Let Me Guess....

I can't tell you how many people walk into our house, see Jude and Ellie running gangbusters through the mess, and say, "Ok.  Don't tell me who is who.  Let me guess."  Sometimes, my friends get it right and sometimes they don't but I think it is funny that guessing who is who has become a little game for them.

Jude and Ellie look a lot alike.  Physically, they were quite different when they were first born but as the months passed, they started to look more and more like each other.  I don't dress them the same for many reasons, not the least of which is it takes me just a little too long to differentiate them when they are in the same outfit.  With efficiency and simplicity as my goal, matching outfits would only add to the chaos.

Now, as the mother, you would think that I have no problem telling my kids apart but if they are dressed alike and I'm not seeing their faces directly on, I confuse them.  A lot.  At their one year well-check, I was holding a baby on my lap facing the doctor.  My husband was holding the other one.  We were arguing over who was who in front of the pediatrician and well, I was wrong.

The pervasive assumption throughout my pregnancy was that the babies are fraternal. They had separate sacks, separate placentas, and the number of fraternal twins in my family is significant.  As the months have passed, however, I've wondered if this is actually the case.  Jude and Ellie are very similar to each other and very dissimilar from their big sister.  The Turtles have always been within ounces of each other in weight, their first tooth was both their top right and they have hit all their milestones within days of each other, and they both have the same, swirled blue and brown eye-color.  There are other things too, which combined with my challenges of telling them apart, has got me wondering.  Are my girls identical or am I just really clueless?

I wonder about this but I don't feel inclined to find out if they are actually identical.  I'm afraid that knowing might change how I parent them and I like the idea that perhaps there are more differences than I can actually see.  If I knew they were identical, I think I'd be less likely to treat them as individuals.  (Consciously or not...)

So, I guess I'll just err on the side of clueless mama.

Comments

  1. UnknownJanuary 17, 2011 at 9:28 AM

    Oh, I just posted about a lady I met who grew up thinking she was a fraternal twin, but really she was an identical twin. They found out because one sister needed something (I don't know what, some sort of medical thing, she didn't go into it). They were tested and found out their zygosity was monozygotic. There are 14 sets of twins in her family, and she is part of the only identical set. Crazy!

    Anyway, it was a short conversation, so that's all I really know about that.

    ReplyDelete
  2. And I'll Raise You 5January 17, 2011 at 1:08 PM

    Always go with clueless. It's more fun.

    ReplyDelete
  3. KeriJanuary 22, 2011 at 3:36 PM

    Actually, a friend of mine who has twins said that there were 4 different kinds of twins: Identical-Identical (sharing the same sac and looking alike), Identical-Mirror (same sac but opposites), Fraternal-Identical (different sac, look alike), and Fraternal-Fraternal (different sac, look different). If your girls had their own sacs and look identical, they still could be identical twins. When they get older, they may want to know. =)

    ReplyDelete

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