TWINS - February 2018

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TWINSINTHENEWS Bankrupted by giving birth to premature twins caps and pre-existing conditions ever become a limit to my children’s access to healthcare, I have no idea how we will navigate this system. This system is not set up to support families with catastrophic medical bills.” It’s twins! And again! And again! to go back to school to become an OB/GYN. Her advice to new twin moms is: “Accept any help you receive, ask for help, and make sure your husband or partner is contributing equally to the workload at home. And secondly, don’t take anything seriously - unless it’s actually serious, of course!” You can find out more about her life with three sets of twins and a singleton on her blog: www.tripletwinning.com. Jen Sinconis has opened up about her experience of having twins sixteen weeks early, and the millions of dollars it cost to save their lives. She writes: “It had never occurred to me the financial repercussions someone could encounter because of an ongoing medical situation. We were a middle-class family with college degrees and solid full-time jobs in marketing and construction management. We owned our house, had very little debt, a savings account, retirement accounts and comprehensive medical insurance.” Despite it all, Jen and her husband had to sell their house and ended up filing for bankruptcy just to pay for the medical bills. Eleven years later, her twins (Aidan and Ethan) are healthier than the doctors predicted, but it was a long road to solvency. Jen says: “When Trump was elected I cried myself to sleep, knowing that one of his first agenda items would be overturning the Affordable Care Act. If lifetime One mom has beaten one in 500,000 odds after giving birth to twins for the third time. Misty Lang, 35, is a twin herself, and imagined being a monther to one or two children. Instead she has ended up with seven children. She had her first set of twins (Alex and Lexie) nine years ago, then gave birth to a singleton (Calista) two years later. She then went on to have another set of twins, Lacie and Nash, who are five, and she has recently welcomed set three: Lana and Phoenix. Misty said she was “happy and scared all at once - we were going to have five kids under three. But once the initial shock passed, we were incredibly excited.” Once her children get a little older, she plans Just how heritable is autism? Twins research suggests it’s more than we think A team of researchers at King’s College London has been combing data from over 4,700 twin pairs in a Twins Early Development Study has found that the heritability of autism is 50%. This is inline with results from previous twin studies, but is far higher than the 6% estimate from single-nucleotide polymorphisms. A 4 TWINS Magazine A www.twinsmagazine.com
My twins have separate birthdays by Chantal Meijer To some sharp-eyed person reading my family’s medical card, it looks like a typo—two kids with the same surname, born ONE day apart. That can’t be right, they invariably say. For years, I’ve been tickled pink to tell them— and anyone else who’ll listen to my tale—why isn’t a typo at all: They’re identical twin boys, born on either side of midnight. So, how did this birth happen—the timing, I mean—and just how did we handle our boys’ birthdays over the years, as brand-new parents with everything to learn? Easy—we held one birthday party, with one double-sized cake. And we always celebrated on the first-born’s birthday. Why wait another day? At least, that was the plan. Most of the time. My boys rushed into this world after my water broke as I answered the front door one morning, three weeks before my due date. My startled dad, who had stopped by while on his way to a jobsite, stood transfixed. “Perfect,” I said, as I ruminated on the saying “the child born on the Sabbath day is bonnie and blight”, or words to that effect. My husband Rick was hundreds of miles away, not due back until the next day. “Phone Rick, Dad,” I blurted as I wobbled towards my suitcase. For the entire day, my eyes were riveted on the hospital-room clock, first at the small local facility where I was admitted, then at a larger regional hospital requiring an hour-long ambulance ride. As the hands closed in on midnight, the doctor called for forceps. I braced myself; sometime later I heard his voice ring out: “It’s a boy! Congratulations. Time of birth ... 11:59!” Moments later: “It’s another boy! Time of birth ... 12:04!” My husband arrived the next day, after being grounded by fog for a day. He grinned from ear to ear. On our sons’ first birthday, I invited half the town—every mom from my prenatal group, every person I had ever met. The party was as much for me as for the boys; validation that I’d survived the Neat thing, but what about birthday parties? ordeal. The cake, awash with both names, was as big as the baker dared make it. Years later, one birthday party for the twins required two cakes, the exception to my birthday-party mantra. The boys, in Batman and Superman mode at the time, had individual Batman and Superman cakes. But in general, we stuck to my mantra: one party, one cake. Why mess with a good thing? Besides, the boys thought having one party was perfectly fine. Gigantic Cake Over the years, we took a gazillion photos—our twins and our other two (singletons), six and nine years younger. For the twins’ photos, I used a little trick: I positioned the first-born on the right, so over the years we’d always know who’s who in photos. For their 16th, each had a separate party. The first-born had his first, with his friends, and invited his twin brother, with the brother’s friends. The next day, the secondborn did the same thing again. Same group. We returned to the tried-and-true format. Recently, our sons graduated from university. As fate would have it, convocation ceremonies fell on the first-born’s birthday. Wow, try and beat that! My maternal antennae were twitching with double delight. Their cake, an impetus for the baker’s retirement, again was as big as he dared make it! It included everything: Congratulations for their birthdays, their graduations, their golden retrievers (that’s another story), and on and on. Every now and then, someone, someplace still asks me the timeless question about their separate birth-dates: “Is that a typo, ma’am?” My chest puffs, almost to its old nursing size. A smile spreads across my beatified face. My words flow sweet as chocolate syrup on vanilla ice cream: “They’re identical twins, born either side of midnight,” I gush. That won’t ever grow old. Unlike cake. A February 2018 5
Page 1 and 2: Living with know-it-alls Get your t
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Page 7 and 8: MOM2MOM boys must be twins,” a wo
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TWINS - February 2018

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