Twin at deep end
There’s a celebrity baby boom, with Amal Clooney and Beyonce expecting twins. MARIA CROCE talks to a Scots mum with THREE sets of twins
THERE’S a towel on the bathroom floor and mum-of-six Karen Rodger knows straight away who has dropped it.
All the towels in the Rodger household are colour-coded to each individual. When her kids were younger, she used to check their toothbrushes in corresponding colours. If they were dry, she knew who to chase to brush their teeth.
Karen has to be organised as she is mum to three sets of twins.
Dance lecturer Karen, 45, and husband Colin, 48, an events manager, have boy twins Lewis and Kyle, 18, and Finn and Jude, 15, and girl twins Rowan and Isla, who are three.
According to Tamba – the Twins and Multiple Births Association – the odds of having three sets of non-identical twins occurring naturally are one in 88,000.
That’s the same odds as dating a supermodel. You’ve got more chance of winning an Oscar, where the odds are one in 11,500. But it’s nowhere near the odds of winning the lottery jackpot, which is one in 45million.
But Karen, from Langbank in Renfrewshire, said: “At the end of the day, I have six healthy children who are generally happy most of the time. I feel so lucky. I would not have it any other way.”
The oldest boys will joke that if they didn’t have so many siblings they could go to Disneyland every year and the family would have fancy cars. But Karen said: “I told them, ‘You wouldn’t have such a fun life’. They agree that life would be a bit dull and boring without the others.”
Karen was 27 when she had her oldest sons and it was a shock to discover she was expecting twins – although her gran on her mum’s side was a twin.
She said: “Initially, we were shocked but very excited. Because we hadn’t had kids before, we didn’t really know what was in store and how difficult it could be, so we were really excited.
“We went out and bought twin cots and a double pram. Like anybody having a child, you want the best for them. The pram looked very good but you couldn’t go anywhere with it because it wouldn’t fit through a door.”
She suffered pre-eclampsia and when her blood pressure went up, she had to have a C-section to deliver the boys at 33 weeks – seven weeks early.
Lewis weighed 6lb 14oz and Kyle was 6lbs – and both were healthy.
Karen admits it was a steep learning curve once she was home. She said: “I
didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I fed them myself because I couldn’t be dealing with getting up and sterilising bottles in the middle of the night.
“It was quite chaotic but it would have been like that even if we’d had one baby.
“When you have your first, it’s a real shock to the system. The biggest thing is lack of sleep.
“I just learned as I went along and was very much a hands-on mum and Colin was a real hands-on dad.
“He would get up and change their nappies during the night and I would put one on to feed.
“If one woke up, I would feed him but I didn’t wake the other one up. But I changed that with the next two.”
She fell pregnant again and was surprised to discover she was having twins again. She added: “They said, ‘There’s the heartbeat – and that’s another heartbeat’. “Colin nearly passed out. I just laughed because I thought, ‘What else can you do?’ It was the same woman who had scanned us in the hospital for the previous twins, so she said it was another set. “We were just so shocked, we couldn’t believe it. I just felt I was blessed to be pregnant.”
This time around, Karen suffered placenta previa – where her placenta was lying low. She went into labour at 36 weeks and was given a general anaesthetic for the boys to be delivered by C-section. Finn was 6lb 1oz and Jude was 6lb 6oz.
Luckily, Karen had kept all the clothes and accessories so she could use them for the second set of twin boys.
Finn and Jude arrived when their older brothers were just two, so the couple had to invest in a second pram and a seven-seater car that would fit two buggies.
But having four under the age of three had its challenges.
She said: “If I was going anywhere, I