Double your fun with twins, twice
Ashley Ness visited her gynecologist with a straightforward goal, to renew her birth control prescription. The Doc’s exam and tests turned up one complication, —she was pregnant. It took two more weeks for her to find out how pregnant. The ultrasound technician doing the follow up testing looked pretty quizzical. Ashley joked at the puzzled look and said, “I know I’m having twins.” The tech who responded with a puzzled, “I don’t know, honey,” and then stepped out of the room. “I’m now in the room by myself panicking, like, What’s going on? What did she see? I felt like it was 20 minutes. It could have been an hour,” says Ness. “Then she comes back in, and she was like, “Did you tell anybody you were having twins?” And I was like, “Why?” She said, “Can you just hold off on telling people? So she starts the ultrasound back up. And she goes, ‘Honey, there’s actually four babies in here.'” But not just four babies. Further tests revealed four babies in two placenta sacks, indicating two sets of identical twins — a rarity of “like 1 in 10 million,” says Dr. Ahmet Baschat, director of the Center for Fetal Therapy at the Johns Hopkins. “If she were playing the lottery, if she’s this lucky,” says Baschat, “she would be very rich.”
The ultrasound technician who briefly abandoned Ness said, “I had to step out of the room to Google it to make sure,” the technician said when she returned, Ness recalls. The mom is a part-time hair stylist who shares a three-bedroom home in Taunton, MA with her boyfriend Val, her 8-year-old daughter, Chanel, and Val’s two youngest sons, Isaiah, 10, and Zayden, 7. On the way to conceiving again, Ness suffered four miscarriages. “I just kind of accepted that I was blessed with one child, and I took on his boys as my own,” Ness says. “So, I’m like, ‘My life is complete,’ never expecting to find out that I’m having another baby.” After everything, the news came as “a big shock,” she says. Indeed, twins run in her family. Her mother had twin brothers, her grandfather was a twin and her aunt had twins. Her boyfriend’s mother is also a twin, and his sister had twins. But learning she’s carrying two sets of twins? “What am I supposed to say?” she asks. “Like, I don’t even know what I was supposed to say at that moment.” In the meantime, people have stepped up with the items she’ll need for the babies. “I have amazing clients that have blessed me with gifts,” she says. “Honestly, just people I don’t even know that have gone on my registry and bought me stuff. I have my car seats. I have high chairs. My father’s actually making me a table for the quads. It’s a special table that has four seats for them to sit and have their dinner. I got the Pack ‘N Play. I received some clothes.” While Ness says she’s “very excited” about this new chapter, she admits she’s “also very nervous at the same time.”
Four times the fun
I found out today that I have an identical twin brother. I got very emotional when we
finally met.
I was beside myself.
“If one of the twins was born at 11:59 and the other came out 2 minutes later…
do they get separate birthdays?”
“My twin sister never forgets my birthday!”
A husband was excitedly calling the relatives to give them the good news of their newborn babies. He called his mother-in -law and told her, “We have twins” She was a little hard of hearing and asked, “Could you repeat that.” He answered, “I doubt it, I was surprised it happened the first time.”
I told my wife I’d pick up Burger and Chips on the way home from work last night.
I think she regrets letting me name the twins.
July 8th Birthdays
1982 – Sophia Bush, 1994 – Aimee Kelly, 1995 – Gabriella Green, 1998 – Maya Hawke
1969 – Kevin Bacon, 1969 – Michael Weatherly, 1950 – Wolfgang Puck, 1961 – Toby Keith