Lying on the table, the sonographer ran a scanner over my stomach.
Then she went quiet and peered closely at the screen.
‘There’s two heartbeats in there!’ she said. ‘You’re pregnant with twins.’
Most mums would probably have been shocked at that news.
But not me… I was half expecting it!
This would be the fourth set of twins to be born into our family.
We already had two sets of identical twins, and one set of non-identical ones.
When I’d first fallen pregnant it was a running joke in our family.
‘It’s got to be twins,’ everyone laughed in the lead-up to the scan.
My husband Martin, 35, and I had been thrilled to be expecting for a second time.
We already had a daughter Ivy, one, and we really wanted to give her a brother or sister.
I had almost expected, with our family tradition, that I would have fallen pregnant with twins the first time around, but it was just Ivy in there.
So when the sonographer delivered the news that she could see two heartbeats it was lovely news.
And when we were told they were identical, it was amazing.
‘That’s the third set in our family!’ I said.
My mum Julie, 59, had given birth to my sisters, identical twins, Jordan and Katie, who are now 23.
My grandma Barbara, 80, gave birth to non-identical twin boys, Robert and Clifford, now aged 56.
It had skipped a generation as my great nan didn’t have any twins.
She did have five kids though!
It was my great, great-grandmother, Rachael Perkins, who had started it all off when she had identical twin girls, Joyce and Joan.
Obviously, she wasn’t expecting it!
Back then, there was no way of knowing until they were actually born.
‘It was a complete shock to her when she gave birth, to then realise that there was another baby following shortly afterwards,’ Mum chuckled when she told us of the family tradition.
Thankfully, there were no complications and both babies survived.
When my gran was pregnant with her twins there were no scans in her day either.
But when she was six months pregnant, the midwife was listening to her stomach for the heartbeat, and she was certain that she could hear two.
So Gran ended up having an X-ray, which confirmed she was pregnant with twins.
Luckily for me, I had lots of scans and ultrasounds so doctors could keep a close eye on my babies all the way through.
Because they’re identical, there were risks to them both as they were sharing a placenta, but there was no problem with either of them.
By the end of my pregnancy, I was absolutely huge and couldn’t wait to deliver.
In July last year, when I was 36 weeks gone, I gave birth to them naturally.
Stanley weighed a healthy 2.9 kilos and Edward was 2.8kg. It was lovely to finally bring our precious boys home afterwards.
‘It’s like seeing a mirror image!’ I laughed, when my identical twin sisters, Jordan and Katie, gave them a cuddle.
Ivy, now two-and-a-half, dotes on them too.
It’s amazing that Edward and Stanley have carried on the family tradition – and are the fourth set of twins in our family.
Identical twins don’t run down the family line – it is only non-identical sets of twins that have a genetic link because of the inherited maternal predisposition to release more than one egg at the same time.
Identical twins occurring is a random event when the egg splits into two – which doctors say isn’t an inherited factor.
So the chance of them being born as the third set of identical twins within the same family has the staggering odds of 1.3 billion to one.
My boys are amazing – and they certainly are one in a billion to us!
