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Where is the article spilling the details of our twin study trip you ask? It’s coming — don’t worry.

Meanwhile, I found an interesting take on twins studies and what they teach us as twins parents — written by a dad of twins. In this WSJ Blog article, “Twin Lessons: Have More Kids. Pay Less Attention to Them“, Bryan Caplan describes his big learn.  He says, “The obvious lesson to draw is that parents should lighten up.”  He even has a name for it: ”Serenity Parenting”.

You’ll have to read his article to see if you agree.  But, it makes sense to me. After all, that is a lesson I learned from our trip to Washington DC and our own involvement in an individual twins study. I didn’t need Mr. Caplan to tell me — but it didn’t hurt, either.

So I think I’ll relax a bit more and see if I can enjoy this adventure in twin parenting just a bit more as a result.  As for having more kids? I think we’re done.

Authors note:  Up to this point, TwinParenthood has pretty much exclusively featured articles about how to raise and parent twins. We are diverging from our normal format this week — to bring you more of a traditional mom blog to chronicle our trip to Washington DC for an NIH Twins Study. 

This week, we are on an adventure. We’ve travelled to Washington DC with both of our sets of twins so that our girls can participate in twins studies at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Just the beginning to a long day...

The twin study includes blood draws, cognitive testing, and MRI’s.  I guess they are doing something to correlate identical twins intelligence and their cognitive abilities with MRI images.  Interesting stuff.  I’ll write more about that if we learn more details today.

As I am writing this morning, one of my boys (T-man, age 10) is sleeping here at the hotel while Dave and the other 3 kids have already headed over to NIH to begin the twin studies.  T-man was sick last week, and traveling cross country was a long trip, with a time change.  He’s wiped out.  We’re hoping to join the others in a couple of hours.

We were really pleasantly surprised to walk out of the airport to mid 80 degree weather yesterday.  But, by this morning I guess they figured out we were here from Seattle and someone turned on the rain.  Now we feel right at home.

So, the most challenging thing so far has to be the end of the night last night and the tired kids this morning. Last night they were in party mode.  Jumping and bouncing off the walls of the hotel room.  It was after midnight before we finally settled in — with much scolding from mom and dad.  This morning, none of them wanted to get up, but we had our twins studies appointments we had to keep.  Next time, we’ll plan to come at least one day ahead of the planned appointments to make things a little bit easier.

I’m looking forward to learning more about the twins study and letting you know how it went for the girls.  I also hope to find out today if they are still looking for more participants — so I can share that with all of you.

Stay Tuned!

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