I'll start this out by saying that, I'm as proud of a mama as the next mama :-) I think my girls are exceptionally sweet, smart, talented, and of course, beautiful. And, that's fine... I think it's perfectly natural to think that way about your children... healthy, even. All the better if you're right! LOL :-p

However, I do think you can take it too far...

I used to frequent the message board at TwinsMagazine.com... I don't anymore because, the way it's set up now, it's less of an all-inclusive community, and really just all these little groups, grouped together by birth month. That always seemed a bit of an arbitrary way of deciding who you would socialize with, to me... and, most people with children my age have moved on to other things, anyway. It's mostly just people with infant/young toddler twins there, and the last time I tried to get involved there, I just felt too much like an outsider... I felt funny posting in the birth month groups, but hardly anybody visited the other areas of the board, so you were lucky to get even one person to respond to a post...

It's for the best, anyway... I definitely need to prioritize my time and it's so easy to get lost on those boards :-p But, I was just reminded of something that happened when I was very involved with the board there...

Yesterday, I was going through pictures, and came across a few that my MIL had taken of the girls when they were spending the night at her house awhile ago... Josie was standing next to me and I opened up this picture:



I asked her, "Who is that?" And she said, "Josie!" I said, "Actually, I think that's Anna..." But, I actually had to open this picture to be sure:



Now, in this picture, I can easily tell that, Anna is in the foreground and Josie is in the background. And, it's the same set of pictures, so I now know for sure that the first picture is of Anna, because she's wearing the same nightgown :-) And I usually don't have any problems telling who is who even in pictures, whether I take them or not. But, every once in awhile, there's one that will trip me up a bit :-) It's something about the smile on her face in that first picture... it just looks so much like a Josie smile... although, it does look like an Anna smile, too... if you have identical twins, I think you'll understand what I mean :-p

But I just always think it's funny when even the girls get each other mixed up, sometimes :-p She hasn't done it in a long time, but there was a time when Anna would look at herself in the mirror, and say, "There's Josie!" It's one of my favorite cuteness reports... :-p

Now, I posted the mirror story on the TwinsMagazine message board when it happened... and a few people did think it was a cute and funny story, which is all I meant for it to be :-p And possibly an illustration of one of the many ways that having twins is such a unique experience...

But, there were actually some Moms who got on, and started saying things like, "Well, my twins have been able to tell each other apart from the time they were a year old!" Or something to that effect... like it was a contest or something. As I always do in situations like that, I just ignored it... but I just thought it was funny how some people can turn anything into a competition :-p

ANYWAY... :-p To those of you with identical twins, do you have any similar stories? I use stories like this to make my husband or my in-laws or others feel better about getting them mixed up here and there :-p So many people will say, oh they do look completely different... and then promptly get confused on who is who :-p And, I'm not immune... most of the time, I think they look completely different... but every once in awhile, my brain will have to take half a second of analyzing "OK, which one is this..." :-p