Moving Across the Country During Twin Pregnancy with Aaron Ameen – Podcast 318
Episode 318 of the Dad’s Guide to Twins Podcast Show Notes Today we continue our father of twins interview series with Aaron Ameen, father of identical boys. Listen as we explore his twin parenting journey, including: Moving across the country during the twin pregnancy Helping others tell the twins apart Juggling a full time job and running your own business while raising twins Toddler’s reactions to having twin babies in the house Finding daycare for twins and a toddler Handling careers after birth of twins The twin delivery experience Taking paternity leave Creating boundaries when working at home Daily routine for one-year-old twins and more… Connect with Aaron on his website aaronameen.com or email him aaron@aaronameen.com . Podcast Transcript This is transcript auto-generated so please forgive any mistakes. Joe: Tell us a little bit about your family right now. How old are your twins and what’s the family dynamic right now? Aaron: We have three young children – three-year-old daughters who just turned three about two weeks ago at the time of this recording, and then our twin boys. They’re identical boys who will turn one in about three weeks. So three right under the age three – pretty busy household here. Joe: That’s crazy. I mean, I always tell people if you can make it through that first year with twins, you can do anything – especially if you have a toddler in the mix. That’s extra crazy. So what is something kind of exciting about this age with your boys? Aaron: So far, we’ve really enjoyed and been very lucky that the kids all get along. At first, we were worried about our daughter maybe getting jealous or there being some competing dynamics, but there’s been a really warm environment among our kids. The boys love their sister. There’s nothing she can do wrong in their eyes. She loves to kind of rough house with them and we’re always worried that she’s going to hurt them, but everything that she does to them, they just end up laughing and smiling. They’re really interactive. They love to babble and talk to each other and now they’re starting to kind of babble towards us. Not sure if they’re quite saying anything or if they know what they’re saying yet, but the developmental pace at which they’re developing at this kind of 11 month to 12 month mark is pretty incredible. Not two months ago, they weren’t even crawling and now they’re pretty close to walking. Joe: Do they kind of hit their milestones about the same time, or is one kind of ahead of the other? Aaron: There’s been some variation. With crawling, one of them made it about probably three weeks ahead of the other one. But now for the most part throughout this first year, they’ve hit milestones around the same time – teeth coming in, and they really are identical. We can tell them apart, but there’s still times that we mix them up a bit. Certainly any family members that don’t see them often or friends, they can’t tell them apart at all. Even at the daycare, it’s a game we play every morning where the teacher guesses which one is which , and they’re still working on getting it right. Joe: Do you have some kind of system that you have in place to help other people tell them apart? Aaron: We try and point out some of the distinguishing features to us. One of them has more curly hair, the shape of their face is a little bit different, they have a different smile, but we don’t label them or anything. One thing we don’t do though – I know a lot of people dress their twins in identical clothes – we do at a minimum put them in different outfits so that you only have to figure out which one is who one time per day because then you’ll be able to tell by the outfit. Joe: I was so afraid of mixing up our girls because we have identical girls. Like you, they look really close, very similar. I was afraid to dress them the same. Eventually, like you’ve discovered, you notice the subtle physical differences or their mannerisms and such. But other people, they still mix them u