Meet the Twins

Okay, okay, I must admit that this post is long overdue. I’ve written about the twins, a.k.a. The Human Pillows, in my 3rd post but have not formally introduced them to you.

My excuse is a good one: I wanted to post alongside a nice, recent pic of them, preferably sleeping side by side, in keeping with the Human Pillows theme. But I have not yet been able to get the shot that I wanted, and for want of the perfect shot, I kept putting off this post.

So I decided to postpone the ‘recent pic’ thing and just post one of my all-time favourite shots of them:

I took this photo using a Motorola RAZR V3i — so please try to overlook the substandard sharpness and clarity — back when they were only 7 months old and didn’t even know what a camera is. These days, they smile and pose whenever I whip out my Nikon D40 (or outright refuse to have their photo taken, if they happen to be in a bad mood), sometimes even counting “1, 2, 3” for me. Then right after I press the shutter, they run to me to take a look at the D40’s LCD screen to check out the photo that I just snapped of them.

Twin1, on the left, who is older by 14 minutes, is a sensitive, affectionate soul. Twin2 is endearingly loud and cheeky. They almost always fight over the same thing (they easily lose interest when they have two of the same thing) and the tussle usually ends with Twin2 triumphant and Twin1 crying. Which is really quite a puzzle to me, because when they were infants, Twin1 was a self-assured baby who hardly cried and Twin2 the fussy, needy type who demanded a lot of attention. Now, it’s the other way around.

They had to wear their hospital tags for about a week after getting back home, while we tried to figure out a system of identifying who’s who. Yes, they look very much alike that even their own mother (that’s me!) gets confused sometimes.

The only fool-proof way of telling them apart is by looking at their palms. See those straight lines that run across their palms? Twin1 has this straight line on his left palm, Twin 2 on his right.

I like to think that they are mirror images of each other, identical end-products of a zygote that was split right in the middle, resulting into two separate, similar yet completely different, tiny human beings. As a matter of fact, when their first teeth erupted, Twin1’s first tooth was his right lower incisor, Twin2’s was his left lower incisor.

They just turned 2 last January and they are at this stage when they are talking non-stop, whether it’s gibberish or proper words. They continue to amaze me day by day with their expanding vocabulary and how they can now manage to put together simple sentences, sometimes in English, sometimes in Malay.

Just the other day, they were playing with MegaBloks, when Twin2 suddenly held up a purple piece and blurted out “poh-po“. I was momentarily stunned, then I encouraged him to go on. And he did. “Gheen” at a green piece, “bu” at a blue one. My husband, amazed, pointed at his t-shirt and asked them what colour it was and both of them triumphantly declared “white!”. We pointed out at their nanny’s blouse and Twin2 gleefully exclaimed “ping kaa-ler!” (pink colour).

This post can probably go on forever, if I’m to tell you every little thing that I love about my twin boys, just like any other proud parent. So I’ll cut this short for now and just post other little gems about them from time to time.