Seemingly, each new day reveals a different headline or restriction to stop the spread of this monster virus and with each new piece of information, the kids readjust their learning and expectation of what the foreseeable future holds. The bizarre schedule rides like a bucking bronco stuck in a living room, but one with clear perks for twins and multiples. I hear mine laughing from the other room and can tell you, it’s a good day to be a twin!

Growing up with a twin sister while attending public school was tricky. My sister, the smarter and more responsible one, always kept me in line. I liked it on the days of forgotten algebra textbooks in middle school and extra reading material for points in elementary, but I recall clear memories wishing away my sister’s explanations for my misdeeds. At school, we ran with different friends because of our own differences and I kept a clear distance away from home.

Hearing laughter from the other room reminds me that this offers a season to reconnect as a family.

At home, however, one thing stayed the same, we were twins, sisters, and friends, wombmates to share life with. At home, our differences added diversity to our favorite pastimes and we felt just fine. Better than fine, in fact, because we always had a peer to play with. We engaged in discussions over books read or movies watched, we experimented in the kitchen and practiced the latest hair trends on each other. Unlike school, we escaped the classmates’ opinions and teachers’ judgments and the restricting schedule. Home together as twins rarely went wrong and we built a friendship there which far outlasted the bumpy journey of public school.

Hearing laughter from the other room reminds me that this time could be a time of panic and uncertainty, but it offers a season to reconnect as a family. Having a twin amidst “stay at home” orders helps the time pass with less weight and the place we call home a place where friendship blooms. 

Maybe these months will be the stuff of fond memories made similar to those of my childhood. While heavy worry with intermittent panic grows outside of our four walls, I desperately long to show my kids how safe home can be.

Someday, when talk of this virus dissipates, I don’t want my kids to remember the news anchors or the numbers or the missing toilet paper. I want them to remember the home-grown games and laughter and learning so the next time there is a panic, they long for this soft, safe place we all call home.

Like my yesteryears, this season of government-ordered “stay at home” showcases the positivity of twinhood. Without the pressures to conform to peers or professionals, twins focus on the things they know and love. In a season when other kids desperately long for a return to school for some company, a twin enjoys their built-in peer at home. Even managing virtual learning alongside a twin proves easier because someone is always there to help explain and discuss concepts, assignments, and inside jokes about the teachers. The fourteen-year-old twins in our home create scenarios about what a friend or teacher might say in response to a virtual assignment and then they grin and chuckle.

Yes, it’s a great day to be a twin!

The post It?s A Great Day To Be A Twin appeared first on TWINS Magazine.

About a month prior, a positive pregnancy test left me elated with anticipation for our third child. The excitement gave way to gloom and winter stretched on, so I blamed the gray skies. When my belly grew faster than my previous pregnancies, I thought maybe it was something physical. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew something changed in me towards the end of my first trimester. 

Looking back, I understand why I misidentified the heavy feeling. First, during my previous pregnancies, I totally rocked the glow factor. I felt healthy and alive, despite the looming complications created by my freak uterus. Rocky deliveries, however, explained my husband’s hesitant response to the idea of a third pregnancy. 

Eventually, he warmed up to the thought, and voila, the third pregnancy was upon us. Perhaps, I still felt the need to convince him a third pregnancy was a good idea, so I laid low all day and tried my best to look alive in the evenings. 

Going out proved to be exhausting and bedtime never came soon enough! 

Second, “depression” seemed, well, too depressing. Prior to this pregnancy, I never struggled with emotional highs or lows. On the contrary, my husband often called me a “ridiculous optimist.” While I knew friends with depression, identifying depression within me remained foreign. I knew post-partum depression swung with indiscriminate blows, but I never even considered depression an option in those hard prenatal days, I just kept trying to be optimistic thinking tomorrow would be better, but I always woke up with the same dull feeling. 

As my pregnant belly grew, the doctor revealed the baby’s gender, a boy! Adding a son to our family overjoyed my heart. I thought the excitement of replacing all the pink in my storage bins with blue might just shoo away the heavy cloud, but the gloom remained. My belly seemed to grow larger by the day, and I chalked up my heaviness to the physical stress such quick growth might cause. 

At my 20-week doctor’s visit, I wanted answers. I asked about my growing belly and the uncharacteristic movement I was feeling all over the place. What caused such fast growth? Why the lack of energy? And the dull feeling? Unfortunately, the doctor shuffled me through his office quickly explaining, “Pregnancies with boys are different. Expect different feelings during this third pregnancy.” 

After my visit, my heaviness worsened. Now, in addition to the emotional weight, I began feeling physical symptoms. Constant fatigue stole my glow and a mysterious “lump” moved into my throat, one that I was familiar with only from moments in my life when I was on the verge of tears. Except, I never felt like crying. I didn’t feel like anything. The lump in my throat remained a nagging reminder that something was “off.” 

I asked my husband to accompany me to the 24-week visit. Our specialist, known for quickly assessing and sending patients along, intimidated me. I couldn’t muster up the boldness or even maintain consistent perception to ask the questions others asked of me after these visits. My husband also recognized a marked difference with this pregnancy and wanted to ask a few questions of his own. 

In the exam room that day, the doctor pulled out the ultrasound wand for the fifth time to look at our growing son. As a specialist, his quick routine measurements directed our conversations. He lubed up my belly, glanced at the screen, and then surprised himself (and us) by exclaiming, “Oh! We’ve got two babies!” 

And that was my answer, at least for then. 

My pregnancy lasted another ten weeks. It was ten more weeks of the same heavy feeling and the lump in my throat, but twins were double the joy and double the concern, so we spent those ten weeks with the best kind of distraction. The reality of my heaviness remained and even now, when I watch home videos of the pregnancy, I hear the nagging lump in my through the tone of my voice. 

Our world was a whirlwind of diapers and feedings and so much laundry after the birth of our twins. I remember feeling the physical lump in my throat for some time after but kept so busy, I never addressed it with anyone. The feelings of heaviness left before the lump and after the twins’ first birthday, even that disappeared completely. 

Four years later, in a pediatric waiting room, I read an article about “antepartum depression” or “prenatal depression.” The article explained prenatal depression as “baby blues” during pregnancy as opposed to after when postpartum depression sets in. The article cited research about the probability of prenatal depression and listed “mothers of multiples” as one of the factors. 

“AHA!” I remember thinking. What an enlightening personal discovery! I wanted to return to that tired mama, resting on the couch for the umpteenth day in a row, and say: 

•  “It’s going to be okay.” 
• “Don’t feel guilty about missing out on the excitement of growing a human being inside of you. Your body is working overtime and you will enjoy all that life soon enough.” 
• “Take all the time you need and pass your heaviness around. Let people help you and encourage you while you rest.” 
• “Be honest about how you feel. Talk it out with your husband, a trusted friend, and most importantly (and emphatically!) to your physician.” 
• “Eat well and rest plenty, taking good care of yourself so your body can miraculously grow a life, or two, or three – and a legacy whose heart beats with yours.” 

Depression related to pregnancy is real. My twin pregnancy exposed the reality of living with numbness of emotion and lack of desire for anything. Although pregnant women with a history of mental health conditions increase the likelihood of prenatal and post-partum depression, my case shows a twin pregnancy might be the only factor that increases the chance of experiencing prenatal depression. 

And you know what? It was okay. I eventually got off that couch and felt like whistling again. Today, my twins are rocking fourteen years of very full lives thanks to the heavy load I carried and that pesky lump in my throat. This mama’s heart sings in knowing the struggle that gave birth to so much life. 

The post Prenatal Depression: One Mom’s Story appeared first on TWINS Magazine.

“Maybe three hours? I’m not exactly sure.” Honestly, this was probably a conservative amount, but I never really kept track. Who had time for that?

“She should be getting no more than her age, in hours, per week.”

Gulp. “Six hours a week?” I asked.

“Yep. Try screen sticks. Some parents find it easier than you think to limit screen-time.”

She described screen time as any face-to-screen time, no matter the device or screen. Television counted, YouTube counted, games on a device counted—every screen and every minute weighed in for “screen time.” She explained screen sticks like currency. Each stick, issued at the start of every week, represented a specific number of minutes. The child chooses to use the sticks at their discretion, but when they’re gone for the week, there is no more screen time left. 

“Right!” I remember thinking. “Like that’ll work!” Cutting screen time in half seemed like a nightmare/whine-fest/Herculean feat that I simply didn’t have the energy to oversee.

She wrapped up our visit, and we were on our way, all five of us like a parade, traipsing to the elevator and out through the parking lot. On the drive home, I couldn’t stop thinking about our conversation concerning screen time. I often allowed our daughters’ screen time with hesitancy. I knew screens didn’t necessarily encourage brain development and wondered how it would play out as our twins joined the screen-begging crowd. Her idea lodged itself in my frontal lobe, unwilling to budge.

Even though the twins overloaded all efforts at home, I couldn’t shake the doctor’s idea about screen sticks. Almost immediately after kicking their shoes off at the door, the girls asked if they could watch a show and I let them, in order to wrestle the twins down for a nap. They groaned when I turned off the television and I groaned back. In my mind, I admitted, the screen time battle wore on this mama’s heart and head.

When detailing the doctor’s visit to my husband that evening, I presented the screen stick idea and we decided to try it. My husband, an entrepreneur, liked the idea of teaching the girls budgeting through screen sticks. I pulled some colored popsicle sticks from the craft cabinet, blue for our oldest and purple for the second. I wrote their names on each and the words “Screen Stick” and “30 minutes.” 

The next Sunday evening, we sat them down, passed out the screen sticks, and then crossed our fingers under the table.

We told them how we wanted them to be smart and creative and overall, flat-out awesome. We told them the doctor said one way to help in the awesome department meant cutting back on screen time. We laid out the plan: give us a stick and you can have screen time for 30 minutes. When the sticks are gone for the week, so are the screens.

Our oldest, a typical first-born, asked a lot of questions with hesitant excitement. She liked the idea of being the boss of something all on her own! She seemed ready. She even helped explain it to her four-year-old sister. I tossed my husband a sideways grin and he read my mind, “We’ll see how long the excitement lasts.”

The first week proved painful. They ran out of screen sticks by Wednesday, and I spent a considerable time initiating play between the two, and occasionally playing along with my four-year-old while her sister was at school and the twins were napping.

Week two worked better. They waited until Friday to spend their last screen stick and with a busy weekend, we didn’t miss the normal allotment of screen time. 

But I never could have predicted week three. They had screen sticks leftover! I couldn’t believe it! What I thought would be a nightmare/whine-fest/Herculean feat turned out to run itself and save my girls from too much screen time. My part of handing over the sticks every Monday morning was easy. Their part of handing over sticks throughout the week worked like magic! 

Over time we noticed screen sticks helped us all by:

• Drastically cutting down on the kids’ screen time.
• Initiating creative play. (Why watch a show when you can “be” the show?)
• Showing the girls the importance of budgeting: their sticks, their time, and their priorities. (Dora or Blues Clues? Big decisions.)
• Offering the kids’ a sense of control about their own screen time.
• Cutting down on screen time for the grown-ups in the house too. (We didn’t want to turn on a screen only to have them watch, so we kept the television off until after bedtime.)
• Teaching our four-year-old the days of the week and a better sense of time.
• Landing a solid parenting win. (Those are harder to come by than it appears!)
• Creating a healthier emotional and cognitive environment for our kids’ development.

It turns out, my pediatrician knew encouraging play over screens takes parent initiative but results in simple success. Screen sticks offered a manageable solution in our busy home. We’ve ditched the sticks at this point in parenting, but the guidelines are the same. Our kids look forward to creative play and do not depend on screens to fend off boredom. As a result, they thrive at school and at home with confidence in their critical thinking, social skills, and creative ideas. Now, instead of biting my lip with uncertainty, I meet the pediatrician’s question about screen time with a winning smile and high-fives around the exam room. 

The post Managing Screen Time Without Tears appeared first on TWINS Magazine.