Having one child can already be a handful and having twins only makes the effort more exponential.
So you can imagine what the staff at a nursery felt when they were left looking after NINE sets of twins.
It was a record for Stockport Village Nursery located in Stockport, Greater Manchester. The workers were already shocked when they found out they were caring for six sets of twins at the start, but when three more sets arrived, they were absolutely stunned.
Eight sets of the twins are non-identical while one set is identical and all are from the local area. Staff believes that in the UK, they are the only kindergarten to look after so many sets of twins at once. To say the staff is seeing double is an understatement. The preschool currently has 120 kids enrolled.
The adorable twins are Gracie and Lottie Catterall, five months, Arlo and Tobias McHugh, two, Joanie and Rey Layton, four, Emily and Chloe Worrall, three, Ben and Archie Lowther, four, Olivia and Elizabeth Handby, one, Grace and Penelope McMahon, one, Lottie and Sadie Dean, two, and Ava and Sia Vivaldi, two.
One staff takes care of one set of twins but thankfully, no name tags are needed because only sisters Rey and Joanie are identical.
Even then, when their parents sometimes decide to dress them up in matching outfits, it can be challenging to identify who’s who said nursery manager Lyndsey Cross.
The 36-year-old said: “We’ve always had a lot of twins, but when we had three sets we were quite shocked, so to have nine is something else.
“We must be the only nursery in the UK to have this many – we’ve never had this many at once before.
“We think it’s quite funny and it’s quite unusual. There must be something in the water.
“It can be confusing for the staff. But thankfully they aren’t all identical, so we can tell the difference and one set belong to a member of staff.”
Lyndsey added that because of their sibling discount, they’ve always had a lot of twins. But the most number of sets at one time was previously just three.
Even parents can’t believe just how many sets of twins they are and it’s almost all they talk about in the playground.
Lyndsey added: “The other parents can’t believe it, they always mention it in the mornings.”
Nursery worker Steph Doxsey, 31, is the mother of the youngest set of twins, Gracie and Lottie, but even she couldn’t believe it when the nursery started getting more and more twins.
She said: “It’s crazy. I’ve never heard of so many twins at a nursery.
“Sometimes, because there are so many of them, if they don’t come in matching outfits I don’t like it.
“When they’re all together, they just sit looking around at each other like they’re thinking ‘Oh, you’ve got a twin too.'”
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