by Lauren Apfel of omnimom.net

I recently did a segment on HuffPost Live about multiples. It was a conversation among six women, each of whom had been touched by twins in some way. Of the six, two were a set of twins themselves, utterly lovely and unambiguously delighted with their twinhood. The point of the show was to discuss the challenges inherent in having two babies at the same time, but the presence of these two adults turned the table on the argument: raising twins is a different creature from being a twin.

I find this heartening. And also worrying. The unique bond that twins potentially share is the carrot dangling in front of the flummoxed parent of multiples. For me, as the mother of two two-year-olds, it is the prize looming in the distance, visible yet slightly out of reach. The difficulty of having twins is front-loaded. You stumble through the incapacitating pregnancy, the early months of sleeplessness, the first years of snatching and biting in the hope that it will give way to something grander: a relationship more intimate, a relationship more profound than the one between consecutively spaced siblings. 

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It’s one of our longest-running forums, at 200+ pages and counting: Name a sibset you know.

On the forums it’s a game where one person names a sibset they know and the next person takes one of the names from that sibset and uses it in a different sibset they know.  Go ahead and play it, it’s fun.

So for this question of the week, we’re going to spin the challenge a bit differently and ask, What’s the best sibset — as in group of sibling names — you know?

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Today’s Question of the Week was inspired by a comment on our Facebook page, noting that names that end with the letter A were a “family tradition” for that berry.

How interesting!  While family name traditions are more conventionally thought of as calling all the oldest child Joseph or Elizabeth or giving children names that start with the same letter, there really is no strict definition to what might constitute a naming tradition.

So we put the question to you: What are the naming traditions in your own family?

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A while back, we asked you to list your favorite names, one for a girl and one for a boy, from A to Z.

Now we’re inviting you to reprise that exercise, but with a pair of twin names for each letter.

You are welcome to mix it up: some girl-girl twin names, some boy pairs, and some girl-boy mixes.  Create pairs with clever matching themes or flow, if that’s your preference, or choices that are very distinct from one another and are connected mainly by their first initial.

The only rule is that each pair of twin names start with the same first letter.

So your list might read:

Alice & Arthur

Beatrice & Bridget

Cassius & Cicero

…..and so on.

Your turn!

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This week, Appellation Mountain’s Abby Sandel finds boys’ names that are anything but traditional, and wonders if nickname-free is the new priority when naming a son.

Flip through on an old high school yearbook, and you’ll probably find pictures of William “Billy” Jones and Mary “Mimi” Smith.

For generations, there was the name your parents chose, and then there was the name you actually used.

Some names were outgrown, of course.  Others held on long after you’d expect them to fade.  My great-uncle Flash was once a high school track star, but even as a portly gentleman in his 60s, he still answered to his nickname.

Of course, Billy and Mimi and Flash grew up in an era when lots of kids shared the same names, sometimes in the same family.  Flash was really Anthony, as were a few of his cousins.  Mimi is one of three Marys on her yearbook page alone.

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