Parenting resources

This is the beginning of what will hopefully become a rich list of resources about parenting twins and multiples. Please either leave a comment below or send additional suggestions to Diana@BeTwinned.com.

**Dr. Laura Baker, twin researcher with the Southern California Twin Project at the University of Southern California, recommends these “wonderful books for understanding twins from both a psychological point of view and a practical point of view in terms of child rearing tips and things that work:”

Raising Twins: What Parents Want to Know (And What Twins Want to Tell Them) by Eileen M. Pearlman, Jill Alison Ganon

Having Twins And More : A Parent’s Guide to Multiple Pregnancy, Birth, and Early Childhood by Elizabeth Noble

The Art of Parenting Twins : The Unique Joys and Challenges of Raising Twins and Other Multiples by Patricia Malmstrom, Janet Poland

Information about twin research and twin registers

This is the beginning of a resource page on twin research. Additionally, the homepage of this blog has a number of helpful links on twin research and twin registers. If you have suggestions for this resource list, please leave a comment below or send information to Diana@BeTwinned.com, and I’ll update either this list or the links list.

**Dr. Laura Baker of the Southern California Twin Project at the University of Southern California said that there is an abundance of material on the Internet and in professional publications about twin research and registers. The following are names of just two professional journals that might be of interest to twins and their parents.

The International Society for Twin Studies publishes the journal Twin Research and Human Genetics – it includes both twin research and research about twins.

The Behavior Genetics Association publishes the journal Behavior Genetics.

Related BeTwinned article: Research on twins has long yielded valuable insight into nature/nurture question.

Research on twins has long yielded valuable insight into nature/nurture question

by Diana Day

Twins have long fascinated those who study human nature, whether present in medical theories of Hippocrates or in stories as old as the Bible’s Jacob and Esau or Romulus and Remus, the mythological founders of Rome.

Sir Francis Galton, a distant relation of Charles Darwin and a scientist, scholar and author, was a pioneer in the use of twins to study questions of nature versus nurture in the late 1800s. Today there are any number of twin studies and twin registries all over the world. The results of twin research have helped form the basis of our modern understanding of human behavior.

Dr. Laura Baker of the Southern California Twin Project at the University of Southern California is a long-time twin researcher. She recently spoke with BeTwinned.com about twin registries and how twin studies are set up. She also gave us a sneak preview into early results from her current twin study.

BeTwinned.com: Please tell BeTwinned readers a little bit about yourself and what you do at USC.

Dr. Laura Baker: I am an associate professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. I’m a twin researcher, and I study twins as a vehicle for understanding the nature-nurture question of human behavior. Twins are a great resource for us to understand how genes and environment impact our behavior, so it’s great to have so many twins in Los Angeles.

I have been at USC since 1984, when I began doing research on twins. I started a twin register when I first arrived here. The way we started out was with volunteers, just advertisements through newspapers and the radio and through word of mouth, slowly gathering names of twins who were interested in participating in research. And then we gradually moved toward hospitals and school districts, and we recruited twins through those sources as well.

So I now have a fairly large register of twins that’s, for the most part, kids, but we still have an interest in studying adult twins as well.

BeTwinned.com: There’s a difference between doing research about twins to find out about twins themselves and doing research using twins in order to understand humans in general, right?

Baker: That’s correct. I am, of course, fascinated by twins themselves as a group of individuals. There are lots of interesting things about twins, but mainly, people doing twin research in my area — the area of behavioral genetics — are interested in the larger picture of human behavior. Twins give us an insight into how humans function in general. They really help us to have an understanding of the larger scope of human behavior.

BeTwinned.com: Why are twins and multiples uniquely situated to do that?

Baker: Because there are basically two kinds of twins. There are identical twins (monozygotic twins — from one fertilized egg that split) that came from the same fertilized egg so they are essentially genetically identical, and there are fraternal twins (dizygotic twins) that come from two different fertilized eggs, but they happen to share the womb at the same time.

The way that twin studies generally work is through the comparison of the two kinds of twins to each other. What we do is to look at the similarities of twins to one another and we look to see if, for example, the identical, or monozygotic, twins are more similar than dizygotic twins, and if so, that would be suggestive of genetic influences because the increased genetic similarity could explain their increased phenotypic, or behavioral, similarity.

So the nice thing about twins is the fact that there are these two kinds of twins, the genetically identical and the non-identical twins. But, they both share environments, they both share the womb at the same time, they are the same age, they grow up with this contemporaneous relationship. And so they serve as a comparison group for one another.

There are, of course, also studies of identical twins raised apart. Those are a really fascinating and unique group of individuals to study as well. It turns out that they provide a really powerful design for separating genes and environment. But it’s not necessary to have twins who are separated at birth. You also don’t have to have adopted twins to get a handle on gene-environment influence. By looking at the two kinds of twins who are raised together you can make many of the same comparisons.

BeTwinned.com: What are some of the big discoveries that researchers have made using twin studies?

Baker: In the last 25 years the study of twins and adopted children together really changed the way that social scientists thought about human behavior. Twenty-five or 30 years ago, it was really thought that learning and experiences were the primary explanation for individual differences, but the systematic study of twins and adopted children and their families all really changed the way people think. We now have moved away from a primarily nuture model to thinking that genes and the environment are both important in explaining individual differences.

In fact, it’s now the case that it seems that just about every realm of human behavior that you look at shows evidence for some genetic influence. Twins have really helped us to understand that very fact. Identical twins routinely are much more similar than fraternal twins on just about everything that you look at, from their actual physical appearance, to their general cognitive abilities, to their very specific talents, whether they’re conservative or liberal, the degree to which they are religious and even their social attitudes.

All of these things have some genetic influence, which was a surprise to a lot of social scientists. Everyone thought that social learning would be the key factor, but in fact genes seem to have these pervasive influences in the way that we think, feel and behave, in general.

It’s almost become kind of a joke to try to find something that’s not heritable, that’s not influenced by genetic factors. For a while, people were searching for something that wasn’t genetic, and it was really hard to find something. There are a few things that came up – it does appear that how spiritual or how extensively one participates in their religion seems to be influenced by genetics, but the type of religion that one participates in is probably more a family-learned cultural experience. So, which religion you participate in seems to be more cultural or environmental, but the degree to which you participate in it seems to be influenced by genetics.

BeTwinned.com: You obviously spend a lot of time with twins in your work. On a personal level, what have you learned about twins from working with them?

Baker: Twins are a really special group because they have this contemporaneous relationship. Twins can be, and often are, extremely close, more so than non-twin siblings. The bond that you see between twins can be remarkable. The love and affection and devotion they have for each other is really heartwarming.

Sometimes you’ll meet twins who are so similar that it’s hard to keep track of who’s who, and you get really confused when you try to hold a conversation with the two of them together. And a lot of times you’ll have twins that finish each other’s sentences, and it’s as though you’re talking to one person, but it’s really two. It can be a really bizarre experience, but fascinating.

I think that that bond, that really special emotional connection and level of communication between twins is really special and unique, but it also varies across twins. Some twins are closer to each other than other twins. And you also see some twins who are really competitive, and that close bond can actually be a problem for them because they feel almost not recognized as unique, functioning individuals. They can resent each other because of the competition. So at the same time that you can see this close, loving bond, sometimes it creates competition that’s even more drastic than between non-twin siblings.

Sometimes I’ll see twins who, during adolescence, will grow to almost loathe each other. They want to go their separate ways and be their own person and stop living in the shadow of their twin, and they’ll sometimes just go their separate ways as young adults and not see each other for years. A lot of times I’ll find that they come back to each other once they get rooted in their adult lives, and then they rediscover each other and they have this close connection.

BeTwinned.com: I’ve heard and read recently where it’s supposed to be common knowledge that twins are underachievers, except in athletics.

Baker: I’ve never seen any evidence for twins being underachievers. I’ve never seen any evidence for adult twins, at least, being any different in terms of IQ, educational attainment, or psychopathology. There’s no greater instance of psychopathology in twins. They seem to function just like everyone else.

There are some studies that show some early delayed cognitive development in twins, but those studies are kind of mixed as well. But, it seems to disappear by the time they get out of school, or even by the time they get into school. So sometimes twins will have language skills that will develop just a little bit later, and that can just depend on the twins themselves, how many other kids there are in the family and what’s going on with the parents. Of course genetics can play a role in their development as well, and premature birth too. So all of those factors might lead to some delays in twins, but they tend to disappear by the time they’re well into elementary school.

So it’s my understanding that twins are really the same psychologically and physically as the rest of the population, perhaps with this exception of having this special bond with each other. But they’re no more psychic than other people, for example. They’re not psychic. It might seem that way sometimes. You hear these freaky things sometimes, like one feeling what the other felt when they were across the world. Those are compelling stories, but what you don’t hear is all the times they don’t feel those things. Some of them really think they can read each other’s minds and that they can feel this connection from a distance. It’s hard for me as a non-twin to believe that. My feeling is that they just have this special communication and that they really understand each other in a way that no one else can. They have this intense communicative bond. But I don’t know how that would explain their experiences from a distance.

BeTwinned.com: When people say “twin studies” does that imply multiples as well?

Baker: It does imply multiples as well. Of course, twins make up the bulk of multiple births. But in our research, we do include triplets as well. We’ve never had anything higher than triplets. But we have nine sets of triplets in our study out of 605 families. It becomes tricky, trying to figure out how to statistically analyze the three. But in some ways you can think of triplets as a bonus because you can get three twin pairs out of them. You’ve got A-B, B-C and A-C, so triplets are wonderful because they give you three times as much information.

BeTwinned.com: What can people do who wish to sign up their twins or multiples on a registry?

Baker: People can go to websites. I have a website where I mention that I’m doing twin research, and there’s a link where people can send an e-mail if they’re interested. We’ll accept any twins that want to be in our register, but that might mean that they have to wait for a while before there will be a study that they will qualify for. But they still get our newsletters, and we keep them posted on things.

Sometimes other people write to us wanting to know if they can find twins for their studies, and we’ll send out letters to people on the registry saying to contact this person if you’re interested. People try to be protective of their twins and while we want to make them available for studies, we also don’t want to go sending their names out to anybody without their permission.

So people can look online. There’s lots of twin registers, and people can just put their names in them. There’s actually some effort right now at the NIH to put together a national twin register, to find all the twins in the U.S. and get them into a database somehow.

BeTwinned.com: What does a study entail?

Baker: It could be anything from doing nothing to coming in and participating in a laboratory assessment from anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days. The people in Minnesota, in their study of twins, had them in there for a week, so that’s really unusual. There are a lot of studies that are done with mail surveys and phone interviews, so there’s a range of things.

We’re doing a study right now with someone from the University of California Davis who’s a political scientist, and he found out about my twin register. He called me to say he was interested in voter behavior. He said we could do the study by just matching the twin register for the adults to the voting records in the County of Los Angeles, and we could look at concordance for their voter behaviors without having to contact them, because it’s public information.

But we felt uncomfortable even though there’s no harm to anyone. We just felt that out of courtesy we should just write to the people in our register and say that we’re doing this, and if you have a problem with that, just let us know. So we did do that, and so far most people have written back enthusiastically, and in fact they started telling us about their voting behavior.

I find most twins that sign up are really eager to participate, and they like to feel special. The only problem sometimes is that families with twins get really busy. It’s hard with kids, and even with one child, we tend to overschedule and having two must be a nightmare. So it can be hard to schedule time to get them to come in and participate in the study. So that’s one of the challenges we face.

BeTwinned.com: Are there any hot new discoveries?

Baker: Here at the Southern California Twin Program, we are actually looking at the development of both social and anti-social behavior. We’re interested in the range of problem behaviors that kids might experience.

We’re particularly interested in adolescent rebellious behaviors. It’s always been thought that that’s the norm almost, for adolescents to become rebellious and anti-social, that that’s what they do as they try to break away from their home ties and become independent.

We’ve been investigating the development of aggressive, anti-social conduct problems in twins. We started at the age of nine and 10. We’re looking at the whole community, so we’re not just looking at kids that get in trouble. We’re looking at all kids, and we’re looking at the range of behaviors, and we’re looking at why some kids become more aggressive than others and why some people are more rule-adherent, versus others who may eventually break laws.

One of the things we’re finding is that that there’s a big range of behaviors that kids display from the age of nine to the age of 14 — our study started at pre-adolescence and now we’re moving into the adolescent phase. We do find some evidence for genetic predisposition towards aggressive rule-breaking, anti-social behaviors. So, conduct problems do seem to have at least a partial genetic basis, but there’s also a huge environmental influence. And things like socio-economic factors, the level of stress in the home that the mother reports, certain kinds of life events, all do seem to contribute to conduct problems as well.

We’re really interested in following our kids into adolescence, where one question is: How much do peers actually influence kids to become more anti-social? Is there going to be a greater effect of environment via the peers than genetics, or are the genetic factors going to become even more important in determining who can resist those peer influences and who can’t? Those are questions we have, so we have studied these 605 families of twins and other multiples. We’re about to follow them up when they are in their teens, from 14 to 17, so that’s the next five years of our study. We’ll be recruiting some new sets of twins, so twins in California who were born between 1990 and 1995 and who are interested in this particular study can contact me.

Additional resources about twin research and twin registers.

Bringing them home: A Southern California family embraces Haitian twins

by Diana Day

On that hot Haitian morning, Nancy Connelly, with her family right behind her, ran up the steps of the orphanage to get to her babies.

Bam, bam, bam
. She remembers the sound of her feet hitting the tile steps.The humidity sucked the air out of her lungs. She saw some older kids playing at the top of the stairs, the sound of them getting closer as she ran.

She thought of stopping to greet them, but her desire to see twins Seth and Amara again, to hold them, was too great.

The Connelly family, Nancy, husband Scott, and their children Iris, 9, and Drew, 5, zipped into the orphanage’s baby room.

The room was a “sea of cribs,” Nancy said, “And it was overstimulating. I wanted to acknowledge all my friends’ kids … mainly, I just wanted to hold my kids.”

Understandably, the family all differ on the details of what happened in the next few emotional moments. Did Nancy go to Seth first, or did she go to Amara? Maybe Iris picked up Amara first, but maybe it was Nancy who picked up Amara and then handed her to Iris. Nancy said Scott looked overwhelmed, and she handed Seth to him.

“It was all a blur,” Nancy said. “I meant to remember every detail of it, and of course I didn’t.”

Nancy and Scott do agree that one of the nannies was holding 18-month-old Seth when they came in. The nanny said to Seth, “There’s your mommy,” and Seth started shaking his head, no-no-no.

After an hour or so with the babies inside the orphanage, Scott had to go outside for a break from the oppressive heat. But Iris never needed to take a break.

“Iris stayed up there the whole time both times we went [to the orphanage],” Scott said. “She was holding infants that have died. There was one that died of AIDS the month after we got home. Seeing [her with the babies] was my favorite part of the trip.”

The Connellys eventually went to the orphanage’s sitting room with Seth and Amara, the new members of their family. Amara appeared somewhat detached, though she seemed content to be out of her crib. But Seth was inconsolable.

“The nannies called Seth ‘the king,’” Scott said. They favored him, and he had more time outside of his crib than his sister Amara. The first few days with the Connellys were hard for Seth, and he “definitely wanted to be back at the orphanage,” Scott said.

“It was hard that day. It was hard that whole nine days [that we were in Haiti],” Scott explained. “There was a lot of crying. I felt bad for Seth. I thought, ‘Oh boy, this is going to be hard.’”

And that wasn’t even the beginning of the journey.


The journey of a lifetime (or two)

The trip from Southern California to Port au Prince, Haiti to bring Seth and Amara home was only one part of the adoption process. Nancy and Scott actually started the whole process in 2003 with discussions about adding to their family.

The couple, who met in 1987 and married in 1991, had always known there was a possibility they would adopt. After having two children by birth, they were considering whether to have another child or to adopt. Nancy had been looking into adoption on the Internet and would call Scott at work with updates.

He remembered when she called one day and mentioned, among other possibilities, Haitian boy-girl twins that might become available at an orphanage called For His Glory.

Before they hung up, Scott said, “Find out some information about the twins.”

Scott remembered Nancy asking, “Why?” He told her he didn’t know why. It was just something that came to him.

Nancy found out that the twins were from Cité Soleil, Haiti’s poorest slum. The birth mother was giving up the children – then known by birth names Jacqueline and Jacquelin, which are now their middle names — because of extreme poverty. They were her sixth and seventh babies.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. AIDS, political unrest, illiteracy and malnourishment are just a few of the dire problems that plague this island nation in the Caribbean. According to the 2005 Human Development Indicators put out by the United Nations Development Programme, the life expectancy in Haiti is 51.6 years with a 34 percent chance that a person will not survive to age 40. Ten percent of infants die being born, and 16 percent of the poorest children will die before they turn five. Almost half of the population is illiterate.

Scott had reservations about adopting from Haiti at first. He was mainly concerned about how having siblings of a different race would affect Iris and Drew in a society where people are not always accepting of multi-race families.

But, Haiti was more affordable for Nancy and Scott. And, they found out that the twins’ birth mother visited the orphanage once or twice a month, so it was comforting to know the children were loved. (At the request of the birth parents, Scott and Nancy have sent some pictures and updates since they came home with Seth and Amara.) Scott had also long been inspired by the closeness of his boss’ large family. Then, their neighbors had twins.

So, the idea of the twins from Haiti stuck. Nancy and Scott turned their focus to Seth and Amara.

“We just kind of kept in the loop on their status and how they were doing,” Scott said. He said he just knew it was right.


Every step is intentional

It took Nancy and Scott five months to assemble the adoption papers.

They started the dossier in February 2004, the same month that Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted from office. Nancy and Scott decided to delay submitting an important form called a 1600A, along with the first outlay of money, because they feared their paperwork would be lost in the coup’s chaotic aftermath. They decided to wait for the political situation to settle before filing the form.

Nancy learned how to navigate the ocean of paperwork and legal technicalities from her Internet adoption networks and extensive reading. Her own self-described “anal retentive” nature helped her keep track of the many details. But still, sometimes it just got to be too much. When the paperwork got overwhelming, Nancy said Scott would comfort her: “One paper at a time, honey.”

“Every piece of paper you get together for the dossier is one step toward changing your family,” Nancy said. “It’s such a conscious choice, every step of the way … That was the beginning of the roller coaster.”

Now that Nancy has successfully been through the adoption process, she volunteers as the adoption coordinator at For His Glory. Nancy, who is a trained doula — a woman’s birth assistant — said she has thought many times about the differences between birthing, helping women give birth and the adoption process.

“Believe me, the contrast is not lost on me. I am being a doula, but in a different way. I’m helping families being born by helping at the orphanage,” Nancy explained. “I have to give pep talks. It’s just like someone giving birth, it’s just a longer process.”

“Linda, the director [of For His Glory], is also a doula. Maybe we have the gift of encouragement, and that’s why we do what we do.”

Once Nancy and Scott turned in the dossier, it took a total of ten months for the process to be complete in Haiti.

In Haiti, the official certificates are beautifully handwritten, Nancy explained. But this is slow, of course. “If a copy machine is broken, you’ve added a month onto the process.”

And then there was the challenge of telling friends and family.

“You already have two kids, which everybody thinks is a perfect-sized family,” Nancy said. But there she was, telling people that she and her husband were planning to adopt outside their country and outside their race. And twins. She was sure everyone thought they were crazy.

In June 2004, a year before the Connellys brought Seth and Amara home, Nancy took Iris to Haiti to meet the babies and see the orphanage.

“We thought it would be a great thing for Iris to see and experience. Our social worker agreed, which ultimately gave Scott the feeling that he could let me take her with me. He was worried about her safety, but at that time Haiti was filled with U.N. forces, and it really was a calm and quiet time to go,” Nancy wrote in a follow-up e-mail.

“It wasn’t scary, it was just different,” Iris said of the time she’s spent in Haiti. “It was sad seeing people not having homes and stuff.”


Coming home

Scott really wanted a picture of his newly expanded family on that first day at the orphanage.

So, after a couple of hours in the sitting room, they went outside to take pictures and walk around a little.

Scott keeps one of the pictures on his desk at work. It reminds him how far they’ve all come.

Iris, Amara, Seth and Drew in Haiti
Iris, Amara, Seth and Drew in Haiti; photo courtesy Connelly family

The nannies had lovingly groomed Seth and Amara – shoes and socks for both, a ruffly dress for Amara and cute plaid shorts for Seth. Nancy remembers that they had bloated bellies. The children at For His Glory have three large meals a day, so Nancy theorized that the bloating was probably caused by some other nutritional imbalance.

Amara was emotionally distant, and she was sick too. She had stuffed some cotton up her nose, and it had festered there, causing an infection. Seth had calmed down some, but he was still unhappy being away from his nannies.

“It was a shock,” Scott explained about those first few hours. “It was real — it was what we wanted, what we prayed for. It was the right thing, but it was just different.”

But the most harrowing part of the trip was yet to come.

The day before the Connellys left Haiti, the twins had their visa appointment. Nancy and Scott were advised not to come because there had been gunfire in the part of town where they needed to go. The morning of the appointment, Pierre Alexis, the Haitian orphanage director, and one of the nannies took the children while Nancy and Scott stayed with Iris and Drew at their hotel.

The appointment was only supposed to take a couple of hours, but Seth and Amara weren’t back until dinnertime that night.

In the For His Glory newsletter, Linda Kohn, the American orphanage director, published the following account of what happened that day:

While Scott and Nancy Connelly were in Haiti in early June about to take their twins, Seth and Amara home to the US, our staff had to take the children downtown without their parents to get their visas, as it was so unsafe the parents could not join them. The gunfire rang out and Seth, Amara and our staff had to hide out in a safe house for several hours before they could return the children to the hotel. On the eve of their freedom from kidnappings, killings, starvation, etc., the children had to experience one last terrifying event before they could rest safely in their parents’ arms on the AA flight bound for America.


Hunkering down

There was an unexpected five-hour layover in the Ft. Lauderdale airport because of an airplane problem. Still shell-shocked, the Connelly family deplaned and settled in to wait.

Iris remembers the time passing fast, but it was an eternity for Nancy.

“For Iris, it was just fun, running around the airport,” Nancy said. But she was worrying about many things, including about whether the last-minute schedule change would prevent family members from being able to greet them in the Long Beach airport.

“I needed the emotional support by that time. It was totally survival mode by then,” Nancy said.

But still, she was very thankful to finally be back in the United States and on familiar territory after the difficult days in Haiti. After staying an extra four days in Haiti because of paperwork delays – they got through with enough clothes because of Nancy’s overpacking — and then after the last day of violence, Nancy was out of steam.

Mainly, they passed the time just letting the kids play. Amara had somehow learned to walk a little in her crib – Nancy described it as a sort of “Frankenstein walk” — and Seth could manage a few steps. But, as kids do, the four children found ways to have fun.

The airport was also Nancy and Scott’s first taste of the world of public opinion regarding the changes to their family. Scott was holding Seth as they got off the plane, and the first comment he heard came from an African American woman who said, “What are you doing with that black baby?”

This made Scott wary, but there were no more negative remarks after that, Nancy said. In fact, “People seemed to be going out of their way to smile at us.” One woman even mouthed the words “beautiful family.”

Once home, the Connellys made a cocoon around themselves for awhile and didn’t go out much. They figured that the best way to make Seth and Amara feel safe was to stay put.

Scott remembers setting Seth and Amara on the grass outside for the first time. Some of Nancy’s relatives came to visit, and they all went outside.

“Amara’s a toucher, and she was touching everything,” Scott said. He found the twins’ happy explorations comforting – a sign that Seth and Amara could indeed venture out of the house and still feel safe, connected.

Drew, formerly the youngest in the family, faced a big adjustment. Nancy remembers that Iris recharged her batteries by retreating into her room for a short time and creating a world for her Barbies, but Drew had a harder time at first.

“[Drew has] grown into his role as a big brother,” Scott said, but he had to work through it. Scott has recently been thrilled to see Drew looking after his new siblings, or spontaneously running to give them a hug or kiss.

“That was the hardest part for me, seeing Drew struggling,” Scott said. “But now looking at it, … it definitely has made him stronger.”

Amara, Iris, Drew and Seth at holiday time
Amara, Iris, Drew and Seth at holiday time, about six months after their homecoming; photo courtesy Connelly family

Attachment issues have been at the forefront of Nancy’s and Scott’s concerns. They are vigilant and observant, trying to gauge how well Seth and Amara are adjusting.

Nancy had done a lot of reading about attachment issues before Seth and Amara came home. But she said that reading the material before the children came was very different than actually dealing with attachment issues when they were really present.

“I expected to feel the same way about [Seth and Amara] as I did about my birth children. And I don’t, you can’t. They were not born of me,” Nancy said. “With adoption, it’s different. … And once I came to peace with that, I didn’t feel as guilty. I didn’t feel like a bad person.”

Scott knew that it might take time to feel a deep connection to the family’s new additions. But “in the last month, I haven’t been thinking about that too much. I have been having that comfort – they’re ours, they’re really ours.”

He relishes coming home from work and hearing four children running and calling to him. Seth says, “Daddy-o, Daddy-o!”

And it takes time for the adoptees to attach, too.

Seth, formerly bonded to his favorite nanny at the orphanage, has now bonded to the family. But Amara still sometimes exhibits some of the detached emotional state Nancy and Scott saw in Haiti.

Amara received good and kind treatment at For His Glory, Nancy said, but she was still “hurt by virtue of being in an orphanage.”

It concerns the couple that Amara will hold up her arms to be picked up by anyone. And at their church, well-intentioned people reinforce this behavior by picking her up, passing her around and ooh-ing and aah-ing over her.

They have good intentions, Scott says, but it’s not really helpful when Scott and Nancy are trying so hard to have the children bond to their new family.

Nancy was greatly comforted by a visit from a county social service provider whose doctoral dissertation was about attachment.

The woman said it was O.K., for now, to let other people hold Seth and Amara and comfort them. Nancy also found it helpful to hear that there will be time later to teach the twins discretion and caution.

Nancy said that when the social worker told her “attachment is a process, not an event. … The weight was lifted off my shoulders.”


The days behind, the days ahead

Besides the larger attachment issues, there were a host of other daily challenges. Both Seth and Amara had intestinal parasites; Seth is still struggling to overcome his.

Also, because they were fed so quickly in the orphanage, the twins wouldn’t chew their food and had to be taught.

And language.

“You don’t realize how important language is,” Nancy said. And then one day she was chatting with Amara while changing her diapers. At one point, Amara responded with a simple, “Uh-huh.” Nancy was struck by the power of this moment of understanding between a mother and a daughter who speak different languages.

And then there were moments of intense worry and self-doubt. Nancy said she sees this kind of thing all the time on her e-mail listservs.

People post questions like “Am I good enough to raise these kids?” and “Will they hate me for taking them out of their birth country?”

Nancy said she worries about these things too. She’s not Haitian, doesn’t speak the language, doesn’t know the intimate details of the culture.

“You can try. You can try, try try,”she said. Nancy and Scott do plan to take Seth and Amara back to Haiti sometime so they can see where they were born.

In spite of all the progress the family has made together, there have been some really tough days. Nancy looked to her e-mail companions for help but couldn’t really find evidence of people who were having as hard a time as she was.

At first, Nancy was reluctant to disclose her frustrations: “My big fear is that I don’t want to be a bad ambassador for adoption. … I didn’t want to be that cautionary tale.”

She decided to post a “candid e-mail,” and then the responses poured in. It turned out that many people were having the same experiences and just weren’t posting them.

Nancy also read a book called The Post-Adoption Blues by Karen J. Foli and John R. Thompson and said it helped her a lot.

Scott and Nancy agreed that they can even see themselves adopting again. They are already discussing it — a little. They also both agreed that they are pretty tired right now.

“It’s definitely hard work with twins, changing diapers and getting meals prepared. It’s definitely more work, but you know, I don’t even like to call it work. Whether you have four kids or seven kids, it’s what you do,” Scott said.

Scott said that it’s “amazing” to see how much his twins like to be together. They might be doing different things, but they do them close to each other.

Once Scott watched Seth put a hand on Amara’s shoulder and pat her back when she was hurt. “They definitely hang together,” he said.

Nancy said parenting twins has changed her concept of what’s “fair.” She said it’s very different from parenting one at a time. Nowadays, what’s fair is not always what’s equal, depending on the needs of each child, she said. She is also less likely to get involved in sibling squabbles, preferring to let the twins work it out themselves where reasonable.

Both Nancy and Scott speak proudly of the twins’ resilience in the face of such big changes.

“They’ve come a long way, and they still have a long way to go,” Nancy said.

Something as simple as romping freely in an open, carpeted American home with plenty of toys and books around or having older siblings to chase and tickle them is completely new for Seth and Amara, now nearly two-and-a-half. In the orphanage, their cribs were side-by-side, but they didn’t get out of them much, though they did have a few toys to play with.

In Nancy and Scott’s home today, Seth and Amara play in front of Nancy on two oversized balls. They roll their little bodies around or sit up and bounce, their little socked toes stretching to balance on the floor.

“I look at them in the grocery cart at Ralph’s, and I can’t believe they’re here after everything. They’re from another country,” Nancy said, shaking her head in disbelief.

“We’ve got a whole host of peeling back the layers and figuring it out ahead. It’s going to be a lifetime of that,” Nancy said. “I can only hope that [Seth and Amara] know that we went on our hearts and not in our heads.”

But, in the end, Nancy said, “It’s really the babies’ story to tell.”

Twins Seth and Amara now have a better chance to grow up to tell that story, their way.

TwinWatch: Kids sharing a bedroom: Psychologists say it’s not two close for comfort

About TwinWatch @ BeTwinned

by Diana Day

According to an LA Times article, even though many parents today prefer having their children in their own bedrooms, psychologists say that kids can learn valuable lessons by sharing space. This is an interesting question for parents of twins and multiples.

I hope that when BeTwinned officially launches in April that this is the type of question that will get readers commenting and sharing experiences and ideas.

TwinWatch: The weight of a cell phone in my lap

About TwinWatch @ BeTwinned

by Diana Day

Babysitter secured, my husband and I made our way to Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall to see an evening of solo piano music by Keith Jarrett. Though this sounds innocent enough, it wasn’t — it’s the first live music I’ve seen since November 2002, when I went to a Beck concert in the very early days of my pregnancy.

The evening started like any pre-twins date night would have. We ate outrageously expensive tri-tip steak on plastic plates in the Disney Hall cafe and then meandered through the gift shop.

We eventually made our way to our seats, noting that my step-father Peter had been correct when he said that there is not a bad seat in the hall. We chatted about Frank Gehry‘s architecture and waited for the show to begin.

I made sure my cell phone was in vibrate mode, and I set it in my lap on top of my only dress-up skirt that fits after carrying two nearly eight-pound babies to term.

The lights went down, and then Jarrett came out and enchanted us with his improvised compositions. At turns groovy, ethereal and abstract, Jarrett commanded the Disney Hall with one treat after another. [See this LA Times review of the concert.]

I could feel the weight of the cell phone, a tether to my two little girls at home. It reminded me of hugging Dinah and Djuna — I try so hard to remember that every time I hug them, they’ll never be that weight or that height or that specific self ever again in time or space. In these moments, I let their weight sink into me as I sink into the present. And I try to preserve the moment in my diminishing brain cells.

Listening to the music, enjoying holding hands with my husband in the dark and thrilling to the feeling of being entertained, I still felt the cell phone waiting in my lap. Senses I haven’t used for years sparked and stretched their little limbs — I had forgotten that CDs and iPods are not the same as live music.

Jarrett played several encores, including some rapturous standards, like Stardust and It Might As Well Be Spring, a song also interpreted by the sublime Blossom Dearie. Djuna used to love to listen to a CD of hers when she slept in her swing as an infant.

For a moment, my cell phone floated into the grand space of Disney Hall.

TwinWatch: Emotional meeting between heart donors, recipient

About TwinWatch @ BeTwinned

by Diana Day

The Draper family and the York family share a unique bond — the Drapers donated the heart of their son Jordan York, just four months old when he died, to 7-month-old Nick Draper. Twins Nick and Nate Draper both have rare and fatal dilated cardiomyopathy; brother Nate is still awaiting a heart transplant. LA Times staffer Kurt Streeter wrote a touching article about the meeting between the two families. Check out the photos that go with the story too.

TwinWatch: Reality show features identical twins test

About TwinWatch @ BeTwinned

by Diana Day

According to Springfield, MO’s News-Leader, the Discovery Health Channel made an appearance at the annual Twins Days festival in Twinsburg, Ohio last August to audition identical twins for its upcoming reality show America’s Most Identical Twins Test. (check your local listings, but the show is supposed to run Sunday, March 12 and Sunday March 19).

But how much of a test could it be? Gee, judging from the picture in the News-Leader article, all the sets of identical twins look, well, identical. Reality TV must be running out of options if they have to test identical twins to see which set is, um, more identical.

Also, I don’t know about anybody else, but the last thing I need after this show airs is more people stopping and asking us everywhere we go whether our twins are identical, whether anyone can tell them apart, etc. Reminds me of a friend who has triplets — she got so tired of people asking her whether her triplet girls were triplets that she started to say, “No. They’re not triplets. They’re quintuplets. We just left the other two at home.”