April Fools

April 1st is a very important day in our family. April 1st 1982 is the day we were the victims of the April Fools prank of all time. It's the day that our twins were born. The prank is that nobody, including the obstetricians, knew there were two babies.

When the doctor delivered the first the conversation went something like...
"There's another one"
"Yea doc, really funny, April Fools...right?"
"No, there are two of them"

Somewhat stunned, but happy none the less, we were gifted with two beautiful girls. Our lives would never be the same, and neither would April 1st.

Twins run in the family on my wife's side. Her mother was a twin. Our first pregnancy was twins, but my wife miscarried. It was sad at the time, but we got over it. We had to. We had three other children after that, at least until the April Fools joke. Now there were five. All of them were younger than 6.

You would think that a home full of pre-K kids would be a madhouse. I guess it was, but we were a little too busy to notice. Changing two sets of diapers, making up two bottles, burping two infants while juggling a toddler and two little boys is an experience you won't soon forget.

My wife and I referred to them as "the girls" a lot...There were four names for the five kids, as if saying the last two took any more breath than actually pronouncing their names. To our oldest daughter, the toddler, they were sometimes"the twinses". It's almost like the two combined were one entity. No. it's not "like"...It is one entity, a kind of group mind with two distinct parts. Think of The Holy Trinity, but with only two members.

They could talk to each other before they learned to talk to anyone else. I don't mean in some weird telepathic way, I mean an actual verbal language that only they understood. It was really obvious. You know how you can tell people are having a conversation just be watching them? It was the same thing. If you had any doubts, they would interact while doing it. As in one points and says what may be "Go get that thing over there" and the other picks it up, says the twinish equivalent of "This?" and carries it back. It was eerie in a way, absolutely wonderful in another.

While I don't recall them ever switching places like they do in some Disney film, they did seem to cooperate on various and sundry endeavors, such as escaping from our porch. Working together they figured out that they could crawl out under a handrail on our front steps. Fortunately their older sister ratted them out..."Mom, the twinses is escaped" and they came to no harm.

For some reason that I still don't understand, the wife and I and their siblings could tell them apart, while the rest of the family was always confused. It's as if each ones personality could be seen in their faces and we could pick up that and nobody else could. While I still have trouble identifying them in profile or by voice it's obvious looking at them full in the face.

They led us on many adventures too numerous to relate and we enjoyed every one of them. That was was almost forty years ago. Today, they are beautiful women, loving wives and moms with kids of their own. They are still the best of friends in a relationship that goes beyond friendship, maybe even sisterhood. One I doubt anyone else could understand unless they themselves were half of a twinses.

Happy Birthday girls. Love you bunches,
Dad