Thursday, May 26, 2011

Can you tell who's who?

On the multiples' listserve today, a mother of one week old identical twins posted asking for advice on keeping her twins' identities straight as they were starting to look more and more alike.  Among the responses were painting toe nails, putting different color thread bracelets on them, assigning them different clothing colors (check!), and making sure they had assigned cribs.  I suggested that she double check them all over to see if there were any identifying markers she'd overlooked - since we didn't find the little bump on Daniel's ear until they were about a week old.

Some other folks posted about how often they still got their identical twins mixed up, despite best efforts to keep them straight.  One woman said they'd gotten pretty good at marking one baby's clothes and blankets with diaper pins, but that sometimes they'd forget and it was entirely possible that they'd mixed them up at some point early on and were raising Kate as Alice and Alice as Kate now.  Another referenced a study that said that identicals are, on average, switched at least three times in infancy.  These stories astounded me, since Max and Daniel still seem to look and act SO different, even though they are resembling each other more and more each day.  Maybe it helped that Max was so much smaller when he was born, so we got all those months to get their faces really set in our minds before they caught up with each other.

But it did lead me to wonder how much more difficult it would be to tell them apart without the telltale ear and clothing colors.  Then I noticed two pictures in which the boys had struck similar poses recently.  So I cropped out any identifying markers and I'll leave it up to you...

Can you tell who is who???

1)

2)

4 comments:

  1. I presume you and Joe don't think the boys look that much alike, but to the rest of the world, Edith, they could be the same child!

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  2. Oh, they look ENTIRELY different to us!

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  3. I was debating with Cathie about this, but my guess is : 1 - Daniel, 2 - Max. At least it's 50/50 :)

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  4. Sorry - it's Max on top and Daniel on the bottom (we put them in the opposite order on Facebook just to try to trip folks up!)

    What's funny is that they look so different to me, but when I go feature by feature I can't figure out what's different!

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