Two sisters received a surprise of a lifetime after they both discovered they were having identical twins at the same time.
Megan O’Brien, 29, and sister Sara Seyler, 32, fell pregnant with identical twin girls and gave birth within three months of one another last year.
O’Brien gave birth to Lilah and Josie on 21 November 2021, while Seyler had Lennon and Parker on 8 February 2022.
The pregnancies were even more surprising as twins do not run in the family, although O’Brien’s husband Matt is a triplet.
The odds of a woman having identical twins is roughly 250 to one. But a woman whose female sibling has had identical twins becomes twice as likely to do the same.
O’Brien said her “jaw dropped” when she discovered her elder sister was also expecting twins.
“I got tears in my eyes because there are no twins in our family anywhere. It was so cool that she was having twins too,” she said.
Detailing how Seyler broke the news, O’Brien said she was out celebrating a friend’s bachelorette party when her sister first rang her.
“I knew she was having an ultrasound… and then she called me as well,” she explained. “I was like, ‘Oh, she is probably just FaceTiming me just to tell me how the appointment went’, and I answered the FaceTime and she was crying, and I thought, ‘Oh my god, what’s wrong?’”
But it quickly emerged that Seyler was crying tears of happiness when she held up her ultrasound image which showed two babies.
Seyler, who was already a mother of one when she became pregnant with her twins, said she initially apologised to her sister when she fell pregnant again.
“I thought she was going to be mad at me, like, you’re stealing my thunder,” she said. “So I called her and I was like, ‘I’m so sorry’.”
But the sisters found that they enjoyed going through the pregnancy journey together.
O’Brien said: “Sara was pregnant before me with her son, but when I was pregnant with twins, you know, I was always three months ahead of her.
“You always had someone to answer questions and kind of relate to, but it was always nice to have her – because she just went through a pregnancy, we kind of bounced off each other in different ways, I guess.”
She revealed that she gave birth to her twins around two weeks before her due date because she had high blood pressure, also known as gestational hypertension.
“My body was just saying it’s time to come out and then they had 17 days in the NICU after that. They were very healthy, just had to grow,” O’Brien said.
Both sisters said the four new additions to their family have been an “adjustment” but they come from a large family, so chaos is “pretty normal”.
O’Brien said it has been “super helpful” that her sister is having a similar experience, although she does not have a toddler to take care of as Seyer does.
However, she added: “We’re super blessed as crazy and wild chaotic as it is at times.
“To be a first-time mum of identical twin girls and to share it with my sister, it’s the coolest thing ever.
“It’s not always rainbows and butterflies. There are some hard days,” she admitted, but said that having Seyer is “a big support for the both of us”.
Additional reporting by SWNS
