There are so many things written about twins development especially around speech delay that its easy to become unnecessarily concerned. What I find the hardest when raising my twins is not comparing their development. I try to remind myself that they are different people and no similar than any other siblings and that I shouldn’t keep comparing them. However, having two little ones exactly the same age, living in the same environment, with the same exposure to learning opportunities it is virtually impossible not to draw some comparisons and be concerned when one is going faster than the other.
Raising twins is a different kettle of fish to raising singletons in many ways, but this is one of the things that has really struck me… I never felt inclined to compare my boys to anyone else, but it’s that ever-present peer that makes it impossible not to at least have a sneaky development comparison. I did for walking and now I find myself doing it again for speech. Its daft really as I know one of the twins was almost 2 pounds heavier than her sister at birth and so was busy for a while with that. I expect her to take longer, but still can’t help comparing.
According to the health visitor at 2yrs 1mth one of the girls was presenting at around 2yrs 8 months developmentally and the other at their actual age.  In my heart I kind of knew it was fine, but seeing one of them speaking in full sentences and the other saying around ten words I was starting to get concerned. She was even trooped off to the GP to check her hearing – hello alpha mother alert!!! I have also recently (at around 2.7 years old) taken her to see a speech therapist informally and she too has confirm that she is totally within the realms of normal.  The message here should be that I just need to relax and I reckon that if I didn’t have a comparator 24/7 I would have done just that.
I also realised that we all baby her and allow her not to ask for things. All of the others ask for her and we let that continue which doesn’t help her in the long run. So I am trying to encourage her to ask for her own things and concentrating more on communicating directly with her. I am learning that this is one of the many challenge of raising twins… It’s a balancing act between helping the one who is behind and allowing the faster developing twin to continue to learn. I have not cracked it yet so for now I will muddle through navigating baby and hope that my mistakes aren’t too bad…..
