I have three children. When people ask me if I plan to have a fourth, I tell them I’m still thinking about it. But actually, I have a moderate amount of fear that I’ll never be a mother of four. In my more paranoid moments, I fear becoming the laughing stock of my family when I end up pregnant with twins next time.

You see, my mother has two older sisters who are identical twins. She also has a younger brother and sister who are fraternal twins. Yes, my grandmother had one set of each, and two singletons, one of which was my mother, to round out the family. Mom would love nothing more than to have her daughter be the one to continue that lovely tradition. In fact, one day as we hypothesized about my telling her “Twins!”, she said she’d come stay with us for awhile–after she recovered from her roll-on-the-floor laughing fit.

I wonder if Suzanne Steece was laughing when the doctor told her she was expecting quadruplets. That’s quite a shock for someone who took the lowest dose of medication to increase ovulation–once. And to top it off, those quads were really two sets of twins–one identical and the other fraternal. The doctors say the odds of that happening are so remote that the odds don’t even exist.

Maybe one set of twins doesn’t seem so frightening anymore.

Maybe.