I remember the day when my husband and I first found out we were going to have twins. The doctor had so rudely used his instrument, but it allowed us to see, fairly early, the growing baby (we thought) in me. My husband was over my right shoulder as I lay down on the examination table. We both leaned forward and strained to make sense of the black and white snow screen. It looked like some moonscape with caves. As the doctor moved the instrument around, he nonchalantly started to voice his travels in inner space. “So here is the placenta. See that? Now look closer. See that small blinking right there?”

“Blinking?” we said in unison. We tried to peer closer to where he was pointing. “You mean that thing blinking like a vacancy sign at a no-tell motel?” I asked.

“Yes yes! That's your baby's heartbeat!” We audibly sighed in wonderment.

“Okay,” said the doctor, “now over here...” he moved his wand away from our little heartbeat we were already falling in love with. “See now this is your other placenta. See that? Another heartbeat.”

Meanwhile our hearts had stopped beating for a moment. “Any more????” I asked.

The doctor laughed heartily, “No, I think twins is quite enough. Now see they have separate sacs so they are fraternal twins—not from the same egg but from two eggs.”

Turns out my body had a mind of its own, but my husband capitalized on the information and proclaimed, “I hit it out of the park!” He stood there gleefully smiling. We continued to laugh and smile all the way home frequently exclaiming, “We're having TWINS!!!” What did we know?

We went through all the usual debate about whether to tell people, wait until the first trimester was done, or tell family sooner. My husband continued to look at my growing belly and became convinced that we would have two boys (“I just have a feeling”). I was used to boys since I grew up with four brothers and no sister to share my plight. I felt I could take on the “double trouble.” We talked about how it didn't matter if they would be boys or girls since we just wanted our babies to be healthy. I was immediately labled “high risk,” but relaxed when I found out that all mothers expecting twins received this nomenclature.

When we returned to the doctor for our second sonogram, we knew he would be able to give us more informtion on the sex of our babies. We wanted to know, we decided, because planning for twins was going to be hard enough. We thought knowing the sex of the babies would give us a running start to the chaos that was to become our lives.

“Well, let's see,” the doctor said. This time when we looked at the black and white screen we could actually see the shape of a baby, but why was the baby wearing a Darth Vader mask? It turns out that as a baby is forming, for a long time his or her skin is virtually see-through which makes the growing eyes stand out as if from a mask. “If you look right here,” the doctor said as he used the roller ball on the keyboard to surround a part of the screen, “this is definitely a boy.” A boy! We knew it! What was weird was that the angle of the shot made us feel like we had invaded our baby's personal space. The camera, or whatever, was situated such that we were looking up underneath the baby's legs.

The doctor moved on to the other baby. He showed us what looked like a gossamer curtain. “See that? That the line that separates your twins. Even though they are in separate sacs, they can touch each other through this very thin layer. It bends with them. Whoa. Amazing we thought.

The doctor tried to get the same angle on “Baby A,” but this baby was far more modest and refused to open his/her legs. Try as he might, the doctor simply couldn't make out what the baby was hiding. “Could be a boy or a girl,” he said rather self evidently.

In subsequent sonograms, our Baby A still would not reveal her sex, but by process of elimination, the doctors and technicians determined that it was “probably” a girl. We did end up having a boy and a girl, of course, but we weren't really sure until delivery day. “One of each!” we cheered—as would so many others.

In fact, despite the blank spot of time after the twins were born along with the lack of sleep and stress, we were still amused at all the comments we got about our twins when we took them out in the double stroller. “Are they twins?” was the most common. “Double trouble!” “Boy, you have your hands full!” Sometimes people would peer down at our boy's beautiful and large brown eyes framed in long lashes and tell us how cute our “girl” was. For our girl, unfortunately, since she had short hair until it grew out, she was thought to be a boy. After a while we could only wanly smile at hearing the same tired lines about twins, but the one that always stopped us short was,” Are they identical?” This would typically come after the person in question was told that one was a girl and one was a boy. Even still, some people insisted that it WAS possible that they could be identical. We could only shake our heads.

There were and are so many t-shirts out there with witty (and often offensive) retorts to questions a stranger might have on his or her mind. We toyed with the thought of creating t-shirts that said something like, “Yes they're twins. Yes it's a lot of work—even double trouble. Yes, one boy and one girl. Yes they're related. No, they can't possibly be identical” and so on.

Interestingly enough, many of those questions have ceased as our kids are about to turn 4. Our son is at least two inches taller and wider than his sister and their hair, eye and skin color is different, so now, I guess, people just see them as brother and sister rather than twins. They are certainly their own unique individuals, but, I believe, they are still connected (and always will be) by that gossamer curtain.