FAQs #2

Are your twins natural?  Did you have IVF or use fertility treatments?

Our twins were conceived spontaneously.  In my mind, using fertility treatments in order to conceive in no way diminishes the wonderful miracle of bringing a child into the world.  It is a super personal decision for a couple to arrive at and therefore people should not ask strangers about their reproductive choices but alas they often do.  I get asked all the time...sigh. 

Do twins run in your family?

Yes, fraternal twins run in my family.  I have cousins that are boy/girl twins and my maternal grandmother had fraternal twin brothers.  The fact that our twins are identical or monozygotic made it that much more of a surprise.  Statistically there are not higher occurrences of monozygotic twins in certain geographic regions or ethnicities like there are fraternal twins.  The research has not been conclusive if there is a genetic link to monozygotic twinning. 

Were your twins really born more than five hours apart or was that a typo on the birth announcement?

Yep, they really were born more than five hours apart and it definitely was not a typo.  Once Abraham was born, Winston who had been in the breech position flipped to the vertex position.  He had lots of room in my very distended uterus and was in no hurry to come out.  My labor was augmented with pitocin so that I did not have a significant stall in labor after delivering Abraham.  After about 2.5 hours of no real progress, I had to push Winston down in order to get him into position.  It took about another 2.5 hours of active pushing but I got my 7 lb. 9 oz. twin baby out after a posterior presentation.  If not for the pitocin, I am pretty sure they would have been born on different days and my OB actually had a couple of twin moms' whose twin babies had different birthdays.  I think people are so used to twins either being delivered by c-section or the second twin being manually extracted that they forget or don't realize that it can take quite a few hours to deliver another baby if the body is left to its own devices. 

As an aside, my dear grandma lives in a retirement community with many other Dutch emigrants.  When the boys were born she went around telling everyone the news and the boys' relevant stats.  A lady who supposedly had identical twins herself told my grandma that there was no way that our babies were identical twins because they would need to be born within minutes of each other.  My grandma got pretty indignant and told her, "My granddaughter went to college and she studied science.  I know that she knows and that's that."  Apparently it turned into a bit of a squabble and the activities director encouraged them to be more civil about it.  I love that my grandma had such confidence in my educational background but I am A&W's mother, shouldn't I be the one to know regardless?  People never cease to amaze me.