That’s Baby B in the foreground. But I thought it was Baby A.

Perhaps I should say right off that this post employs irony, since this is not always readily apparent to all readers.

Remember my new twin granddaughters? Well, it turns out they are identical; we learned that a month or so ago.

Here I was, taking great pride in the fact that I could tell them apart, even when other family members had trouble. This gave me, I felt, a sort of moral advantage — look at what a great grandfather I am. But it also meant I was staving off something that terrified me: I was worried about how a child would feel if her own grandfather couldn’t tell her apart from her sister.

But when notifying us that they were identical, the doctor observed that they looked more different at that moment than they ever would again.

Unfortunately, this has proved to be prophetic. Earlier, they looked distinctly different. And it wasn’t a question of this one has a slightly different coloring from the other (which they did; one was ruddier than the other), or shape of the mouth or anything simple — their faces simply looked, in their totality, like different people’s. Baby B reminded me of some of my cousins; Baby A (while being perfectly beautiful in her own way) did not.

But over the last few weeks, Baby A has started looking more like Baby B. See that picture above, taken last Tuesday (March 4)? That’s Baby B in the foreground. But when I initially took it off my digital camera, I thought it was Baby A, and labeled the image that way. I’m not quite sure what to do.

My daughter, knowing how I obsess about the subject, sent me this piece from the NYT via e-mail:

    It is a basic tenet of human biology, taught in grade schools everywhere: Identical twins come from the same fertilized egg and, thus, share identical genetic profiles.
    But according to new research, though identical twins share very similar genes, identical they are not. The discovery opens a new understanding of why two people who hail from the same embryo can differ in phenotype, as biologists refer to a person’s physical manifestation

That’s interesting, I said, but if you read on, it doesn’t sound like these genetic differences are going to be enough to tell them apart.

So I suggested that my daughter look into whether it’s actually illegal to put tattoos on babies. Something small, I’m thinking — something tasteful, and out of the way. Say, something only visible during diaper changing. A tiny heart with "Mommy" written across it on one of them, that’s all.

Yes, that last paragraph was the ironic part. But I’m serious about worrying about telling them apart.

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