I don't think so...
We've thankfully now noticed one has a slight elf ear (?) so they're stuck with their names now. They also have polar opposite personalities, so waking hours are easy. One of them is possessed by a particularly loud and bouncy party parrot.
I should add, our boys have near identical birthmarks which felt very unfair at the start.
My oldest was born with the elf ears as well. I was do sad when they grew to normal boring ears haha
Boo. I hope he gets to keep his elf ears. They were born two months early and had eyes like black pools of water and we're still covered in that super fine white hair unborn babies had. Very much little forest animals/changelings.
One of my kids was born with an elf ear and he still has it at almost 9. I have always thought it was adorable.
Mine still has an elf ear and he’s 16. We used to call him Buddy the Elf
My BIL’s gf was a premie and still has elf ears at 30
They change? My adult daughter still has hers and passed the trait along to two of her offspring.
My kiddo has one elf ear, one normal ear, as do her dad and half-sister. Its the same side for all of them.
My daughter had wolf ears when she was born. Slightly pointy and covered in unborn baby fuzz that was really long at her ear tips. She's rounded out and smoothed over by now!
Possessed by a loud and bouncy party parrot 😂 i also can tell your twins apart now
One of them is possessed by a particularly loud and bouncy party parrot.
What a fantastically evocative description!
My boyfriend is an identical twin. He told me that his parents would differentiate him from his brother by putting nail polish on one of their big toes when they were babies. One night, while bathing them, the nail polish chipped off and in the confusion, his parents couldn’t tell them apart. They just made their best guess as to who was who. 😂 So now, whenever my bf’s twin tried to pull the ol’ “I’m two minutes older than you” joke, my bf counters with “that’s not 100% confirmed.”
Dated an identical twin
At family dinner
One said the I'm two minutes older bit
Without skipping a beat, GRANDMA (of all people) interjects with "you know, you always throw away the first pancake"
Grandma went for the jugular! 🤣
you know, you always throw away the first pancake"
If you need to do that you need to get better at making pancakes.
Yeah, I've never run into an issue where my first pancake was bad and the others weren't.... They're either all good or all bad lol
Idk I'm with grandma, the butter in the pan needs a warm up pancake imo. I give the first one to my husband.
It’s called the mother-in-law dosa in south India
My first one is almost always fucked up. I adjust whatever was wrong (temp, oil, water) and then the rest are fine. That's why the first is the test pancake.
The first one is an offering to the pancake god, to ensure the success of the rest of the batch.
This is my main reason for wanting a slightly younger twin - just so I could constantly go "when I was your age" and just recount what I did two minutes ago.
Makes me really love the joke from the Venture Bros between Hank and Dean.
"Sometimes I forget you're younger than me."
"By a lousy 4 minutes!"
"Well then maybe in 4 minutes you'll understand!"
My twin, who is 4 minutes old than me, does this all the time! Sometimes it’s annoying, sometimes it’s funny, but it’s always sentimental.
Your poor twin! It is common for the elderly to get forgetful and repeat themselves.
You could try gentle redirection.
Hahaha!! I love that and can’t wait to try it out. Thank you!
My brother once said he couldn’t tell me something as I was too young, I told him to tell me in 2 minutes.
As the younger twin, this can go both ways. I assure you that it's equally annoying from both sides.
Haha! I can imagine.
"I hope I am not as clueless as you when I'm as old as you are! " for example?
At a soccer game behind us there were a set of twins. One says to the other “you cooked longer, you’re like 90% more burnt”. lol!
"ahhh, I remember it like it was two minutes ago..."
Haha I love this, I would do it non-stop!
When my identical twin brother says that he has 31 minutes more experience than I do, I always make the point that I had 31 minutes more development than he did.
I have a friend who is a twin and the older by 5 minutes or so. When they finally got high speed internet at their house (DSL) they got it hooked up and went to the first webpage to check speeds (they were in highschool). He then turned to his brother and said, when I was your age we didnt have this new fangled DSL. Those were the good old days... I remember it like it was 5 minutes ago...
This is why redundancy is important, you should have two methods of telling them apart in case one fails.
Just get on circumcised and not the other! So reliable, you won't need redundancy!
they should have been using two different colors, that way if the pink came off the one baby, the other baby would still have red on his toe
I once dated twins, and people would ask me how I could tell them apart. It was pretty easy because Madison always wore pink nail polish and Connor had a cock.
The doctors put a sharpy mark on one of our heads and told our parents to keep put the mark on our heads till you figure it out.
"These are our twin sons, Mark and Nomark"
brilliant
Written in sharpie: “NOT THE EVIL TWIN.”
That's the problem.. they are both evil!
Evil twin and eviler twin?
Poor Hugo :(
Too crazy for Boy’s Town…too much of a boy for Crazy Town!
The boy was an outcast
Yeah, but he got lots of yummy fish heads.
The sharpie mark was a soul patch on the chin.
And they named him Flexo
Just wait until they reach puberty, that's when the goatee grows out
I saw a photo of identical twins whose mom had buzzed their hair into a number 1 and 2. Which is exactly the kind of scheme you'd come up with during the delirium of sleep deprivation in the first year. (If mine were identical instead of fraternal I'd probably have done something like that too.) 😂
Nail polish on one finger is a common trick….. If one has a medical condition then a tiny freckle tattoo is another.
I have twin friends with dot tattoos on the bottom of their feet! I asked them why their parents didn't just tattoo one of them and they said their parents didn't think it'd be fair to make just the one twin go through it, so one twin has the dot on her left foot and the other has the dot on her right.
"Which baby is Todd?"
"The one with a dot tattoo on the right foot."
"My right or his right?"
"...Shit."
I'd forget which was the right foot
My brother and I had name bands on one leg. One morning they discovered that both bands had fallen off. So they weighed us and the heavier one (by an ounce) was me. Probably correct.
I have identical twin cousins. They are almost 60 but they still are identical. My aunt used the polish trick. When one cousin was four, she got hold of her dad's razor and tried to shave like him. The scar is still visible.
But I always could tell them apart, because one looks more like herself than the other one does. But this requires both of them to be present.
This had to have been an old timey doctor.
Born in the 80s. Nurses painted our toe nails to tell us apart.
When my boys were babies, people would recommend this. I had to explain to them that I would then have to unwrap and undress one of them just be sure. Sounded like too much work.
So you mixed up which was the evil one?
Lots of the time the personalities don't diverge until they're separated so this doesn't really work at a young age, unless you're sending your kids to kindergarten with sharpie on their foreheads.
It's pretty common at early ages they will be each other's best friends, have the same behavior, preferences, etc. and at least for my friends that were twins loved swapping to trick people. They didn't get their own unique personality until like middle school when they intentionally wanted to be unique.
You sound like never figured out which kid had the sharpie mark
100%. Why? Because they did. We applied for our drivers licenses and when we looked at our birth certificates we realized our mom had our middle names mixed up for the first sixteen years of our life. I still struggle to remember what my middle name actually is.
My brother had a leather bag monogrammed with the wrong initials when he was 29, because he couldn't keep it straight in his head either 😂
Growing up I thought my middle name was Phillip (2 l). When I got my birth certificate at 17, I found out it was Philip (1 l). Now, 39 years later, I still have to think about the correct spelling of my own name.
I know a guy that found out when he went into the military that his name was spelled Stephen, not Steven on his birth certificate. He had been spelling it wrong his whole life, and his parents never corrected him, they had it wrong too.
The US military has a weird obsession with correct names. My parents didn’t give me a middle name. When I got to college on a Navy ROTC scholarship, they examined my birth certificate as part of the onboarding process and saw that I had no middle name. In the space for “Middle Name” in the documents, they had to write “(nmn)” for “no middle name,” to verify that the space hadn’t accidentally been left blank. There were a couple of places on documents which required a signature, and I was forced to sign “Final (nmn) Candidate.”
My classmates nicknamed me “num-nuh.”
My grandfather didn't like to be called Edward, and he didn't want to be called by his middle name. So when he was going though basic training during WWII, he told the Army his name was Ed, just Ed.
When he passed, I was going though some of his papers with my Dad. We had a chuckle when we saw he is listed on his Army papers as "Ed JE".
A friend in high school had that problem with at least one of the colleges she applied to. They wouldn't let her just say "nmn" or "none" or anything like that, they insisted she choose a name.
That’s messed up!
I have a female relative without a middle name, & in school, her paperwork said "None" where a middle name would go, & the teacher thought it was her middle name pronounced Noe-nee 😅
Back at the turn of the century, my husband had difficulty being loaded into his HR system since he did not have a middle name. He was arbitrarily given the letter "X" as a place holder, and since that time that initial has morphed into "Xavier". Online now he is u/xavierpibb.
Thus making him Uneven Stephen.
*Unephen Stephen
My husband’s middle name is similar. Apparently the hospital spelled his name with 1L on the birth certificate and his mom had to get a correction. Even after the updated birth certificate came in, she kept both documents, so she would mix them up and turn the wrong one in all the time for stuff. So half his legal stuff has the misspelled name on it. Like why tf did she not throw the other one away!?
I’m suppose to have a double barrel first name and no middle name but my birth certificate split my name to a first and middle. But my parents continued to use the double barrel name on all registration forms and sometimes it got hyphenated and sometimes it did not. And it didn’t even matter because almost everyone always called me by the first name anyway.
I’m in my 40s and I have different variations of my name strewn through decades of documents. Hyphenated, not hyphenated, double barrel name, single name middle initial, single name no middle initial. My 3 diplomas don’t even have the same name. I also half assed hyphenated my last name after I got married. So not even all of that matches. I have leaned into the double hyphenated name in recent years though.
I have a unique double barrel name that I have spent my whole life explaining. My parents conjoined it with an apostrophe but not all government agencies have had the option to add it on my documents before the Read ID went into effect so my first name ends up being all just smooshed together on some documents.
Think something like Mistie-May (but more unique than that) so my license / credit cards would read “MISTAYMAY” and people would ask if my name was pronounced “Miss-TAEMAY”. Thank goodness when the real ID went into affect and each state had to comply with listing the license exactly how it was written on my birth certificate, I finally got the apostrophe to differentiate between the two parts.
My husband wanted to follow the same pattern with our daughter and I put my foot down. I don’t use my full first name in any context and the majority of people that know me don’t even know my full first name. None of my professional documents have my full first name either.
Tragediegh for sure…
My husband’s middle name is spelled Alan on his social security card but Allen on his birth certificate. I think he chose Allen for his ID.
I knew someone who had an identity crisis at 25, having spelled his middle name as Allen his entire life, only to discover that his birth certificate says “Alan”. When he went to ask his mom about this, she said: “Oh yeah, I forgot!”.
I’m lucky that I was originally named in another language, where Allen and Alan sound very different :-D Your husband made the right choice, by the way :)
I’m middle aged and my father is in his mid 70s. We just found out when my grandfather passed away a couple years ago that his last name on his birth certificate is spelled differently than the way we’ve been spelling our last name for our entire lives. Apparently at some point in his life, my grandfather decided to add an extra e in his last name which he carried over to his wife and kids who then did the same with their wives and kids. The annoying part is we’ve all had to correct people our entire lives because the extra e is not the common way of spelling our last name. We would have much preferred the original spelling. 😂
My middle name is misspelled on my birth certificate! I just embraced it. Made it easy to get the unique email address though, lol.
My wife doesn’t know how to spell her middle name. She has to look at her drivers license.
It’s her maternal aunt’s name, except her mother misspelled it on her birth certificate. So now neither one of them can remember which spelling goes with which person.
when my grandfather first tried to get his driver's license, he learned that his name was not actually Bob, it was legally Alonzo
Mine is Phillippa, instead of the common spelling of Philippa. My name is misspelled on my drivers licence, and I only realised I’d been spelling it wrong my whole life when I got a passport at 20.
My cousin went to apply for his drivers license and realized his parents had never legally named him. His birth certificate read Baby Boy Smith and he had to legally apply for a name change to the name he’d been called all his life.
My father is just not on my birth certificate, despite having paternity tests and living with him for like 20 years
I know a lady with a similar story - no actual name on the certificate - and she somehow didn't find out until she was over 70! She had a heck of a time getting a passport, and to add to the fun the records from that time period in her little hometown had been lost in a fire decades before.
To be fair, my dad was not a twin, and he didn’t know his first and middle name were legally flipped flopped until he joined the Army.
My grandpa found out he wasn't his name when he applied for social security & had to get his birth certificate for the first time.
Back in The Olden Days (this was the 1930s) you could get a job & get married & do all sorts of things without necessarily having to show a birth certificate.
He wasn't "Robert John Smith". He was "Johnathan Ezekiel Smith". He'd never been called anything but "Bob" by his parents, sooooo go figure. He had a heck of a time straightening it out, as his entire existence was based on the wrong name.
Damn. I think at that point I would just try to legally change my name to what I thought it was my whole life.
My uncle thought his birthday was one day earlier than it actually was until he needed to get his birth certificate to get his driver's license.
i do this all of the time. my daughter was 1 month and 1 day from my bday, so i always mix ours up (ex: my bday jan 1 and hers being feb 2)
i even insisted i had the correct day at the county clerk, trying to get her birth certificate. 🤦🏽♀️
My friend’s father put an initial on their birth certificate instead of the full name. Now their legal middle name is just a letter.
Hey, better your mom get confused by twins and their rarely used middle names than my mom who has misremembered what date my birthday is since birthday 0 lol. Seriously, my dad got pissed when he got custody cause I kept saying it was the day before. Got my birth certificate and showed me. Now, I'm 34 and she stills laughs about how she "Can never remember whether its day of or day before". She laughs, I just get angrier at her lol
This happened to my sister and I. My parents were using different colored socks to keep track, but we always kicked our socks off cause we ran so hot. We were young enough that we were sharing a crib, and my grandma was watching us. When my parents came home, we were both in the crib, sockless. They sort of shrugged and said "Well, that one is Fren and that one is Cheezes." Done.
There was a Full House episode about this
Even baboons know their own babies! Gotta love Kimmy
Baby socks don’t stay on because their feet are too tiny and they have no ankles. Not because babies are hot. Baby socks are silly, really. They all fall off and get lost.
Right? It’s like the most unreliable way ever to tell twins apart
Knowing this fact about myself would give me an existential crisis. I'm even uncomfortable with having to trust that my birthdate is accurate. Yes, of course it's written on my birth certificate. But what if it's incorrect? I was there, but I can't remember it. If I think about it too much I start to panic.
Edit: Folks, I know it's an irrational fear. It's best not to try to understand it. It's a small, what-if thought in my ADHD-riddled brain that creeps to the front every once in a while.
IDK why that would, you're still you. You're not your name. All it would do is change some letters around and what mouth sounds people make to get your attention.
My birth records have 3 different dates my birth certificate says one day and ss has a different day 3 days later they told me to go to the hospital I was born in for the records to straighten it out and they had a third date between the two my mom says my birth certificate is right but I have no proof of that
Your mom was an eye witness. That's pretty good proof.
My grandma and my mom’s birth certificate disagree on the day she was born (it was like 11pm) and to this day we take my grandmas word for it.
We lucked out because my sister has a lazy eye so my parents just had to wait for us to get tired.
My husband has a lazy eye when tired, so I 100% would also use this method lol
This must really come in handy so you don't take the wrong husband home at the end of the long day.
I dated an identical twin for a while. Lovely woman. Lovely family.
She told me she wasn't sure her parents could tell them apart when they were tiny and they used a sharpie to mark her head so they knew which kid was which.
At a family dinner, this story was confirmed. Her mom said since there was NOTHING distinguishing, and they would not sleep unless they were together, she drew a heart on my ex's head.
I had twins in preschool last year and they were truly identical. Looks AND personalities. I joked with the parents I was going to have to put a marker dot on the back of one's neck.
Instead I spent the year mixing them up. Literally getting their name wrong 50% of the time. In the final month of school, very subtle differences allowed me to guess who was who about 80% of the time.
Good luck, Kindergarten teachers!
My spouse and his twin had baseball caps in different colors with their names printed on the front they wore for kindergarten. Sounds simple, but they figured out pretty quick that if they swapped caps, that no one could tell them apart. They got away with doing this for weeks at a stretch. They might have never been caught but one was right handed and one was left handed :P
My teacher friend used to say, “Is it you or is it your brother/sister?”
I went to highschool with a couple sets of twins. I could tell every set apart except for one. The one set I couldn't tell apart was pretty chill about it and they took it in stride when I would call them "Ian and/or Ryan"
A woman I dated in college a bit over 20 years ago was an identical twin. She said that from the day they were taken home from the hospital, her parents intentionally got them the same clothes, but always in 2 different colors (pink vs lilac was apparently common), and always made sure one only used color set A and the other color set B. This continued until the parents could reliably tell them apart, around age 3.
Same woman (and her sister too) was also annoyed that I clued into their subtle differences quickly. I could pick them out in person nearly perfectly, and over the phone in most cases too.
1) it was pink/yellow (her) and green/blue (me) for my twin and me
2) yeah, we can get annoyed about it if we're trying to fool people, lol. I've been told it's hardest when we're on the phone though, because our voices are so alike.
Definitely, phone was the hardest; in person I could tell so fast that I could address them by the correct name pretty much immediately upon seeing either of them. But even on the phone, they had to put in serious effort to fool me, as I noticed right away that they had various verbal tics that were different. The way they pause or inflect, certain word choices, etc.
I went to high school with a pair of upperclassmen twins (we were all in ROTC so encountered each other regularly). One had straight teeth, the other jagged, so there was one easy tell, but if you couldn't see their teeth you'd never know; hair, clothes, mannerisms, voice, all 100% duplicates.
I've been with my fiancee (identical twin) for 18 years and friends with her and her sister for 23. Never an issue in person but every once in a while I get mixed up on the phone.
My dad can’t tell me and my mom apart on the phone sometimes. If they have similar voices i feel like it’s not too big of a deal
My mom and daughter sound almost identical when they're around each other for a few days and they'll call on each other's phones, so it's really easy for them to fool me for a minute if they're trying to. My aunt, great aunt, and grandma all sounded alike too. They all used to live in the same house together.
I had an SO who was an identical twin- pulled out old pix and quizzed me and was THRILLED at how accurate I was picking out who was who!
I have close friends who are twins and they say that neither they nor their parents know who is who in several baby photos. To me the corners of their eyes are so different it’s completely clear to me even in newborn photos, but when I point it out to them they’re never sure if I’m right!
The software used to make "deepfakes" is actually pretty good at doing exactly that, too. It's because of the method by which the technique works (called a generative adversarial network). Basically, you train a faker program to try to modify an image of person X into that of person Y, and a discriminator program to try to figure out if and how it's a fake. As they train, the faker basically has to learn what makes the first person fundamentally different from the second versus what makes them alike at a deeper level than just the raw pixels, so that it can successfully fool the discriminator, and that often clues off things as subtle as minor visual distinctions in facial patterns like what you describe. Because of that, some software that matches faces against known IDs (like the biometric scanners at TSA now that compare you to the ID you handed over), is developed using the same principles.
I'm an identical twin, and it sounds like you've run into a phenomenon I often observe: people who meet us both at the same time often have trouble picking us apart, but people who know one of us well before meeting the other are able to do it easily
Mine are identical but always a weight and height difference to them. Looking back on photos is hard but.
To be fair, my kids were not twins. They didn't look anything alike from about the age of 6 months. When I look at baby pictures, I have to think about which baby that was.
Also not strictly twin related, but I recently sent my fiancé a photo of my mother as a baby and he thought it was our son (9 months old) with a sepia filter :) infants who are related can look so similar!
Baby pics are easy for me, at least for the very newborn stage - one looked like Winston Churchill and the other was orange for the first two weeks.
It happened shortly after birth. My parents had a name for the firstborn and a name for the second born. My mother switched the babies around so the larger and second born one got the first name and the smaller firstborn got the second name. My father then used monogrammed pins to tell us apart. The first three years only my mother could tell us apart. I then had an accident that needed stitches in the forehead. So for two weeks they could tell us apart. Then my twin sibling had an accident as well. The doctor that treated us had a sense of humour. She made sure that the stitches in my twin sibling were an exact match. For many years we had to wear the pins. Now in our sixties only our siblings can tell us apart, cousins and friends still struggle…
I like that doctor.
When I was working in the NICU we often put twins in the same incubator so that they could bond. These girls were identical, same weight, same size and same respiratory aid. Anyway the bracelets came loose with their fidgeting over nightshift and we had no way of knowing who was who. Only way to differentiate them was to do a blood test because one twin had a high hemoglobin and the other one had a low hemoglobin. Parents were made aware and we apologised and they found it absolutely hilarious 🤣
I commented further up that I mixed up my twins at the doctors office when they were only a few days old but I knew their respective weights so we had to re-weigh them!
That was actually a concern of mine. I like to think that I managed to never mix them up.
Before I ever took off their hospital ID bracelets, I sharpied their initials onto their right heel so I could make sure I didn't get them mixed up. After their baths, I would make sure it was still visible and would touch it up if it started to fade. I did that for almost 2 years until they were old enough to say their own name clearly.
My sister got upset we would use her water cup so she put her initials on it. Me, my brother, her, and my father are all JJS. A+ plan there.
...but if she was the only one to put initials on her cup, you still knew that one was hers - right?
In solidarity of her decision making skills, my brother and I put our initials on our cups as well of course.
0% but this is because we went to the hospital with nail polish toark them. Didn't need it because twin A had a birth mark in the shape of an A. After that we noticed a few other differences if you look.
Does twin A have an A initial?
Final letter of her name.
My kid went to preschool with a set of identical twins and initially I could not tell them apart at all, so I asked their Mom for advice. She was baffled and said she never had any issues, they have completely different personalities and have since birth, but as a hint one has two moles on their arm the other has three. So, a quick glance at their arms confirmed which twin I was talking to. After a few days though I did realize what she meant, one was really quiet and the other was a chatterbox so easy to figure out who you were talking to.
Nearly zero. There was a significant size difference as babies (410g which isn't that much, but when the smaller is less than 2kg it kind of is), the larger child was significantly jaundiced and we kept their hospital bracelets on for about a month.
I remember reading something a long time ago about triplets that had tiny tattooed dots on their feet at birth to differentiate them.
If I remember this correctly, it was due to a life threatening medical situation that could be deadly if they mixed them up. If those were my kids I'd be all for it.
I read that too, it seems like a perfect solution.
Lol, I asked my identical twin niblings if they were sure my sister never mixed them up and Twin A wasn't actually Twin B. They were HORRIFIED. Apparently, this would be a soul-crushing erasure of their identities or something.
For the record, I don't think she did mix them up since one had a birthmark and the other didn't. But, considering she didn't sleep for about a year, it's not impossible.
Once they hit a few months old, their personalities were so different they didn't even really look alike. Different walks, different expressions, different ways of approaching things. I could tell which was which even over the phone.
Not a parent of twins but had some twins in my school that were in some of my classes. Not once in the 5 years I was there could I tell them apart unless they were in my class.
I had three sets of twins in my grade, which is crazy because it was a relatively small school. One pair was B/G, the other were fraternal G/G and NEVER looked alike even as sisters, and the other was identical B/B and I went to school with them for a dozen years and I still couldn’t tell you who is who. They used to switch places in high school too apparently.
My mom is also an identical twin and while they look completely different now due to health and upkeep, there is a great possibility my childhood photo I put in my senior yearbook was actually my aunt and me. Nobody knows exactly.
That's funny. Growing up in my hometown (rural western Colorado), there were about 15000 people. In my high school, in the graduating class after mine, there were 2 sets of fraternal twins (1 G/G, 1 B/G) and 3 sets of identical twins (2 G, 1 B). I could NEVER tell any of them apart (except for the fraternal twins--DUH!), especially the boys--they were truly identical, down to their personality. The only way to tell them apart was that they wore different colored shirts every day.
Oddly enough, when all 5 sets of twins were born (all within a 6-month span), all 5 families lived on the same mile-long stretch of road out west of town, and went to the same elementary school until 2nd grade, when 3 families moved into town.
I taught identical twins, who were generally pretty easy to tell apart because of how they did their makeup. Then it came out that the smarter one was trading places with her sister to take tests, because if they switched styles the teachers couldn't tell. After that I never let one write a test if the other was absent (I had both in the same class, luckily).
The fucking long con right here lol
Oh I had this too!! The boy who showed up to homeroom was Tyler, the one who came to 4th block was Travis. If I saw them anywhere else in the school, I had no idea who it was. I would literally reach for their lanyard and ID. lol
We had this at my school with identical twins Mick and Alan (UK so school uniforms…) same height, weight, hair, accent, mannerisms…
The only way to tell them apart was one had a slight scar on his forehead that was visible at chatting distance only.
They got nicknamed by their surname, so was always right when just one of them was around.
I have identical twin cousins. They are in their 60's and I still can't tell them apart.
I lived in a small town with identical triplets for a few years. They weren't really close friends of mine but definitely acquaintances and very nice so I'd always try to identify which as which. I did fairly well if they were all together but one on one, forget it.
0%
one was born with dark hair and the other has a penis.
Edited to add: My coworker played an april fools joke with daycare once. Dressing his boy/girl twin babies in the other’s clothes. They looked alike as babies so much that daycare only found out when it was time for a diaper change.
Friends had a set that they marked with a sharpie for the first couple of weeks, although there were minor differences (one slightly higher birth weight, slightly chunkyer overall). However at week 2 one was diagnosed with an issue requiring surgery - since then the surgery scar was the big difference.
Being a twin parent sometimes means you are (very slightly) happy when one of them falls and scrapes their face when they're little.
At very least you have a rapid identification system for a week or 2.
My sister has twins but most of us could always tell them apart. It helped that one twin had a tiny freckle just above the corner of her lip, but I was always correcting my mom who got them mixed up for at least a couple years 🤣
Twin here. Our birth record and birth certificats are switched. Birth record says Baby A born 6lb 5oz , Baby B 6lb 7oz. Birth certificate says my sister was born first at 6lb 7oz and me 2nd at 6lb 5oz.
Mine are fraternal and always looked quite different. But I remember a baby waking up crying, me getting a baby and starting to feed him, and wondering how he was still crying; then realizing I had picked up his brother, not him!
I was born with a head full of hair and my sister was bald, bald, bald.
10%? When my identical twins were first born it was easy because baby B had noticeably more and darker hair.
They’re now 7 months and it’s… difficult. 😅 Their hair has completely evened out and they are incredibly identical in looks and personality.
The only reason my percentage is so low is that baby A developed a birth mark on her right arm before their hair evened out. But we’ve had to use that mark to check a handful of times and otherwise could have mixed them up.
I have an identical twin and I think about this every so often. My thought is if it happened once it could have happened several times. So it just depends if it happened an even number of times.
According to a friend of mine with identical twins (where this is actually an issue), their doctor told them that about 15% of identical twins don’t have the “right” name (or they name they were given right at birth, I.e., they got mixed up along the way).
I have an identical twin, and a really ‘great’ port wine stain on my face that made it easy for our parents to tell us apart but I’d be stuck with a life long journey of trying to find a foundation to cover it up and convince people it’s not acne. Huzzah.
That’s when you think of the old adage, what’s in a name.
Very high, we don't know for sure which one was the first out. After they pulled them out (c-section) and took them to the warmer units to clean them off I lost sight of them for a little while I was comforting my wife.
Doesn't really matter since they've been hearing the same name since the hospital so that's effectively what their name is, doesn't matter what we called them as they're being pulled out.
I knew a twin girl who said that at around age 4-5, she and her sister decided they each wanted to be the other name, so they just... switched. Their family had a hard time keeping track of who was who anyway, so when a girl insisted they were a name, they went with it.
Also, I have never seen twins who were so identical into adulthood. She said until their 20s (when one of them had a kid) even their friends and family had a very hard time telling.
I have identical twins. There is 0% chance I mixed them up. There were enough differences from birth to always know who was who.
I am an identical twin and my parents never mixed us up for this same reason. The differences were not subtle. She had a couple of birthmarks and I had a flattened side of the head.
My parent's used name badges for me and my brother. However my grandmother once put two name tags on one baby and my mom claims she knew which baby was who, but I doubt it. Never happened again and been called my name my entire life, doubt I switch to my brother's name if I learned otherwise.
0%. Despite the fact that they are technically identical, they look WILDLY different to me and always have.
As in, I am absolutely baffled that anyone even thinks they’re related.
At their high school grad oarty we had pictures of them out and I could not believe the people who couldn’t tell them apart in the pictures!
Maybe it’s your motherly (or parental) instinct
Like once I went to a concert and I sent my mom a video someone else recorded, she was able to tell me apart from the video…I was wearing a hoodie and it was dark af. She said it was the way I was standing or something 😂
Despite the fact that the twins weigh within five pounds of eachother, I can tell who is walking down the stairs just by the sound of their footfalls.
I am a twin myself and I am pretty sure I am not me.
Even now at 25 years old, if I video call my dad in our family WhatsApp group, he will take the call and if the name doesn't pop up, he will ask.. "who are you?"
I cannot imagine how many times he would have messed up our identities when we were tiny and couldn't answer when he asked who are you. 😂
As a guy with a twin sister, I am confident this has never happened to me.
I nannied identical twins. I painted one kid with fingernail polish on his big toenail until I got it.
Friend had twins a few years ago and would joke about this... then finish off with the punchline: "But then, I remember that one has a penis and the other doesn't so I can just look it up in their jeans."
The dad jokes are strong with him.
Well, I'm an identical twin, born with a large mole on my chest so no way to mix us up. Except I got an ear infection so my dad proceeded to give the medicine to the twin instead of me. He had two crying babies, one with an ear ache and one with an upset tummy from the meds. I don't blame him though, my dad also had to contend with a two and four year old while this was happening.
He also invented "baby wrestling" once we could crawl. He'd stick a bottle in the middle of a blanket and put us on opposite corners so we had to crawl to the center to fight for the bottle.
Ours were fraternal. They tried to switch places in kindergarten, and we had to explain, "You're not that kind of twins."
Zero chance with my identical twins. One was born with a birthmark. I have only had to use the birthmark to doublecheck myself once. Other than that, some of their patterns even from the womb continue to persist. Based on this, I can't wait to see if some of my predictions about their individual future talents/weaknesses/hobbies will come true.
This would stress me to no end and I would do things to make very sure there was no chance at mixing up my children! Well-fitted anklets, toenail polish, sharpie on the bottom of the foot, different haircut... whatever it takes!
I ended up with all singles, though!
I have identical twins, we used the hospital id brackets for the first few weeks but after that it became pretty easy to tell. Once they got older the behaviour and personality differences made it easy. They don’t look anything alike to me, but to outsiders they are identical. Teachers used to use their footwear to tell them apart and always stressed out when we got new shoes! 😂
Luckily my twins look definitely like sisters but aren't identical, so no, no mix-ups. My neighbor, however, her twins I still cannot get right after 5 years of knowing them. They look so freaking similar. Their parents have figured it out but they legit could've been switched as babies, who knows.
My twin aunts found out they were switched when they read their baby books after my grandma's death. There's a description of a mole or something that one has but the other doesn't, but it's opposite to what IRL they have.
But at the same time they think they were swapped in the hospital before the book was made, so maybe when they got home they got swapped back lol.
0%. One came out purple.
Thanos and starfox?
As an identical twin, this is one of my biggest fears. My mom insists they could tell us apart because of a scar I had from the NICU that my sister didn't have. I still question if I'm the other twin.
Low. I was slightly bigger at birth and have a birthmark. So while we looked a lot alike, there were small differences. My mom also said our cries were very different.
I am the one who names. They are what I call them.
I think it should be acceptable / common practice to put a small tattooed freckle behind the ear of one twin, call it an “artificial birthmark” and have it be used for emergency identification (for example: one twin needs medicine the other doesn’t. Or they both take a medicine and you want to avoid accidental double dosing)
You should ask this over at /r/parentsofmultiples. They probably won't burn you at the stake for it.
I've got identical twins. Right with they're born the very first thing that happens is that they get bracelets put on them that say "Baby A" and "Baby B." Why? Because they literally don't have names yet... not legally anyway.
Once the birth certificates are filed the nurses come in and replace the bands with new ones that have their actual names on them. My kids wore those home from the hospital.
And then they kept wearing them for several more days until we discovered a little red birthmark on one of their legs. Once we knew that "Baby B has the Birthmark" (except, you know, with the kid's name) we cut the bracelets off.
The birthmark eventually faded but by then they could both tell you their names and would LOUDLY voice their objections to being mixed up with the other. So we're pretty sure we have the right name with the right kid.
Either that or they've been punking us for 12 years.
Best friend definitely has mixed up twins. She had a difficult delivery and postpartum depression and the babies were mostly cared for by family members for the first month or so. When they were approaching their first birthday, she was looking closely at their early pics and found a couple of tiny physical markers that indicated that they had been mixed up, probably at about 2-3 weeks old. I dont think she has told many people—she felt like the people who were taking care of them would feel bad if they knew, as if they had been neglectful somehow, when in reality she was so grateful that they had kept her babies safe and healthy when she couldn’t.
50/50
Honestly, those are better odds than my own parents remembering my name on the first try!
My Old’s run through all the grandkid’s names before they latch onto the right one when telling stories. Sometimes asking me which person it is they are reminiscing about.
my mom once went through all the other kids' names—and the dog and cat!—before getting to mine
One of my cats had the same middle name as me bc our names sort of rhymed, so my parents (mainly my dad) constantly called us by each other’s name, and when she was causing trouble, it just came naturally to add my middle name onto hers 😂 (note: none of our other cats have/have had a middle name)
I mean... you're not wrong
Take my upvote and go.
r/theydidthemath