Still, I have my limits. Yesterday afternoon, after returning from school, M was in rare form. She was frustrated, it seemed, with everything. She whined about having to put her school bag away, about my choice of snack, about the heat of the day, and about our cats choosing to play with a toy other than the one she had selected. She forgot all her basic responsibilities: washing her hands; picking up her dishes after snack; putting her dirty clothes in the laundry hamper; clearing her desk after homework. Every time I reminded her, she had some excuse for not having done what she was supposed, and I was a “meanie mama” for asking her to do it.

She may very well have been mirroring my own general sense of annoyance; the previous evening had brought an extremely unpleasant obligation I had hoped to put off until the weekend. I tried to shield the kids from my mood, but they’re observant souls.

J loves to dance, so it’s not unusual to find her twirling around the living room. Today, though, M decided that J was no longer allowed to dance, simply because she found it irritating. When I reminded M of our mantra, “Not your body, not your business,” she turned on me, screaming that she just didn’t want J to dance. That earned M a time out, which she spent kicking the door to my bedroom. Once she was done with time out, I told M to take a rag and clean her shoe marks off the door.

It was when M insisted that she had not kicked the door and that the very visible shoe marks didn’t exist that I felt my face get hot and heart beat harder. I knew that anger was seconds away, so I placed the girls’ dinner on the dining table and told them I was taking a time out “to calm my body down.”

It’s been so long since I took a mommy time out that J and M were thoroughly confused. Why did they need to go to time out? I explained, quickly, that I was feeling very angry, so I was going to take some quiet time to calm down. I was going to lie down, drink some water, and take deep breaths, just as I’d taught them to do.

Fortunately, my daughters, at 6, are old enough to be left alone in the dining room at dinner time. When they were little, when the screaming and whining got to be too much, I would place them in their cribs and make myself a cup of peppermint tea, telling them that mommy needed a time out. When they were 4, I once asked a neighbour to sit with the girls while I went for a walk, because I knew I had reached the end of my rope, and my husband wasn’t expected back from Afghanistan for several months more.

I love my kids. We generally have a fantastic time together, and are usually excellent at negotiating solutions to high-stress problems. Still, there are moments where I need to be human for a moment before I return to being mommy. I’d much rather step away from the situation than give in to the urge to yell. I yelled at M once earlier in the week after she ignored repeated requests to pick her dirty panties off the floor, and I’ve felt horrible ever since. It was just one sentence: “I said, put your panties in the laundry!” There are, however, better ways to engage the children’s attention.

What do you do to keep your cool when your kids are acting up? Are you a yeller?

Sadia’s identical twin daughters, M and J, turned 6 years old just last week.

It seems to me that both A and J have a good sense of who they are as individuals. They both respond to their names being called and will also call each other by name. Recently, there was something that made me wonder how much they do actually know about their individuality. J was looking in the mirror and pointed to his reflection and called himself by A’s name. He did this several times and then would turn around to see A and point again and call him by name. I thought this was a little strange until it happened again the other day. We were outside and J caught his reflection in my sunglasses. Again, he pointed to his reflection and called himself by A’s name.

Having no experience with identical twins before these two came along, it made me wonder if this is a process that all identical twins go through. I had three singletons before the twins and so far, I haven’t really observed anything different about having twins up to this point. I have heard about twin behavior and am wondering if this is my first taste of it.

For you Mom’s of identical twins, what has your experience been with this development?

Ashley is a stay-at-home, homeschooling Mom to five kids aged 6 and under. She loves her busy, chaotic, and always unexpected days!

I was going to do things right but when I heard the recommendation is to take a child in when they turn 1 I rolled my eyes. So we skipped that first year. When Nathan turned 2 I also decided to skip the dentist because it still seemed very unnecessary. The next year I took him, actually all three of them.

I had found a pediatric dentist office with a train table, DVD player and all kinds of other fancy toys that we didn’t have at home. I imagined the kids would play while I took them one by one to the back room for a ‘quick and easy’ check up. Oh boy was I wrong..

Nathan refused to open his mouth. I tried prying it open with my fingers until the dentist lady kindly suggested that it was probably enough and I should consider taking him to a place where they can ‘knock him out’. In the mean time Beth and Joshua were running between the play room to the back room and then back, completely ignoring my ‘stop running at this minute or there will be trouble’ looks. When it was their turn to have a turn they had seen enough example from Nathan and knew what to do. No one was going to count their teeth either.

When I lurked my way out of the office I was sweaty, frustrated and decided this was the last time they’d see me. I was going to wait until my kids understood what was expected and I was going to find a place where ‘knocking them out’ wasn’t the first recommendation.

Last month I took Nathan to see a dentist again. This time to an office with no train table and only a few toys to play with in a corner.
I had started to talk to him about going to a dentist few months back saying ‘when you turn 5 it’s time to go and see a dentist’. During the weeks we talked what the dentist would do this his teeth: count them, clean them, tickle and poke them. He’d sit in a chair that moved like Daddy’s machines and there would be a bright light and he’d get to wear some awesome looking protection glasses. He was excited.

The day came and he did great! Slightly nervous but no refusal to co-operate, even if he wasn’t ‘knocked out’ . I was very nervous of what they’d find because I had *gasp* not followed the recommended dentist schedule and I was certain if they talked to me sternly about its importance I’d break down in tears. At the end there were no cavities (or tears), the dentist lady was sweet to tell me I had done a great job brushing and flossing his teeth and to keep up the good work. Beth and Joshua did great waiting in the ‘kid corner’ and were devastated when they realized they didn’t get a turn (or at least the cool sticker that Nathan got). Afterwards we all went for ice cream and talked about the sugar bugs we were going to brush away as soon as we got home.

Now that’s a visit I look forward to duplicating!

How did you go about the ‘schedule’ and how did you get your kids to behave?

Yesterday was Mothers’ Day here in the US, as is the second Sunday of May every year. Mothers, grandmothers, godmothers and mother figures are celebrated in all sorts of ways, from children’s handprints to breakfast in bed, cards to vacations. Like many holidays, this one is highly commercialized, but I have yet to meet the person who considers this celebration of motherhood to be a burden or chore.

My family doesn’t do a whole lot for Mothers’ Day. Our twin daughters, J and M, have their birthdays this second week of May. We’re usually still working our way through their birthday cake leftovers through Mothers’ Day until my birthday rolls around a few days later. As you might imagine, Mothers’ Day gets a little lost in the middle of three birthdays.

My mum lives in the United Kingdom, and British Mothering Day falls two weeks before Easter for her. We do make a point of doing something for my mother-in-law for American Mothers’ Day. This year, however, some fantastic medical news eclipsed Mothers’ Day altogether, and the flowers and pampering headed her way turned out to be more a celebration of her good news than of the annual holiday. I confess that in my giddiness over my mother-in-law’s news, I failed to call my grandmothers-in-law yesterday, which I usually would do. Oops.

Despite my general grinchiness toward Mothers’ Day, my girls always bring some token home from school in recognition of my role in their lives, thanks to their rather less grinchy teachers. J has forgotten to give me hers this year, but I found M’s to be deeply touching.

“Dear mom,” it read, “I hope you like this mother’s day. I wish you a lovely mother’s day. You are the best mom. I learn lessons from you. Anyways thanks for the cats. I love Sasha. Mom she’s adorabel [sic]! Mom I love you. I miss you so much at school. Love M.”

To clarify, we added two young cats to our family last week. M is usually quite nervous around new animals, but bonded instantly with Sasha, a 13-month-old bundle of purrs and adoration. Fortunately, J and 7-month-old Sookie also hit it off, J giggling helplessly as Sookie attempted to groom her (J’s) toes. I suppose the addition of two new felines for me to mother is a rather decent celebration of motherhood this year.

How are you celebrated on Mothers’ Day? Who do you take this annual opportunity to recognize?

Sadia is currently recovering from her daughters’ sixth birthday party in El Paso, TX. She failed to write this post on Mothers’ Day because she appears to have forgotten to do much eating in the preparation, execution and cleanup phases of the party. Instead, she fell into bed shortly after tucking her daughters in at 8:00 pm, managing only to feed to cats and brush her teeth prior to crashing.

We were surprised by our results. G did not qualify for the gifted program, missing the cut-off by 4 IQ points. P did qualify.

Initially, I was upset with myself for even requesting the test. I hadn’t thought about the possibility of one qualifying and the other not.  Now we had this bona fide test result, on paper, saying G was less capable than his brother. And G has always struggled with self-confidence.

We had a conundrum, too. While we agreed it would be devastating to G for us to place P in the gifted program, we didn’t feel good about withholding enrichment opportunities from P just because his brother didn’t qualify. This is similar to the situation HDYDI blogger Sadia faced this year, except she was faced with moving one of her twins to first grade while the other remained in kindergarten. In researching what to do for our boys, I found this study of different twin types and their reactions to having one twin placed in a gifted program, while the co-twin was not. It definitely affirmed our gut feeling that our boys wouldn’t do well in that situation.

The more I’ve thought about it, the less I trust the IQ test results. I consulted with the director of the university speech clinic the boys attend, and she felt his speech issues could have thrown off the results. G is very aware of his articulation errors, and speaks very slowly to strangers so they can understand him. P does not make any effort to slow his speech for the benefit of others. The speech clinic director said G is likely to choose his words based on what will be easy for him to pronounce and for others to understand, rather than choosing the words that best convey his meaning. G is a kid who asks for math work on his days off of school, because he says he feels anxious on days when he doesn’t get to do math. He picked up his sister’s 4th grade math workbook and started completing the pages for fun. My other two kids who do qualify for the gifted program don’t do anything like this.

We will probably have him retested at some point, so we know what all of our options are. Our oldest child attends a charter school for academically gifted students, and our public schools have various levels of differentiation available. For now we won’t retest — G said he didn’t like the test and it was boring, so I hate to put him through the same thing with the same test administrator this school year. In the meantime we’ve decided to home school next year — we can let them work at their own pace, and provide as much enrichment as either of them needs.

What would you do? Have you run into a similar situation? How would your multiples handle one being placed in a gifted program, while the other remained in the regular classroom?

Jen is a work-from-home mom of 7-year-old twin boys, and two girls ages 5 and 9. She also blogs at Minivan MacGyver. Once in a while.

M is in the green, J in the orange.

As M likes to point out, her widow’s peak hairline makes her face heart-shaped, where J’s is oval, thanks to her ruler-straight hairline. J is built like a soccer player, all lean muscle and power, while M has a typical dancer’s frame, birdlike and flexible.

J inherited Daddy’s single dimple, but M didn’t. J’s cowlick is profoundly untameable, while I can get M’s hair to hang down nicely with a little effort. On the other hand, I can part J’s hair in the middle, put it in pigtails, and have her hair stay generally well-behaved all day. M’s part, on the other hand, clings stubbornly to its location. It’s stronger than any combination of hair elastics, gel, bobby pins and effort I’ve been able to come up with. I’ve stopped fighting it, even if it does cause her pigtails to noticeably differ in thickness.

M was born with a facial cleft, which hasn’t needed any surgery so far. I hope it stays that way. Rather than the more familiar cleft palate, her frontonasal dysplasia is higher up in her face, and is the cause of her defined widow’s peak. It also causes her eyes to be more widely set than her sister’s and impacts the symmetry of her nose. She hasn’t had any complications from her condition, so we don’t spend a whole lot of time thinking about it. On the rare occasion that a child asks why M’s nose is funny or little, I say that it’s so we can tell her apart from her sister. That answer has always satisfied diminutive inquisitors.

Every now and then, though, I catch a glimpse of Sister in the face of one of my daughters, and the sameness makes my breath catch.

I’ve come to enjoy the opportunities I get to share the science of twinning with strangers. I’ve learned to explain in a few words that identical twins are identical(ish) at the level of DNA, but are otherwise completely distinct people. Still, I’m taken aback every time I participate in the following exchange:

Stranger or acquaintance: Are they identical?
Me: Yes.
Stranger or acquaintance: No, they’re not!

Do you know whether your multiples are identical or fraternal? Does it make any difference?

Sadia is a business analyst living in El Paso, TX. Her twin daughters, J and M, will be turning 6 next month.

That was quite the knife through the heart. Within minutes of learning that there were two little people growing in my womb, I had promised myself two things: I would never play favourites, and I would treat our children as individuals.

I wasn’t playing favourites today, of course. M would be allowed to snuggle up against me with her blankie too, once she’d served her well-earned 5 minutes in time out.

Here’s what led up to this moment:

We had a small quantity of chocolate milk in the fridge, a spring break treat. I had split it evenly between two cups, and offered them to the girls to tide them over while I prepared breakfast. J took a cup from me and downed the milk in one swallow, while M tensed every muscle in her body before wailing, “But I wanted that cup!”

I offered her the other cup. I offered to pour her milk into the cup J had just emptied. She didn’t want milk at all, she informed me, because J had the cup she wanted. This sort of interaction was par for the course at age 3, but not now. Instead of having the milk go to waste, I offered it to J. That was when M started pummeling me with her fists. Instant orders to time out prompted her accusation of my not seeming to love her.

M has been having some major self control issues all week. It’s been a stressful time for the whole family. J is more in touch with her emotions than the majority of adults I know, including me, so she’s been weathering this period unbelievably well. M, on the other hand, is either unaware of what’s really bothering her or unwilling to talk about it. I sat her down with crayons and paper yesterday, and drawing seemed to help some, but she has a way to go.

While she has a legitimate reason to be generally upset, this doesn’t excuse rudeness or hitting. She’s a month shy of turning 6, and we’ve been working with both girls on a variety of tools to help them maintain their composure and handle their emotions since they were 2. Deep breathing, playing with water in the sink, and taking some alone time with a book or toy are standard ways that both J and M deal with overflowing anger to make their way to a productive solution.

She finally calmed down. I explained to M that it was because I loved her that I took the time to help her behave like a grownup. If I didn’t love her, I wouldn’t care how she behaved. Surprisingly enough, she accepted that response.

A little later, M asked to play a game on my iPad. I told her that I wanted to let her play, but the fact that she wasn’t controlling her body well made me worry that she would break the thing. That cued another tantrum and time out. Once she returned, I told her that if she went 3 hours without a tantrum, I would have enough confidence in her self-control to let her play a game. Classic bribery, I know, but we work with what we have.

She made it 45 minutes until the next tantrum hit. She begged me to lower the bar. A tantrum-free hour should be enough, she thought. I do not negotiate with tantrum-throwers, so I held my ground.

It was afternoon before she asked if it had been 3 hours; I’d been head down in work and hadn’t thought about her request for the iPad game. I realized that she’d been playing nicely with J for 5 hours, blowing bubbles in the yard and inhabiting up an elaborate make-believe world that involved pirates and restaurant owners.

It wasn’t until I sat down to write this post that I noticed how M had worded her pain to me. (I jotted the sentence down immediately for use in this post.) She had asked me why I was acting like I loved J more. She didn’t actually accuse me of not loving them equally. Even in her deepest frustration with me, she was confident in the content and equal partition of my love, even if she didn’t like how I expressed it.

I think M’s going to be all right. We’ll get through this. I just need to take my deep breaths, play in the water, and take some alone time every now and then.

What’s your approach to fairness in parenting? How do you balance the needs of multiple children?

Sadia telecommutes from El Paso, TX to her job in Austin and is thankful that her 5-year-old identical twins can entertain one another 8 hours a day.

I was slightly worried how the whole language barrier would go but turns out kids are pretty good communicators with couple words, gestures and primal noises. It took them about 10 minutes after we arrived from the airport to be playing ‘jungle’ in the basement (and the pace never slowed down after that). By the second night Daniel requested that we make a bed for him in the kids’ room.

Nathan was in awe of this older boy who knew how to climb trees and dive and speak Finnish flawlessly. It was fun to watch him soak in the ‘wisdom’ Daniel so openly shared. They planned jokes on the rest of us with such a speed and creativity that I had forgotten existed.

Prior to the visit I had worried about spending tons of money on admissions to several of our planned activities. I was thrilled to find out that through our library we could get discounted admissions to a whole lot of places. I met a mom from CA at the aquarium who told me that their library has a similar program. So if you’re planning excursions with a load of neighborhood kids or your own you should totally look into that. Our budget throwing $95 admission fee to our Zoo became pocket chance when we flashed our library pass and were charged only $12.

I had hoped that having a Finnish speaking child in the house would produce some language development in my kids but to my disappointment I don’t think they now speak one more word of Finnish than they did before the visit. Daniel however developed his understanding of English by quite a bit and would tell me sometimes when I started to translate something that ‘I already know what that means’. We have a month long trip planned to Finland in the fall. Who knows, maybe by the end of that trip my children will dazzle me with their ability to form a whole sentence in Finnish! Until then we have many memories to cherish and are looking forward to making new ones.

How do you find deals on fun things to do with the family? 

Hanna is trying to foster the sense of Finnish heritance in her kids (and her totally awesome American husband) in the outskirts of Boston. 

In the middle of the joy I felt for my friend, though, I felt an upwelling of the sadness, anger and helplessness that tainted the joy of my own babies’ release from the hospital, over 5 years ago. Homecoming is one of the ways that the NICU experience can differ for parents of premature multiples in comparison to preemie singletons. Many twins and triplets are released from the hospital simultaneously, but many are not.

Our daughters were born 7 weeks early, but had few problems apart from their small size. J had a hole in her heart, which eventually resolved itself, and M had a facial cleft that turned out not even to require surgery. Neither of these conditions required hospitalization, so they were textbook “feeder growers,” newborns who were hospitalized until they had fattened up enough to maintain their own body temperature and had the strength to suck enough nutrition to keep them healthy.

Our girls didn’t need any assistance breathing; they’ve been verbal and long-winded since the start. They were keep in warm isolettes, and fed a mixture of high calorie formula and my breast milk through feeding tubes inserted through their noses and threaded into their stomachs. Every three hours came a diaper change, weighing, blood sugar measurement, temperature measurement and feeding. We watched every number as they rose and fell, and I promised myself I would take notes when they got home so as not to double feed one baby and starve the other. J and M were cared for by the same nurse, so their schedules were offset by 15 minutes. One benefit to having NICU babies was that they were on a clockwork schedule by the time they came home.

There were 3 criteria to be met, we were told, before the girls could come home. They had to weigh 5 lbs (2.25 kg), be able to maintain their own body temperature, and take 8 meals in a row by mouth, drinking at least 31 mls of formula/breast milk each time. Every now and then, when J asks for her “warmed up milk, please,” at breakfast or dinner, I wonder at the way she guzzles 8 oz of milk down and think back to the days I tried to get her drink 1 oz by force of will alone.

We wanted all the girls’ energy to go to growing at first. Somewhere in the first week, I think, they were introduced to doll-sized bottles. It took a few tries to get them to suck, first 1 ml, then 3, more and more each meal. They finally made it up to 31 mls at a time, but couldn’t keep it up two meals in a row. It was just too much work.

M couldn’t finish her bottle at every feeding, but she made an effort. Once, I was even allowed to let her suckle at my breast, although the nurses took her away before she exhausted herself. J was less predictable. She’d suck like a champ and then suddenly get distracted, seemingly more interested in playing with the bottle than drinking from it. Two weeks in, she broke our hearts by refusing two meals in a row and being put back on her feeding tube. It was the only time I saw my husband so upset that he couldn’t stay in the NICU to monitor every last detail of our babies’ care. A friend took him out for a beer.

When our girls were 2 weeks old, the hospital staff pronounced them to be the healthiest babies in the NICU. They could afford to be downgraded to a less fancy-schmancy NICU within the same hospital network. We talked it through and agreed to free up their beds. However, when the paperwork arrived, we were asked to sign a waiver releasing both the hospitals and the ambulance service of responsibility for the babies during their transport. There was no way we were signing that, so the girls stayed put.

Two days later, M was ready to come home. She hadn’t quite made the weight cutoff, but they couldn’t see any reason she wouldn’t be just fine at home. She passed the carseat test, and home we went.

J was still on her feeding tube. I felt more torn as a mother of twins in that moment than I ever did before or since. I was celebrating the health of one of my daughters, but leaving the other alone at the hospital, without even her sister with her. My husband was away for an army training exercise, and I was still recovering from my C-section. Fortunately, my father-in-law was able to stay for 3 weeks, and drove us the 30 miles to the hospital every day so that I could deliver breast milk and steal a few moments with J. I couldn’t stay too long, though, since M was in her carseat in the hospital parking garage with Grampy.

After 5 long, agonizing days, J was ready to come home. It finally felt like my life as a parent could start. My friend just ended 48 days of that waiting, and I hope that her heart can finally begin to heal.

Did you get to bring your babies home at the same time?

Sadia’s daughters, M and J, are still short for their nearly 6 years, but Sadia is short for her nearly 33, so it works out nicely. They guzzle milk, grow, and keep each other busy in El Paso, TX.

I’ve used all the tried and true techniques to get her to wake up happy. I’ve climbed under the covers with her and wiggled her toes. I’ve played her favourite music at her bedside. I’ve put her socks on her while she sleeps to grant her a few extra moments of sleep. I’ve asked her about her dreams. None of this have kept her from tired, self-pitying tears and anger at having to go through the morning routine.

This morning, something finally worked. I asked M to tell me not about her own dreams, but about her stuffed toy du jour’s. She has a Care Bear, the music one, that she has named Fuey. (The naming of toys is a discussion for another day.) She was instantly awake.

“Fuey had a dream about going to my school, which is my work. She is going to my work to participate in my choir club. She’s going to be the audience. She dreamed of wearing her Easter dress and sitting with Caitlin who is her favourite my friend because Caitlin loves her. Mommy, I’m awake! I’m ready for the big light! I need to brush Fuey’s teeth. I will squeeze the toothpaste just to let air out which is imaginary toothpaste and brush her teeth!”

That’s the little chatterbox I had been hoping to see! She finished breakfast on time, managed to navigate a disagreement over shoes without tears, and got on the bus cheerful and ready for her Friday. I’m just hoping she’ll remember to turn her homework in.

What helps you get your kids out of bed in the morning or, for those you with early birds, keeps them in?

Sadia and her 5-year-old twins wake at 5:30 Mountain Time in El Paso, allowing Sadia to start telecommuting to her job at 8:00 Central Time. She gets easily confused about what time it is.