DOUBLE VISION

Last week I was on Facebook and saw a couple of videos of young kids, toddlers or younger, reacting to seeing twins for the first time. One was a little girl, toddler, reacting to meeting her father’s twin brother.

Since my sister and I can’t see each other every day because of distance, we’ve had some experience with this reaction. I had two daughters, both under three, when my sister and her husband were able to come visit us at my house. (We’d seen each other a couple of years before at our Dad’s place.)

When my sister walked in it was fun watching the kids look back and forth between the two of us trying to figure out what they were seeing. My older girl, who was pushing three, had actually met my sister at our Dad’s place. Her eyes got big but she accepted my introduction. She was then and always has been a very friendly girl, though a bit shy at first. She had no problems with her Aunt Bonnie.

Now, my younger daughter hated strangers. In fact if she couldn’t see Mommy well then she better have Daddy, or Grandma Sharon (all of which she lived with). Anyone else and she’d scream like a banshee until I picked her up again, and I mean for hours on end without stopping. And she’d probably start screaming for both Sharon and her daddy if I didn’t show up fast enough. So I held her for her first meeting with her Aunt Bonnie. And like all babies, the sight of two faces so similar confused her, but she had mom and was fine.

Then at one point during Bonnie’s visit I needed to run errands and left Bonnie with the kids while my baby was asleep, but I hurried concerned she’d wake up and start her banshee impersonation. However, when I got home I found my kids on the couch with their aunt Bonnie reading a story to them, and my baby was fine.

I avoided the couch and did some chores that needed done while I had the reprieve. And it lasted until my daughter got hungry. At which time she got really upset when she realized the woman holding her didn’t have anything to feed her.

But, besides the people she lived with, Bonnie was the first person who could take care of that particular daughter without earplugs. The next person who walked into her life who ever managed that ended up becoming her favorite uncle.

Anyway, it’s fun watching kids react to seeing two of the same person for the first time. And their confusion can be hilarious if one of those twins is someone they see all the time and the other one isn’t. Kind of reminds me of the incident in eighth grade when the Neilson boy, started talking to me outside our fourth period classes (which were across the hall from each other) and while I was trying to figure out why he would even talk to me Bonnie walked up all happy because we were actually being nice to one another.

He gasped. “There’s two of you!”

At which point I saw the Neilson boy walk into his fourth period class down the hall. “That’s nothing. There’s two of you too.” Which solved the problem of why Bonnie liked him and I didn’t, and apparently solved the same issue for the two of them.