on the naming of twins ...

i am not a twin, thank god because i don't know if the world is ready for two of me. and as a non-twin i cannot speak from personal experience here, but i am going to go out on a limb and say that twins are actually two separate people. so parents, when naming your twins can you please give them two distinct names? i mean, you have 9 months to think about it. i will even accept stuff like jesse & jessica or brenda & brandon, if your twins are of opposite genders. but if you have twins that are of the same gender, i think it is only fair to give them two separate names, as they are two separate people (or so i've been led to believe)

let me give you some real world examples of what i'm talking about (names have been changed to protect the innocent). first we have the bully girl twins. one is named Bully May and the other is named Bully Ann. seriously, you couldn't come up with anything better than that? but at least May and Ann are notably different. as opposed to the Bad Attitude Twins who are named Clarisse and Clarene. you might think this difference is large enough, but these Bad Attitude Twins have a tendency to mumble so i'll ask them something like "are you clarisse or clarene?" and one will reply "i'm claree ..." and kind of drop off at the end so i have no idea what she's saying.   and that dear blog readers, is why my assistant and i now just refer to each of them as "twin." as in, "hey, what's up twin?" or "how's it going twin?" or "twin, if you suck your teeth at me one more time you're out of here." nice.

but the last straw was yesterday at my story time when two twins dressed in the same outfits (i always wanted to be a twin in matching outfits. like the parent trap!) were named Alyssa and Elyssa. seriously? that's the same name. granted, one letter is different, but they're typically pronounced the same way. how am i supposed to differentiate between the two? i ask you.

a message to parents ... give each one of your kids their own name.