The babies each have their own spine and esophagus

Conjoined twins with a single body and two heads were born at Suining City Central Hospital in Sichuan province in China last Thursday.

The twins weighed 9 pounds and were 20 inches at birth and have two spines, two esophaguses but share the rest of their organs, which has led doctors to say it would be nearly impossible to separate them.

A spokesperson for the hospital said the parents are farmers and didn’t want to have the babies initially because they worried they couldn’t afford to keep them alive.

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The one knows what the other is thinking. When not, they can always talk it out.

You know that thing where twins claim they have their own language? I’m totally buying it after watching a set of twins just go on and on about, oh, you know, a missing sock, an unbelievably big stack of … OK, I missed that. There’s a fascinating big stack of something. And something else I can’t quite make out but it’s clearly off limits — hence the stop sign hand-waving and repetitious “no, no, no.”

Which, P.S., is an awesome joke that never gets old. Continue reading »

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Who's Your Daddy?

As Melissa Dahl from MSNBC called it: a little baby boy in Poland has a “sister from another mister,” which wouldn’t be super-unusual, if she weren’t his twin.  That’s right, a Polish woman got pregnant with twins – each from a different father – which can happen when a woman has sex with two men while she is ovulating and releases two eggs that are fertilized.

TIME magazine writes, “after paternal tests were done, it was revealed that each child had a different father.”  The woman’s son was fathered by the man she was married to and her daughter was the product of an affair.  As you can imagine, this type of pregnancy is extremely rare.  In fact, this is reportedly only the seventh time this has ever happened in human history, and is the third most bizarre birth story next to Octomom and the Immaculate Conception. Continue reading »

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Hey! Where's your grownup?

Oh, the classes for kids. Sign up for too many and you’re an over-zealous helicopter parent prepping your two-year-old for Stanford. Sign up for too few and your kids will never learn “A Ram Sam Sam.”

Unless you have twins. Then, if you’re not very strategic about the classes you sign up for, you will (A) go broke, or (B) go gray very, very quickly (not that there’s anything wrong with gray).

Because, as Jane Roper writes over at Baby Squared, when your first baby is actually two babies, there’s a whole lot of stuff you can’t do easily. Mommy and Me yoga, conversations on the playground — these things pretty much don’t happen with twins. Mostly the things that don’t happen don’t happen because life with multiples is so hectic, not because of institutional requirements. But one mom in Brooklyn was told she didn’t have a choice about a gardening class she wanted to take with her twin sons. She could only sign her kids up for it if she brought a second adult with her to every class.
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Celine Dion and Rene Angelil

By now, virtually everyone knows that Celine Dion recently gave birth to a pair of healthy baby boys. Strangely, it took Celine and hubby Rene almost an entire week to name the newest additions to their family — a fact which prompted Madeline Holler to ask the famous couple a question: What took you so long?

Some extremely sad news which recently surfaced has suddenly left me with a question that I’d like to ask Celine and Rene: Why do you refer to your newborns as twins?

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There’s a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about a former cop who turns writer and pens a murder mystery called the Bone Chamber. On its face, it seemingly has little to do with kids and family life.

But I can’t stop chuckling at the motivation behind the book. Continue reading »

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Babies conceived via IVF are hardly news. Going back for treatments and procedures into a third decade like Monica and Neil Ward, however, certainly catches one’s attention.

At long last, the British couple are the stunned and elated parents of twin sons, following a quarter of a century of fertility treatments. Twenty-five years! And how does daddy Neil describe it?

A living hell. Continue reading »

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