13 Twin Stories From the Families Who Mixed Them Up, Like a Babysitter Who Swapped the Cribs

My boyfriend is an identical twin. He told me that his parents would differentiate him from his brother by putting nail polish on one of their big toes when they were babies. One night, while bathing them, the nail polish chipped off and in the confusion, his parents couldn’t tell them apart. They just made their best guess as to who was who. 😂 So now, whenever my bf’s twin tried to pull the ol’ “I’m two minutes older than you” joke, my bf counters with “that’s not 100% confirmed.”

Parent of twins here. When they were first born in the hospital, literally a few hours old, they were in little cots with their name tags above their heads. Someone opened a door too fast and the breeze knocked both tags to the ground. I picked the tags up and couldn’t remember which was which so just guessed. No one else needs to know. Especially not their Mother.

Father of identical twin boys here.

The day after their birth the boys were sleeping in a hospital cot designed for twins. The cot itself lay on a slight incline, to ensure that the baby’s heads were kept slightly elevated.

This, unfortunately, caused both the boys’ hospital tags to slide off their skinny little legs during the night and land at the bottom of the cot.

If I hadn’t taken a photo of the boys the night before and written their names on the picture (using my phone’s stylus), then we would have never known exactly who was who. Bullet dodged.

I have identical twins daughters that are teens now. I could just always tell which was which. From the day they were born they looked and sounded different to me. When they were about 9 months old we went out and left them with a babysitter. When we got home I looked in on them and they were both sleeping in their own cots facing away from me but I knew from the back of their heads that they were in each others cots because the babysitter mixed them up. It took their dad about 6 months to work out who was who. The grandparents a couple of years. A lot of people still mix them up even though they have quite different haircuts now. They don’t have any distinctive features but to me the overall look of them is different in the same way you know who is who when you see two different unrelated people together.

I could always tell them apart. My wife had to hold them separately a couple times to figure it out. One of them came out with really spiky hair, so it was pretty obvious which was which.

I can tell which of them I’m talking to on the phone. When my sister asked me how I knew, her son (he was about 6 at the time) said, “Well, they are different people, mom!”

I don’t know why, but that always cracks me up.

100%. Why? Because they did. We applied for our drivers licenses and when we looked at our birth certificates we realized our mom had our middle names mixed up for the first sixteen years of our life. I still struggle to remember what my middle name actually is.

My brother had a leather bag monogrammed with the wrong initials when he was 29, because he couldn’t keep it straight in his head either 😂

When our twins came along, we decided to assign each a color — one was always in blue, the other in green. It started off as a practical thing, but as they got older, they each developed a preference for their own color, it became part of their individual identity. As funny as it sounds, that color coding stuck with them and now as teenagers, their rooms are themed around their colors, their gadgets and even their bikes. It’s hilarious looking back at baby pictures trying to figure out who’s who, but now, we can tell them apart by the color aura they literally chose to live

My younger brothers are identical twins. When they were in preschool they attended separate classrooms in an effort for them to have some independence and social skills (fear was they would be ’twinning’ and not engage with other kids).

Welp, one day they schemed and pulled a switcharoo. It took a bit of time for the teachers to notice that they had the wrong twin in their classroom (actually, only one teacher did lol). The teacher figured it out because the one twin wasn’t playing with the usual kids, and he couldn’t spell his brothers name (only his).

The only way to tell them apart is a freckle otherwise if you just see one twin at a time its still difficult to tell who is who. Personality wise they are pretty different.

Father of triplets.

I honestly just took my wife’s word for it for the first 6 months or so.

But she named them (and knew their sex and which one was where) before they were born.

Im a sister of identical twins. I was the only one growing up who could tell my baby brothers apart. So whenever my parents had to make sure they had the right kid they would just be like “hey, which kid is this?” and I would tell them. Every morning I would tell them what kid was which and they had color coded clothes. One only wore red while the other wore blue. This went on until they turned about 2.

I have two twin sisters who for most of their lives were considered fraternal (mid-20th century medicine). Outsiders couldn’t tell them apart but all of us siblings and our parents never had a problem. Recent DNA testing revealed that they are in fact identical twins

Honestly, pretty much every parent of identical twins will tell you that they don’t really look all that alike to them. Obviosuly on the surface they do, but I don’t think we’ve ever mistook one for the other. It’s not one big thing that makes them different, it’s lots of small things that you’d only really notice if you spent every day with them.

I have twin sons, and I’m sure I never mixed them up. I kept bracelets or something on them when they were newborn. There was one time when they were a few months old and I gave them both a bath, and then noticed neither of them was wearing a bracelet. That was...interesting...but my husband and I laid them both on the bed and looked them over, then agreed that we knew which one was which, because one had a pretty distinctive fold in his ear.

My mom is also a twin, and as I child I once asked my grandfather if he was sure he never mixed them up, ’Are you SURE my mom’s name is Jan?" And he says “If you can’t tell, it doesn’t matter.”

I guess that is one way to look at it. :)