Fraternal

You’d be amazed how often people ask me if my boy/girl twins are identical.  Apparently no one was paying attention in high school biology.**

Being a mom of twins has, to state the obvious, shaped my parental world-view in countless ways. One notable thing is that everything in my world comes in pairs.  I never pour a single cup of juice or get a single snack from the pantry.  I always ask if there’s a “twin discount” when I’m buying two big-ticket items, like carseats or cribs.  Most recently, we bought a pair of toddler beds and moved my big kids into their own rooms and big beds.

Having two kids of the exact same age makes me a little obsessed with keeping everything “equal.” I don’t want them to always have two of the exact same thing (though sometimes that’s the easiest way), since they’re two very different little people with different interests.  But we do try to keep things fairly equitable.

And, so, you’ll notice that my kids’ new quilts are indeed very similar, but hardly identical.  They are both made of 8″ blocks with 3″ sashing and 5″ borders.  Lots of solids, including the binding. Similar strip of blocks on the back.  The layout, the structure is the same.  And yet, the actual quilts have very different looks and personalities.  Both suited to their recipients.

I’ll give them each their own post in the next two days.  Much like my beloved kiddos, they are certainly their own individual quilts.  And yet, I cannot ignore the fact that they are, and always will be, a pair.

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** OK, here’s your mini biology lesson for the day, in case you want to actually know the difference between identical and fraternal twins.

IDENTICAL or MONOZYGOTIC twins occur when a single fertilized egg splits in half, generally in the first couple of days after fertilization.  Therefore, the two resulting babies have the exact same DNA.  Having the same DNA means they will be the same sex and will likely be almost impossible to tell apart to the casual observer (barring things like different haircuts and the like, of course). Boy/girl twins, therefore, cannot be identical. (No matter what the crazy lady at the grocery store tells me. There is also not, as she would have liked to believe, such a thing as “almost identical.”  WHAT?) Identical twinning is a random occurrence, and there is no scientific evidence of it “running in families.”  It just happens.

FRATERNAL or DIZYGOTIC twins occur when two separate eggs are individually fertilized.  When they occur spontaneously (i.e. without fertility treatments), it means the mother has ovulated more than one egg in a single cycle (or, as I like to say, “double-dropped”).  The resulting babies are no more genetically alike than any other pair of siblings, and can be same- or different-gender.  Because they are the result of multiple-ovulation, fraternal twins can and do sometimes run in families, as the mother might have a genetic pre-disposition to double-dropping.  But, as you can now tell, it only matters if there is a history of twins on the woman’s side of the family, as the man obviously has no influence on how many eggs she’s going to drop.  So it does not matter in the slightest whether or not there are twins on my husband’s side of the family (there aren’t, but everyone likes to ask). There are other factors that can give a woman a higher risk of multiple-ovulation, even if there is no family history.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist this mini rant. As you might imagine, we twin moms get a lot of very strange comments.