My twins share everything but a birthday

• When I was pregnant with twins, I assumed they were going to be born minutes apart.
• My twins had different plans and Baby B came two hours after Baby A was born.

"Wait! Where are you going? There's another one in there," I pleaded anxiously to the on-call doctor, a man I had never met before, who had just delivered Baby A and was now getting ready to leave the room.

I wasn't prepared for his response. "I know. That one might be a while," he said. As he grabbed his keys to leave, he said it could be anywhere from 10 minutes to three hours before the other baby was born.

Weeks before, my OB/GYN had told me both babies were positioned head down, so I could try for a vaginal delivery as long as I understood the risks. She told me that sometimes Baby B enjoys the newfound extra space a little too much, turning and necessitating a C-Section. She warned me about the possibility of recovering from both delivery types. She did not warn me about the possibility of Baby B being stubborn.

They were born on different days

We had arrived at the hospital just before 10 pm that night, and only 90 minutes later, Baby A — Colin — was now safely nestled on my chest. His delivery was a whirlwind, fast and without intervention.

Baby B — Libby — on the other hand, had other ideas. She had no intention of sharing her birthday with anyone. The nurses tried to help move her along, first starting medication to induce labor and then taking additional measures. Libby held out as long as she could — nearly two-and-a-half hours — before finally arriving just before 2 am the next day.

My husband and I always thought the twins would be born minutes apart, not hours, and certainly, not hours that stretched over days. We later discovered headline-grabbing stories of twins whose before-and-after-midnight deliveries spanned different months, different years, or even different millenniums.

Having twins with different birthdays isn't common, so it can lead to some confusion from time to time. When paperwork is involved — like school enrollment or doctors' appointments — we're often asked if we made an error filling in their date of birth.

Their birth shows how different their personalities are

What we love most about Colin and Libby's birth story — and what we had no way of knowing at the time — is just how much it revealed about who they are. To this day, their birth story exemplifies their unique personalities.

Colin is competitive. He wants to go fast and be first. Of our three children, he can be the most chill. After he was born, we bonded for a short while before the labor pains took over, and for the next two hours, he slept quietly in a bassinet to the side of the delivery room. I'm not even sure if all of the nurses realized he was there. He is still our best sleeper.

Libby is independent. She likes to do things her own way, in her own time. She never wants to be rushed. I always dreamed of having a strong-willed daughter, yet I never imagined she would be quite so strong-willed from birth.

Libby has full conviction when telling her brothers what they should do, but she gets nervous trying new things on her own. When the twins had just about outgrown their cribs, we watched on the monitor one night as she sat safely in her bed and gave Colin step-by-step instructions on how to climb out. "Be careful, Collie," she whispered, "and don't get hurt." I sometimes like to imagine they had a similar conversation in the womb the night Colin was born.

As a parent of twins, you often worry and wonder if you are doing enough to help each one feel seen as individuals and if you are making space for them to each form their own true sense of self. We are so lucky to have had this incredible experience to help us see some of what makes Colin and Libby so special right from the start.