Where are the new children going to go? and will they receive the love and attention they need?

Really the less serious issue is what makes me happy. The fact that she is now getting too much attention and getting annoid is making me smile. I dont mean to sound evil about it but she is totally getting what she asked for.

BTW… go Octuplet Grandma!

• Attention. Says Risa, a 35-year-old Upper East Side mom who said she had her twins naturally: “If I am ever depressed, I put my boys in the stroller and take a walk down the street and people just go nuts.”
• You can turn them into revenue-generating TV stars. Risa, whose sons were cast in the soap opera Guiding Light: “”Because of the labor laws, children can only work a certain number of hours, so identical twins are in such high demand.”
• It means you’re rich. Brinton Taylor Parson, counselor at a prep school for prep schools: “There is an inordinate number of moms in Manhattan who view their children as an accessory.”
• They can stop being mommies sooner. Said “a Gramercy Park mom:” “While my friends are bracing themselves for baby number two and all the sleep deprivation and chaos that comes with it, we are planning a family trip to Hawaii.”

Read the full article at Gawker: Why New York Moms Lust for Twins

Michael and Michelle

Christopher and Christina

Angelo and Angela

Patrick and Patricia

James and Jamie

Alexander and Alexandria

Samuel and Pamela

Stephen and Stephanie 

Brian and Brianna 

Eric and Ericka

Riley and Kylie

Leukemia Research made headlines in January last year when a study on identical twins confirmed for the first time the existence of stem cells in childhood leukemia. Now, nearly a year on, new data has emerged shedding more light on how leukemia, the most common form of cancer in children, develops from birth.
The original study led by Professors Mel Greaves and Tariq Enver at University of Oxford compared the blood cells of identical twins Oilvia, who has leukemia and Isabella, who does not. They found that both twins have the same genetically abnormal primitive cells in their blood, which were shown to have developed during pregnancy, supporting claims that childhood cancer starts in the womb.

With more funding from Leukemia Research the scientists set out to identify the genetic events that must be set in motion to convert these pre-leukemic stem cells into full-blown leukemia in some children.

Dr Caroline Bateman, a clinical scientist working with Professor Mel Greaves, looked at the blood cells of five more pairs of identical twins where one of the children has developed leukemia. Although it was presumed by many scientists that there would be a common genetic pathway to explain how leukemia develops in some children, this study has revealed that there is no pattern in the way the pre-leukemic stem cells behave within individuals.

These findings, which were previously unconfirmed and unsuspected, were announced at the 50th Anniversary Meeting of the American Society of Hematology in San Francisco, 6-9 December 2008. The study was selected from over 6,000 applications to be presented at this prestigious event.

(Source: 50th Anniversary Meeting of the American Society of Haematology: Leukaemia Research UK: January 2008)

I think this will be very interesting, especially for those who have twins or are a twin.

“Walk around the Upper West Side with a double stroller, as I do from time to time, and it’s amazing how long it can take to make it to Fairway. An older gentleman wants to know whether there were twins in the family. A middle-aged woman needs to stop and list every pair of twins she’s come to know in a five-block radius. There are many, many, many young twins in that five-block radius. The listing of them takes a long time. There are twins on 72nd Street and two sets in her building alone and girl twins on the corner and boy twins she always sees at the Starbucks … Is it something in the water?

This person invariably wants the parent of twins to share in her incredulity at the freak nature of so many twins proliferating in so concentrated an area. Never mind that the same abundance quite likely exists in most gentrified areas of the five boroughs, the kinds of places inhabited by two-career families, or women who had a good long run of New York dating before settling down to start a family in their mid-30s.

Of course, there’s nothing freakish or remarkable about how so many twins came to crowd the preschools of New York City. Older mothers are more prone to throwing off two eggs at once, but they’re also more likely to have trouble conceiving, and opting for in vitro fertilization. (The number of twins nationwide has increased by 65 percent in the past two decades.)

Maybe Jennifer Lopez, who, her father announced on TV last week, is expecting twins, is one of those two-eggs-per-cycle women; maybe, as her father suggested, it’s in the genes (his sister has twins). Or maybe she opted for reproductive technology, as do so many other women in New York and Los Angeles in their 30s and 40s. As one friend (with twins) responds when she’s asked if there are a lot of twins in her family, “No, but there are a lot at our fertility clinic.”

Because the pregnancy rate is higher the more embryos are transferred, doctors in the United States often encourage women to transfer at least two, and the older the woman, the harder they push her to transfer three or more. Don’t worry, the doctor will assure an aspiring mother, the chances of getting pregnant with twins, should you transfer two embryos, is only about 20 percent.

What isn’t made clear (and what the would-be mother is usually too rattled to ask) are the odds of conceiving twins should the in vitro actually work, and that answer is around 33 percent. To believe that the reproductive technology will work is to accept the high probability that the future will involve endless jokes about double trouble, and yes, there will double trouble, as well as double joy, triple sleeplessness and so much artful juggling that simply leaving the house on time makes the stagecraft of Cirque du Soleil look banal.

One could stop here to imagine the way the world will look when so many children in New York come of age as dualities. Will the three sets of twins in Zoe’s kindergarten class leave her feeling that she’s missing an essential other half? Will life as a twin be an easier experience when it’s so much less of an abnormality?

If all goes as expected, however, the twins glut we’re experiencing now will not be a permanent facet of life in the city. Instead, there will most likely be a 10- or 15-year window that will be known as the twins years. A 37-year-old-man named Max will mention at some dinner party in 2039 that he’s actually a twin, and the host will say, oh yes, that makes sense, you’re the right age, aren’t you — fraternal, of course?

To start, a younger generation of women may begin having children earlier. Surely, women in their 20s today better understand that their fertility really will wane in their mid-30s, a preposterous-sounding reality that women born before 1975 took as media propaganda designed to keep them in their place.

Right now, doctors frequently sound cavalier, even jovial, about the possibility of a twins pregnancy. But that, too, may change. In many Scandinavian countries, guidelines push doctors to transfer only one embryo (and in Belgium, the law requires it for reimbursement), since twin pregnancies entail five-fold higher risks for mother and child. For the mother, there are concerns like pre-eclampsia; for the babies, higher rates of severe or moderate prematurity and the numerous attendant ills.

ALREADY, at the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine, one of the leading centers in the country, doctors urge patients who could afford more than one cycle to consider transferring only one embryo, so confident are they in a risk-benefit analysis that favors singleton pregnancies.

Technology will also hasten the decline of the $300-a-night multiples-specialist nurse, as researchers perfect embryo-vetting techniques, creating a higher degree of certainty with just one shot. In the future, older women who know they want two children but are worried about the timing — and are willing to endure more two-for-one cracks than Hillary — could still have the option to transfer two. But it will be a proactive choice rather than a wild card that comes with in vitro fertilization.

Like every age of plenitude, for better or for worse, this era of multiples will probably come to an end.”

NYTimes source 

New York City’s Twinsworld Restaurant employs 37 sets of twins & it is a requirement to be hired.

Meet Curtis and Curran Carter. They turned 100 years old in August and have some word joint words of wisdom to share with us.

“It’s also your attitude toward life. You have to look forward to things to keep you here.”

The brothers never have lived far from each other, married their wives in a double ceremony and both of them have two daughters.