A Parent’s Purview: Welcoming our Identical Twin Girls to the World

A new topography, NICU nights, and practice over production

Jake Daghe
3 min readOct 13, 2022
Photo by GeoJango Maps on Unsplash

My wife gave birth to identical twin girls in June of this year. I realized very quickly after our girls were born that every piece of advice that I’d been given on how fast time goes was truthful, and ultimately, undersold.

It’s been a blur, and it’s been brilliant all at the same time. Like a bright comet flying through the night, the first few months have felt like a blazing trail of life that’s hurtling through a new area of previously unexplored space.

Our girls were born around 33 weeks and consequently spent nearly 35 days in the NICU adjusting and learning the basic necessities like breathing and eating at the same time. Those days were trying and exhausting as incremental progress met seemingly consistent regression.

But one day, the progress outweighed the setbacks and we got to load up both girls into the back of our car and drive away from the hospital. It was such a tangible reminder that even though hard things accumulate in all of our lives, more often than not, the good will eventually out stack the bad.

I talked with a lot of friends who had kids before us about how to maintain some level of creativity, especially…

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Jake Daghe

Creative Engineer writing working hypotheses | I write what I wish I could have read when I was younger | Join my newsletter ‘I/Q Crew’ on Substack.