Moms of multiples tell it like it is

Growing up in the UK and Bangladesh, I was raised on Mahatma Gandhi’s life story and words as the embodiment of a worldwide move towards civil rights and mutual respect between people and between peoples. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. embodied those same values, and today’s US-wide commemoration of his achievements is a reminder to [...]

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My husband has a very physical job, and our daughters, M and J, are incredibly active kids. It takes a little more effort on my part to fit exercise into my day, since I have a desk job, but I do my best. I will admit that I haven’t been good about working out since [...]

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This afternoon, I received an email from my daughters’ school informing me that a spot had been secured in Mrs. G’s 1st grade classroom for our daughter M. She starts Monday. Mrs. G is a great teacher, and a warm and lovely person. I once ran into her at the grocery store and we chatted [...]

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I’ve written a little before about my efforts to help the boys’ teachers and friends tell them apart. I’m happy to report that their teacher, by mid-October, had found some tiny freckle on one boy’s face that he can use to tell them apart. Their friends still have no idea and arbitrarily call them by one [...]

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When I told you that my twin daughters were now in separate grades, many of you provided very thoughtful, thought-provoking responses. The bulk of the opinions were on the side of keeping M and J at the same grade level, rather than having J skip 75% of kindergarten and 25% of first grade to become a [...]

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I thought that once we’d decided that to place our twins in public school and in separate classrooms, we could sit back and let the kindergarten year unfold. Some of you may recall that getting M and J into their kindergarten classes was a little stressful. Fortunately, both their teachers turned out to be skilled [...]

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Who knows best whether your multiples should be placed in the same classroom or separated at school? You, right? For our family, separation in kindergarten was the right answer, but it’s different for everyone. Many educators and school administrators believe that same-age siblings should never be placed in a classroom together. I would argue that there is no one-size-fits-all solution [...]

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Every time that I start to stress about J and M’s eating habits, I remind myself of our parenting goal: Healthy, happy, whole adults. Of course I want our children to have a healthy diet in the here and now, but it’s far more important to me that they be equipped to make good food [...]

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Technical difficulties prevented this post from being published on Sunday, October 10. M and J are five years old. In all those years, neither of them has ever asked for time away from her sister. From time to time, they have chosen to pursue different activities with one parent or the other, but my husband [...]

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I am an unashamed nerd. (My husband, looking over my shoulder as I write, claims that he is not a nerd, and is better described as “awesome.” His high school friends would probably go with nerd-jock, though. Oh, and band geek.) We’re the kind of people who see science and math everywhere in our daily lives. Our kids told us, [...]

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