He’s a 42-year-old first time dad busy assembling two cribs a few days before Father’s Day, and now all he’s waiting for are the twins to put in them. They should be here any day now.
It was a year ago last May that Robel Neway asked co-worker Christina Yousefi to marry him. They both wanted children — one boy, one girl, and that’s it. It didn’t matter who came first. Just one boy and one girl.
They never figured they’d both show up at the same time.
Christina had three positive home pregnancy tests and went to see her doctor to confirm it. Yes, she was pregnant, said Dr. Neetu Sodhi, an ob-gyn at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center, but she had some additional news.
Christina was having the two for one special. Twins. She couldn’t believe it. Twins? That wasn’t the plan.
Dr. Sodhi herself was the mother of twin boys. She told her it would be a lot of work — double everything — but there was a special dynamic between twins that was a beautiful thing to see.
She didn’t mention a study she had read that said breastfeeding a baby for the first year of life was a 1,800 hour job.
“A regular full-time job with three weeks vacation was something like 1,980 hours a year,” Dr Sodhi said. “So, if breastfeeding one kid a year is a full-time job, two is kind of like, yeah …”
Still shaken by the news they were having twins, Christina called Robel at work and went on FaceTime with him at the doctor’s office. How’d it go, he asked. Christina held up two fingers. What does that mean, Robel asked? It means we’re having twins, she said.
“My jaw dropped and I went into panic mode, everything became a blur,” Robel said. “How was this possible?”
Well, we know how, but the why is interesting, too. The numbers vary, but the Center for Disease Control & Prevention report the birth rate of twins in the U.S. is 31 per 1,000 births. It’s happening more frequently.
At this point, all Christina and Robel knew was they were…
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