by Diana Day
This sweet article at Fredericksburg.com, the online version of Fredericksburg, VA’s The Free Lance-Star, caught my attention because of its sensitivity and lack of stereotypes about twins. The pictures are nice, too.
TwinWatch: Older women have a higher chance of conceiving twins, article says
by Diana Day
This article gives a brief account of why women, as they age, have a higher chance of conceiving fraternal twins. This article doesn’t mention it, but very young women apparently also have a higher chance of double ovulating as well.
Please check back soon for BeTwinned’s feature article about multiple gestations.
TwinWatch: Missouri moms of multiples get support from area club
by Diana Day
Members of the Columbia Mothers of Multiples Club help each other out through all sorts of challenges faced by families with multiples. This Columbia Daily Tribune article explains how these busy moms are a source of support and comfort for each other.
TwinWatch: Kids sharing a bedroom: Psychologists say it’s not two close for comfort
by Diana Day
According to an LA Times article, even though many parents today prefer having their children in their own bedrooms, psychologists say that kids can learn valuable lessons by sharing space. This is an interesting question for parents of twins and multiples.
I hope that when BeTwinned officially launches in April that this is the type of question that will get readers commenting and sharing experiences and ideas.
TwinWatch: The weight of a cell phone in my lap
by Diana Day
Babysitter secured, my husband and I made our way to Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall to see an evening of solo piano music by Keith Jarrett. Though this sounds innocent enough, it wasn’t — it’s the first live music I’ve seen since November 2002, when I went to a Beck concert in the very early days of my pregnancy.
The evening started like any pre-twins date night would have. We ate outrageously expensive tri-tip steak on plastic plates in the Disney Hall cafe and then meandered through the gift shop.
We eventually made our way to our seats, noting that my step-father Peter had been correct when he said that there is not a bad seat in the hall. We chatted about Frank Gehry‘s architecture and waited for the show to begin.
I made sure my cell phone was in vibrate mode, and I set it in my lap on top of my only dress-up skirt that fits after carrying two nearly eight-pound babies to term.
The lights went down, and then Jarrett came out and enchanted us with his improvised compositions. At turns groovy, ethereal and abstract, Jarrett commanded the Disney Hall with one treat after another. [See this LA Times review of the concert.]
I could feel the weight of the cell phone, a tether to my two little girls at home. It reminded me of hugging Dinah and Djuna — I try so hard to remember that every time I hug them, they’ll never be that weight or that height or that specific self ever again in time or space. In these moments, I let their weight sink into me as I sink into the present. And I try to preserve the moment in my diminishing brain cells.
Listening to the music, enjoying holding hands with my husband in the dark and thrilling to the feeling of being entertained, I still felt the cell phone waiting in my lap. Senses I haven’t used for years sparked and stretched their little limbs — I had forgotten that CDs and iPods are not the same as live music.
Jarrett played several encores, including some rapturous standards, like Stardust and It Might As Well Be Spring, a song also interpreted by the sublime Blossom Dearie. Djuna used to love to listen to a CD of hers when she slept in her swing as an infant.
For a moment, my cell phone floated into the grand space of Disney Hall.
TwinWatch: Emotional meeting between heart donors, recipient
by Diana Day
The Draper family and the York family share a unique bond — the Drapers donated the heart of their son Jordan York, just four months old when he died, to 7-month-old Nick Draper. Twins Nick and Nate Draper both have rare and fatal dilated cardiomyopathy; brother Nate is still awaiting a heart transplant. LA Times staffer Kurt Streeter wrote a touching article about the meeting between the two families. Check out the photos that go with the story too.
TwinWatch: Reality show features identical twins test
by Diana Day
According to Springfield, MO’s News-Leader, the Discovery Health Channel made an appearance at the annual Twins Days festival in Twinsburg, Ohio last August to audition identical twins for its upcoming reality show America’s Most Identical Twins Test. (check your local listings, but the show is supposed to run Sunday, March 12 and Sunday March 19).
But how much of a test could it be? Gee, judging from the picture in the News-Leader article, all the sets of identical twins look, well, identical. Reality TV must be running out of options if they have to test identical twins to see which set is, um, more identical.
Also, I don’t know about anybody else, but the last thing I need after this show airs is more people stopping and asking us everywhere we go whether our twins are identical, whether anyone can tell them apart, etc. Reminds me of a friend who has triplets — she got so tired of people asking her whether her triplet girls were triplets that she started to say, “No. They’re not triplets. They’re quintuplets. We just left the other two at home.”
TwinWatch: A new twins’ festival in Australia
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.
TwinWatch: Thrill to the scale
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.
TwinWatch: Some informative news about twins & multiples, for a change
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.