Scarlett O'Hara's theory

I have a theory. Nothing empirical, obviously, because I only thought that happened with my girls, but now I am discovering it’s not only us. Or perhaps it is evidence for pediatricians and nobody told me.


If you have twins, if you know someone who has, whether in school there are two pairs ... spread the survey and tell me, please.


The twin who was born smaller or with less weight… has he/she become later on higher or taller?

Ona weighed 2,500 kg at birth. Her sister, Estel, 3400. At the age of three months they were nearly equalled. Now, close to their third anniversary, Ona is much taller and weighs two kilos more.

I am pretty sure that after birth, Ona raised her hand and crying, she shouted: “As God is my witness, I will never be hungry again!”. Yes, a tiny Scarlett O’Hara on Gone with the wind.

Alright, then, very well. They’ve already been born. And now what? (2)

My post-operative period was awful (well, I suppose that they all are, but I had no previous experiences). I could only see that time went by and that I only wanted to be taken upstairs. I did not think of the girls. I wanted to be with Jordi, my husband. I was told that when I could move and lift my legs the epidural would have worn off and could go up to my room. I became obsessed with trying to move and lift my feet. However, this was fruitless. And then, this was when the prick actually came round. What they shot me had to be strong, but when they asked me “in a 1 to 10 scale, your pain would be...” I looked like a fool. I don’t know. I wouldn’t know what to tell you. “What does a scale from 1 to 10 mean? It hurts like hell. I wanna get out of here.”

I even had a surrealist moment. One of the women who assisted me in my last gyn/ob appointment came to see me. She was the one who had calculated and told me that Estel was 3 Kg. 400 gr. and Ona, who was smaller, weighed 2 and a half Kg. That day, Jordi and I did not take her seriously enough. “It’s impossible that they know exactly how much they weigh, with the mess of legs and arms inside". She saw me and happily bursts: “ So, I got the weight wrong only by 60 grams, huh?”. “Bloody hell!”, I think. What a memory she has!

But things get complicated in the birthing rooms. The pain and the shot that they’ve given me give me I a hard time trying to keep up with what’s happening around me- I am concerned enough with my body. I sense that the situation in the operation theatre has become difficult, because they have brought a woman who has them running about. I don’t really know what happened, why she is there, what happened to her baby. I only know that things have gone wrong and that the medical staff are tense and nervous. The woman shouts. She makes me even more nervous, but even so, I still wonder if when I watched TV series on hospitals and thought that they were overdoing it the series were actually such an exaggeration... or not.
I don’t know how long it has been, but I feel that I can lift my feet. Such a simple thing feels like a total success. I’m taken up to my room. Where are the girls? I want to see my girls. Jordi has already called our family and they are thrilled to bits. My youngest niece has been the first one to arrive and it's been a while since she met them. My mother and my sister are helping Jordi out. At this point, my girls' pix must be on every existing social network.

When I get to the room and I see them, and Jordi hugs me, I can't help it any longer. I brust into tears. Tears of happiness. And emotion. And fear. At last I have them both with me.

Twin - humour

-         - In two years I gave up doing everything I did like to. Reading, listening to music, going to the cinema, going out, going to the hairdresser, doing sport...

-     - Oh dear. Did you have a deep personality crises?

-     - Noooo, I had twins!

Míriam, from the blog Criando multiples has published this today. There are times I really recognize myself as this woman, so I have had the need to share it with you. A little bit of twin-humour for a rainy Sunday ;)

They’ve just been born. And now what? (1)

I enter the operation theatre and a dozen people are waiting for me. I am frightened. It’s just natural in this situation, isn’t it? I know that it’s a twin birth and there’s a double birthing team, but I find it a bit too much. The anesthetist – who is kidding around – tells me that my blood pressure has suddenly gone up and asks me if I’m nervous. I wonder that this is the first time I have been to a spaceship. And I’ve heard so many things about epidural anesthesia that I freak out just thinking of it. But in fact, I don’t even notice the shot. At this stage, I can’t think of anything else than the fact that I’ll see Ona and Estel in a little while. I’ll be able to check if they are as I have imagined them for all these months.

Imagination had not betrayed me when I found out who was who. We had always said that we’d have an Ona if it was a girl or an Oriol if it was a boy (as you can see, we had not contemplated having two children for a moment. “Only one kid to give it a try”). So we had chosen just one name: Ona. But- what about the other one? A good friend told me not to worry, because the little one herself would tell me what her name was. One day, I found out that her name was Estel. But which is which? How will I know when they are born? I felt the need to identify them while they were in my belly to be able to speak to them and to establish a good communication to understand each other (especially at night, when Ona would not stop moving and would not allow me to sleep at all!).

I’m lying in the operation theatre. Not until they start performing a c-section on me does my mind fully react and then I realise that they’re actually performing a surgical operation. I can only think: “When I come round and the anesthesia wears off I will have a hell of a time”. Because of the feeling that they’re stirring up my body, I have my head in the clouds when the midwife asks me to look to my right because Estel is coming out. I see a ball covered in blood to my right. Suddenly, they put Estel’s face on my cheek. I’ve been imagining what this moment would be like for months, too. Obviously, I do nothing in the way I imagined it. I stare at her. It’s 10:53 in the morning. I don’t have time to react. Three minutes later Ona comes out. They also place her on my cheek. She’s smaller than Estel. I don’t cry. I am so frightened that I can’t be moved right now. My mind can only think about asking whether they are well.

Yes, they’re well. They let me know that they're taking the babies to meet their father. I try to imagine how Jordi will react. Are they just as he imagined them? What will he say? What will he do? Some hours later, he’ll tell me about the funny situation he was in, sitting in the middle of an operation theatre corridor holding a baby on each arm. When people passing by congratulated him, he told them that we were waiting for them to arrive and about all the things we would do together. After a while, he does not recall if it was five minutes or half an hour, he asks for help to go up to our room with the two babies. They will have to wait for me for a while.

PD. I must explain, for all English readers, that 'Ona' means 'wave' in Catalan, my mother tongue. And 'Estel' means 'star'. We found two names closely related to the sea, the wind and the sky...