THE WASHINGTON POST – Identical twin sisters Erin Cheplak and Jill Justiniani had a running joke throughout their pregnancies that they would give birth on the same day. They never thought it would actually happen. But then, suddenly, it did.
“This isn’t a joke anymore,” Cheplak said to her sister over the phone, just before 9am on May 5 – the date of Justiniani’s scheduled C-section. “My water broke.”
Just a few hours apart, the twin sisters each gave birth to their firstborn sons down the hall from one another at the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Anaheim, California.
Not only were the babies born on the same day at the same hospital, but even their measurements matched. The boys – Justiniani’s son Oliver and Cheplak’s son Silas – each weighed seven pounds and three ounces at birth. They were also each 20 inches long.
Although the serendipitous timing of their sons’ births was shocking to the sisters, in some ways, they said, it was par for the course. All their lives, the 30-year-old twins – both of whom live in Yorba Linda, California, about two miles apart – have been on parallel paths.
“We’ve always done everything together,” said Cheplak. “It has been amazing to be able to go through life together at every stage. We are truly each other’s best friend.”
