Twin sisters Erin Cheplak and Jill Justiniani joked during pregnancy that they would have their kids on the same day . They never thought it would actually happen. But that’s exactly how it all happened.“This is no longer a joke,” Jill told her sister by phone shortly before 9 a.m. on May 5, the date of Erin’s scheduled caesarean section.
“My water broke.” Just hours apart, the twin sisters gave birth to their first babies in a hallway from each other at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Anaheim, California. Not only were the babies born on the same day in the same hospital, but even their sizes matched. The boys – son Jill Oliver and son Erin Silas – weighed 3260 grams each at birth.
The growth was also the same – 50.8 centimeters. Although the coincidence in the timing of the birth of their sons struck the sisters, they said it was in the order of things. All their lives, the 30-year-old twins, who live in Yorba Linda, California, have walked side by side. “We always did everything together,” Erin said. – It was amazing to be able to walk through life together at every stage. We really are best friends.”
Now the sisters work in one polyclinic as teenage occupational therapists. Their tables are next to each other. They often bring each other lunch. The sisters married about a year apart and got pregnant just eight days apart, which they said was not planned. Jill and her husband Jan had been trying to conceive for almost a year when they finally tested positive – the morning before the Cheplak family’s belated wedding celebration in August 2021.
Together, going through all the vicissitudes of pregnancy seemed natural for the sisters, given their common life. It also became comfortable for them. “Because these pregnancies were our first, there were so many unknowns,” Erin said.
