Sure it's possible. In fact, the second set of twins is statistically more likely than the first set, because some women have a genetic disposition to produce twins. How much more likely? Good question. I can't find the answer. I will send an autographed copy of The Magic Half to the first person who can.
     Miri's father says that hers is a one in eight million family because they have two sets of twins. I manufactured that figure from some statistics I found on a website called "Facts about Multiples" (http://www3.telus.net/tyee/multiples/1formed.html), which claims that after having one set of twins, a woman has a one in three thousand chance of having another set. I amortized that figure over the world population and came up with the one-in-eight-million remark (Okay, I'm a children's book writer, not a statistician. If you want to know the truth, I almost flunked out of college because of a statistics class.) But then I found another source that claimed there were currently 5000 families in the United States with two (or more!) sets of twins. With a current US population of about 303 million, that makes multiple sets of twins a LOT more common, about one in 600,000. To me, that sounds a lot more likely, but I'm no expert.
     So I went to an expert. I asked Dr. Louis Keith, Emeritus Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, what the odds were of having two sets of twins. He answered, "At the risk of sounding foolish, those who attempt to calculate the odds are the fools because there are so many factors that affect the equation. . . . Why bother other than saying that many factors affect the likelihood that this will come to pass?"
     Thanks, Dr. Keith. That was really helpful.



Worldwide: 1 in 43
Japan: 1 in 150
Nigeria: 1 in 22 (True! But why?)


Worldwide: 1 in 280
(Get this: In the United States, one-third of all twins born are identical; in Japan, two-thirds of the twins are identical.)


Worldwide: 1 in 50,000


     A woman who is known to history only as Mrs. Fyodor Vassiliev (which is totally unfair) had not one, not two, not three, not . . . Okay—she had SIXTEEN sets of twins, also four sets of quadruplets and seven sets of triplets. Altogether, the poor lady had 69 children, and then she died and Mr. Fyodor Vassiliev remarried and had 18 more children, including some more twins. Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, found this little population explosion charming and rewarded—guess who? Fyodor!
     Some unnamed woman in Italy had ELEVEN sets of twins in eleven years, between 1936 and 1947. Pretty crummy time to have twenty-two new mouths to feed.
     There are 141 recorded instances of three sets of twins birthed by the same mother.
     There have been 49 instances of septuplets in history. On November 19, 1997, the McCaughey family of Iowa produced the first set in which all of the babies (and the mother) survived.


     If identical twins marry identical twins, their children will legally be first cousins, but genetically, they'll be siblings.
     The earliest written record of cojoined twins were the Biddenden Maids, Eliza and Mary Chulkhurst, born in 1100 in England. When Eliza died at the age of 34, it was suggested to Mary that she might survive if separated from her sister. She refused, saying, "As we came together, we will also leave together," and died six hours later.

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