the scene is set, and then “one day” brings you to the problem in the story — that specific day when everything is different from all the other days before it, as in: One day, Miss Gulch came and took Dorothy’s dog away from her family …
And, then, recently, I heard Djuna start to insert a new word into her memory retellings — meanwhile. This excited me even more. Meanwhile! A great transitional word, a word that introduces a plot complication, as in: Meanwhile, as Dorothy ran away from home through the countryside, a great storm was brewing.
When I was a fifth and sixth grade teacher, I often had parents come in and look to me for solidarity when they would turn their noses up at serial books like Nancy Drew mysteries or Bobbsey Twins books, or any number of other formula pulp fiction for kids. (These parents wanted their kids to be reading only high class literature that could guarantee admission to Harvard.)
I was never an ally for these types. I lived and breathed Nancy Drew as a kid, and I still managed to become a successful adult. And now, I firmly believe that anything that reinforces story structure, even if it’s bland and predictable — and sometimes, because it’s predictable — is great for kids to read.
Predictable story structures, complete with their one days and their meanwhiles, are what give children the bedrock they need to deal with more complicated literature, as in: One day, Hamlet returned from college to find his father dead and his mother remarried to his uncle. Meanwhile, people were seeing the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father out and about in the castle …
by Diana Day
We didn’t tell Dinah that she had to go to the doctor until this morning — the morning of the appointment. She had to go for her year’s follow-up to see if the teeny hole in her heart muscle had closed up or whether we’d need to come back next year for another check.
It occurred to Dwayne and I that Dinah and Djuna hadn’t been apart in ages, probably since Djuna went to the hospital over a year ago when she had pneumonia.
The parting went OK — it actually seemed as though both Dinah and Djuna were excited to be alone with a parent. They said goodbye to each other cheerfully enough, and off we went.
Once at the doctor’s office, we waited over an hour to get in. But it was fun and different to hang out with Dinah on her own. I am so used to interacting with both of them at the same time.
At one point, we called home, and Dinah chatted with her Daddy for a minute, and then I suggested to Dwayne that he put Djuna on the phone. When Dinah heard her sister’s voice on the phone, she was thrilled and stunned.
“It’s Djuna,” Dinah said, sporting an enormous smile. The sisters had a little conversation, and both Dwayne and I were touched by their affection for each other.
After the doctor’s appointment — and after hearing that the little hole had thankfully closed up, like most do — I took Dinah to the bookstore, and she picked out a Thomas the Tank Engine book. I asked her what book Djuna might like, and she immediately said, “George and Martha,” naming two subtly hilarious hippos in the children’s stories by James Marshall.
Dinah picked out the George and Martha book she thought Djuna might like.
Once together again, Dinah and Djuna hugged and hugged. Djuna showed Dinah the flowers she had picked for her, and Dinah showed Djuna the book she had chosen for her.
So many moments in the day I am reminded of how great it is to be betwinned!
by Diana Day
My daughter Dinah sat dutifully on the white line with a bewildered look on her face, looking around for the other kids.
Only moments before, the dance teacher had said that class was over and that it was sticker time. So Dinah made her way to the place where the teacher had asked the kids to sit the previous week — the white tape line. But this time, the teacher let the kids gather round her in a big bunch to collect their stickers.
Dinah reminded me of myself in that moment so much that my heart almost burst. The obedient good girl, so intent on following what she thought were the directions, didn’t see that it was all different this week.
I remember so many times in my childhood where I was bewildered like that, so focused on doing the right thing that I ended up missing all the new directions.
I started worrying about the upcoming Easter Egg Hunt in our town, our first hunt with the girls. I was concerned that Dinah would have an experience like the white line, where she would so lose herself in the technicalities that she’d miss the whole egg hunt. My friend suggested that I bring a couple of plastic eggs in my pocket to surreptitiously stuff in Dinah’s or Djuna’s baskets if the need arose.
Hopefully when my daughters are older I won’t be so willing to stack the deck to avoid hurt feelings. Instead, I’ll hopefully be able to let moments just be, figuring that I’ll be there to hug, hold and talk about sad things that have happened.
Hopefully.
But my husband said we’d be fine without an egg stash, so off we went to the hunt, baskets in hand, tempting fate.
Luckily we live in a terrific little town where the volunteer firefighters’ association does the deck-stacking for the parents so they don’t have to do it themselves.
The park was absolutely loaded with generous piles of donated candy, enough so no child could possibly go home empty-handed. Dinah and Djuna hunted like seasoned pros and came home with baskets filled up.
A good time was had by all.