Lets say you have Jimmy and Timmy two brand new identical baby boys just home from the hospital. Now being babies our two adorable scamps have kept their parents up for two nights straight. After giving them their baths together our proud Papa being in a sleep deprived stat accidentally puts Timmy in Jimmy’s jammies and vice versa before putting them to bed. When everyone wakes up tommorow morning do you think Papa is going to realize his mistake or will Timmy be Jimmy and vice versa from now on? Or perhaps when they are playing with the babies Papa says “Silly me, Timmy smiles like that we when play so I must have accidentally put him into Jimmy’s clothes” when in fact it is merely Jimmy apeing his brother?
If it were to happen, it would have to be when the babies were very young. In my experience, parents can reliably tell identical twins apart when just a couple of days old - perhaps sooner.
As half of an identical set who knows many many many others, there is always some way to tell them apart. In my experience everyone has their own way too. We each had noticable birthmarks/defects. At or shortly after birth, you could weigh them too, I was 1# bigger, and stayed bigger until we knew who we were. Besides, my sister was always the one crying or sleeping in the pictures, so you coulda just gotten a camera and seen who started bawling.
My mom tells a funny story about leaving us home with Grandma for the evening. Grandma gave us baths and then consulted my (2 year old) brother which wet nekkid baby was which. My brother responded that he couldn’t tell until we had our jammies on 'cause the pink ones were mine and the blue ones were my sister’s.
I have wondered this question myself. Other parents may be great at telling but I wouldn’t trust myself to. My daughter went into daycare at 8 weeks old. I was the pickup parent. The first few weeks were rough as I would walk in and then try to slyly get one of the nursery people to give me some clue about which little identical (to me) bundle of joy was mine. Grabbing the wrong baby would have been very embarrassing so I just tried to buy time with small talk until they migrated over to the prize.
Yeah but which one has which markings! This might be just me projecting my own deficiencies onto other people but I have trouble remembering who some adults are.
Speaking of twins, what I’ve always wondered about is knowing that it was a coin flip that you got the name you did. At the moment when one becomes Timmy and the other becomes Jimmy, it’s completely arbitrary. That must be weird.
Somewhat similar to this…when my daughter was an infant, she was in a daycare center which had a nifty ParentCam. I wasn’t in an office and, as such, rarely logged on, but my husband would.
He told me he used to be watching the babies all do their thing. He’d watch one of them lovingly for a while. Ah, there’s my little girl, my bundle of joy! Eventually someone would carry another baby into the area and he’d realize, No, wait! THAT’S my child. Eventually he asked me to please start dressing her more distinctively, so that he could stop mooning over the wrong babies.
Of course it’s arbitrary – but I can console myself that there was something about my older sister that evoked her name – it wasn’t that my parents liked her name best of all female names, and my name only second best. Or maybe something happened in the intervening four years or something. It’s the baldness of the arbitrary nature of naming that seems to be thrown into relief in multiple births.
Admittedly, it isn’t usually a problem today, but I can think of several romance novels I’ve read where the hero is one of a set of identical twins, usually the younger twin and thus the younger son (and perhaps treated badly because of it) while the older twin inherits the title, the estate, etc. At some point in the story, usually after at least one has found true love, the brothers talk to each other about how life might have been different (and perhaps better–except for the true love whom he might never have met) if they’d been born in the opposite order. (In one case, the father of the twins had marked one of them with a hot poker so they’d never be confused–and decided by looking at the infants or listening to the one scream, that the one was unsuited to being his heir and so swapped them. By the time they figured this out, swapping back was not possible(mostly due to the true love thing)
Modern technology. You know which baby is which in the womb. Most twins are delivered by c section and so that’s real easy. In our case, we had named them probably a month before the delivery. The hospital named them Twin A and Twin B.
If you can’t tell them apart, why does it matter? You could switch the twins by mistake at that age - you wouldn’t know, they wouldn’t know, I don’t see the problem here. The only difficulty would be if one had some kind of disease/illness on their medical records, which when they get a check up would reveal them to be the wrong twin - but if you have to keep taking them back in at that young age, you’ll probably remember which of them has whateveritis anyway.
Also, people who call their twins/triplets/multiple birth kids rhyming names like Timmy and Jimmy or names where the first letter is the same are bad people. Bad, bad, people.
My friend was always so embarrassed that she couldn’t tell her identical twins apart for the first six months of their lives. They used to colour code the baby clothes. One of the older sisters used to refer to them as “The Yellow Baby” and “The White Baby” I recall her telling me that she was paranoid that they’d mix up the clothes while changing the babies in the middle of the night, and so I think they used nailpolish on the toenails of one baby as a backup system.
I saw a rather tired-looking woman a few years ago in the mall, juggling packages and a maybe-kindergarten-age girl, and pushing a triplet stroller, with identical baby boys in the seats. I SWEAR I know better, but it just came out of my mouth anyway: “Wow! How do y…”
That was as far as I got when the woman snapped “Nail polish!”
