Photograph by Scott Lechner

Matt O'Keefe and Camilla Joe dress their twin boys, Trevin and Spencer O'Keefe while daughter, Madeline O'Keefe watches.

Raising Twins (or Triplets)

Child-rearing strategies take on a new dimension when baby makes four--or more

By Sandy Sims

The second Monday evening of each month, Sheila Kreifels leaves her children behind and wends her way down the hill from home in southeast San Jose. She travels all the way across town to the library in Saratoga. There she meets Monte Sereno resident Elsie Ostiller and Saratogan Camilla Joe along with women from all around the South Bay. They come there not to discuss literary things but because they need each other. They are MOMs--mothers of multiples--and they belong to the Gemini Cricket club which meets at the library (twins are the symbol for the astrological sign Gemini). Sometimes dads come, too.

The Gemini Cricket club boasts some 80 members, mostly mothers of twins and a handful of mothers of triplets. At times the membership grows to 100. It's one of two such clubs in the valley. The Double Rainbow club serves mostly the South Valley population and has about 50 members. All told, that's a lot of multiple births.

With women having babies at an older age--after the age of 35, the probability of having twins increases--and with the advent of fertility drugs, multiple births are on the rise. In fact, since 1970 the rate of triplet and higher births in the United States has quintupled.

"New moms are lost," Kreifels, past president of the club, explains. "There are so many issues that come up: do I need three high chairs; can I nurse twins or triplets; how do you handle the questions when you take your children to the mall; how do you give them each enough attention; what about identity problems; how do you get three car-seats in the car?"

Moms who are still pregnant come for help related to their pregnancies. Raising twins, triplets or more is a tough job, a major challenge, and parents need lots of support from each other and from outside help.

Ostiller, mother of 4-1/2-year-old triplets, doesn't even remember the first year. "It's a blur. I'd just get up and start in, do what had to be done."

"You have to have help," Los Gatan Wendy Yost, mother of 5-year-old Jared and 6-month-old triplets and member of the South Bay Parents of Triplets says, "or you will go stark raving mad." Yost has help five days a week from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and two evenings a week.

Photograph by Scott Lechner

Wendy Yost gets James settled into his feeding chair while his sisters
Gillian (top) and Rachel wait for their mom's attention.




It takes super organizing to manage the simplest tasks, such as getting two or three toddlers into the car or changing their diapers.

Dinnertime at 4:30 p.m. for the Yost triplets is an event. Yost lines them up in their Pack-and-Go play seats right on the dining room table. She fills a big bowl with baby food, picks up a baby spoon and starts at one end (a method even recommended by Dr. Spock).

Tonight, James is wiggling the most. He's hungry. Gillian is quiet, smiling, content, and Rachel is kicking her feet and reaching out her hands. Yost maneuvers the first heaping spoon past dimpled, grasping hands into James' mouth, then the next one into Gillian's little mouth and then another into Rachel's. Back to James and on down the line. It's not too long before Gillian clamps her mouth shut against the spoon. She's done. Rachel and James scarf down the rest of the food.

"They are getting so active that we will have to have high chairs in the next couple of weeks," Yost explains, and she's still trying to figure out how they will fit in her small kitchen. The babies' room is filled with three cribs and a changing table. They removed the coffee table in the living room to create space for the two swings, the round-bouncy-standing toy, a blanket and two free-standing mobiles. Five-year-old Jared likes his three siblings so much, he wants more babies. Yost explains to him that this will be all the babies they will have.

In the beginning, the adjustment is overwhelming.

The first day Kreifels was alone with her newborns, Jamie and Jenner, her husband came home to find her in the rocking chair with a baby in each arm. "All three of us were crying," she said.

Ostiller nursed her triplets for six weeks until the pediatrician looked at her and said, "You are exhausted; stop nursing." She was relieved.

Camilla Joe, mother of 20-month-old identical twin boys, nursed her twins at the same time. "I had to do it that way, or I would have gone nuts," she recalls. But Joe has a daughter 19 months older than the twins to attend to. She is also a full-time optometrist and, after an unsuccessful attempt at finding a nanny, eventually took her babies to her daughter's daycare where Joe spent lunch hours nursing the twins.

Not only do parents of multiples have to figure out how to care for their children, they also have to contend with the world outside.

Yost's family of six strolls through downtown Los Gatos from time to time with the triplets in a stroller that seats one baby in front of the other. They do not go unnoticed. One driver almost drove off the road while staring at the babies.

Sometimes they go out for dinner. "It's a lot just to get into a restaurant," Yost explains, "Double D's has been very accommodating to us." There's plenty of room there, and they make the Yosts
feel welcome.

Being out in public with multiples can bring unwanted questions and comments.

"Sometimes, people stare at us like we are a freak show," Ostiller says. She explains that you learn to go to the mall or wherever and stare straight ahead. "You don't make eye contact with anyone, and hope they don't bother you."

People sometimes come right out and ask if the parents have used fertility drugs. "They don't understand what a personal question that is," Ostiller says. "People don't realize how much these babies mean to us," she explains. "Many of us waited a long time for them." It took the Ostillers 10 years of medical care--tests, shots, hormone treatments and much more, plus thousands of dollars. The fertility treatment journey can be a grueling nightmare, an emotional roller coaster filled with tears, hopes and painful disappointment before a positive test that holds.

"I can tell," Yost says, "when someone is just curious and someone is asking for information because they are considering fertility treatments themselves." The latter is different, she explains. "I want to help them out."

People also don't take into account the little ears picking up words like "drugs." Ostiller's children are old enough to wonder what people mean, she explains.

Photograph by Scott Lechner

Camilla Joe corrals her twin sons, Trevin and Spencer O'Keefe, to
get them ready for daycare.




One question that especially annoys mothers of multiples is: "Are they identical?" Kreifels has a girl and a boy--it follows that they are not identical. Identical twins occur when a single egg splits in two, creating two babies of the same sex instead of the one. Fraternal twins occur when two separate eggs are fertilized, and can result in boys, girls or both--but they usually don't look any more alike than single brothers and sisters do. Interestingly, the rate of identical twin births in the U.S. is the same as it's always been, while fraternal twin births are growing dramatically. Only fraternal twins run in families. Identical twins happen by chance and can happen to anyone, whether there are twins in the family or not.

Different races have different probabilities for having twins, too. Joe, whose identical twins were a complete surprise, says she is really in the minority because she had her twins when she was under 35, and she is Chinese. Asians have the lowest incidence of multiple births; blacks have the highest, she explains.

Some people think having twins or triplets is the same as having two or three children in a row. "It's not," Ostiller explains because you never have one child out of a stage before another is into it. For instance, if you have one child in the throes of the "terrible twos," your 3-year-old can usually maintain a little better.

Potty training multiples calls for unusual measures. Ostiller trained her triplets all at once. "I waited till summer and got three potty chairs for outside. I let them run around bare-bottomed in the backyard and showed them where they were to go to the bathroom," she explains. They also had potty chairs in the house and in the car. The whole operation took just one week. "It worked great," Ostiller says laughing, "because when they made a mistake, all I had to do was hose the patio down," she recalls. One mother of triplets ran into a problem using this method because she bought three different style potty chairs, and the triplets all fought over the yellow one. She had to go out and buy two new yellow ones.

Dads of multiples, Kreifels says, get much more involved in parenting. They have to. "My husband and I co-parent," she explains. He works his sales job out of the home, and she works as a psychotherapist in San Jose 10 to 15 hours a week. They have help come in and work their schedules out together. Yost's husband has a demanding Silicon Valley job, and sometimes is gone from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. or so. But they do a lot together on the weekends, going to places like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the zoo and Big Basin park. Camilla Joe and her husband have actually managed to remodel their kitchen themselves in the midst of dealing with twins.

These families are doing well, and a great deal of their success has to do with the support they get from each other. No one understands the difficulties and the joys of raising multiples like other parents of multiples. "You actually get a personal feeling of achievement," says Kreifels, "because you accomplish things you never thought you could.

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The Gemini Cricket club meets at 7:30 p.m. on the second Monday of each month in the Saratoga Library. A support meeting for new parents takes place at 6 p.m. before the regular meeting. The April meeting, however, will be on April 19. The club often invites speakers on a variety of topics, has social events, and sets up play groups for children of the same age. For further information contact Jennifer Nordin at 984-6908. For information about South Bay Parents of Triplets call Linda Scianna at 226-6316. The national organization The Triplet Connection can be reached at 209-474-5775. For information on the Internet about multiples see the National Organization of Mothers of Twins at www.nomotc.org or The Triplet Connection at www.tripletconnection.org

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