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Twin Tuesday: Taylen and Dayr

By Dawn Sailors In Featured Twins

Hi there and happy Twin Tuesday! (This is the second time I’m writing this post, FYI. I hate it when WordPress eats my work. Boo. I’m always convinced that draft one was far superior.)

Anyway… We’re back on track this week with an adorable set of twins who have a very sweet mama (I can make that judgment from our few email exchanges and from blog-stalking her). Crista, who writes a twin-mommy blog called Hands and Hearts More Than Full (what an appropriate name, right?), emailed me about her twin boys, Taylen and Dayr, a few weeks ago and I’m so glad she did. Her and husband, Bobby, have two adorable little guys on their hands! I’ll let Crista take it from here:

Are your twins identical or fraternal? Do twins run in your family?
The boys are fraternal. Yes, twins run on both sides of our family. My husband’s grandfather was an identical twin and I have an aunt and uncle who are twins.

When did you find out you were expecting twins and what was your reaction?
I oficially found out I was having twins at a 12 week ultrasound (that was only performed because our midwife thought I was measuring big, we didn’t want any ultrasounds in preparation for our home birth but she insisted.) When my husband had to adjust my work pants at 8 weeks pregnant and then again at 9 weeks we knew something was up and so we suspected there were twins beforehand. The moment the ultrasound tech put the wand on my belly I gasped because I could see two amniotic sacs. I laughed, a lot and then cried. My husband didn’t “cry” but he definitely had tears in his eyes.

How did you go about picking names?
Until I was 30-weeks-pregnant we thought we were having boy/girl twins (from the ultrasound) but at 30 weeks we were corrected: boy/boy. We had the HARDEST time with names! It wasn’t until I was 34 weeks (which is SUPER late in twin-pregnancy-land) that we finally decided. We had read books and searched the internet but couldn’t come up with two that jived/we agreed on. We decided to create names. Our boys are Taylen and Dayr (pronounced day + uhr). Taylen is from my name Crista Lynn. Dayr was transverse in my belly and up top “dear” to my heart and so we wanted to use the letter from the word Dear but decided to rearrange them into Daer. I knew that we would abbreviate them somehow and shortening Daer to Dae seemed feminine and so we changed it to Dayr, which also goes better with Taylen (Tay and Day).

What is the hardest part about having twins?
My husband and I used to be quite social and have a lot of fun together, go out often, and (I’m sure it’s challenging with one child, too) we don’t have time or energy for that anymore.

What is your favorite part about having twins?
y absolute favorite thing about twins is the fact that they have each other. I don’t worry if something takes my attention for a moment because they were born best friends.

What advice would you give to other parents of twins?
Insist on them maintaining the same schedule. We ALWAYS put them down to nap together, bathe together, eat togehter, etc. and it makes the few moments of peace that we do have just that…peaceful.

Share something fun/interesting about you guys?
I think people might find it interesting that the boys have different birth dates. Taylen 6:30 pm February 9th and Dayr 4:28 pm February 10th. They’re 22 hours apart. Taylen was born naturally at home, breech. Dayr was delivered via c-section the following evening. (The entire story can be found here.)

Well first of all, the two birthday thing is amazing. Crista is super-mom for being in labor for that long, and what a unique and special thing for her boys. Second thing, Crista hinted to me in her emails that Twin Tuesday has become somewhat of a ‘thing’, which I couldn’t have been more surprised or happy to hear. (If you’re interested, you can read how it got started on DD by clicking here.) She has even started her own version of Twin Tuesday on her blog, where she answers readers questions every week about being a mom to twins. How fun! Make sure to go visit her. Thanks again Crista, for taking time to answer questions for us today!

Are you a twin? Are you a mom to twins? Do you have friends who are awesome twins? I want to hear about it!! If you want to be featured on twin Tuesday or know some twins who should be, please email me a photo that you don’t mind sharing and I’ll email you back a little questionnaire to get to know you better.