Australian mom of three Annie Nolan is causing quite a stir with her viral photo of her twin daughters.
Nolan, who has a blog called Uncanny Annie, shared a picture of her 2-year-old twins Delphia and Cheska with two very... informative signs.
The signs read:
Yes, they are mine.
Yes, they are twins
Yes, both girls
No, not identical
Yes, I know they look alike though
Yes, I’m sure they aren’t identical
Conceived by f**ing
Born via C-section
You have twins in your family? “Great”
They don’t run in my family … until now
Yes, my hands are full (sometimes with 2 glasses of wine just to get through)
Yes, triplets would be harder
In her caption for the photo, Nolan says she wanted to leave the signs on the baby stroller when she took the girls into Melbourne last week, but she removed them before they arrived. "As a twin mum, you get asked a series of questions/hear a series of statements EVERYTIME you go out," she wrote. "I know most people are coming from a great place and are just curious however many can be quite intrusive and after a while it's just plain exhausting."
Following up in the comments section, the mom added that she always answers questions from strangers in public, but certain inquiries still shock her sometimes -- especially when they ask about IVF, fertility drugs and even if she considered aborting one of the fetuses. "Eighty percent of people are fantastic and the twenty percent can leave you feeling a bit cross," she wrote.
In an interview with The Huffington Post, Nolan said that she and her other friends with twin children find that this phenomenon is much more common with multiples. "Those of us who have singletons agree that they just don't receive the attention twins do," she said, adding, "I love showing off my girls, and I am someone that loves asking other mums questions too. It is just that sometimes you will be running for a train and someone will block the footpath just to talk to your twins or you need to just buy bread, and it can take 45 minutes to leave the shop."
Still, she has a sense of humor about this common occurrence, as shown by her previous posts about the questions strangers ask her in public.
In mere days, Nolan's twin signs photo gained over 21,000 likes, and the follower count on her blog's Facebook page grew from around 200 to over 3,400. She and the twins also appeared on a local Australian morning show.
While many of the comments on the photo were positive messages of solidarity from fellow parents of multiples, she also received some more critical responses, which she addressed in a follow-up post.
"I absolutely NEVER meant to hurt a single soul with this photo," she wrote. "If you knew me, you would know that if I think the pet cat is upset with me, I can't sleep! I am grateful for my children EVERYDAY."
Speaking with HuffPost, Nolan also clarified that she did not actually walk around the city with these signs on the stroller and that it was a staged photo meant as a harmless joke.
"It was mostly to gain a laugh between my friends who have twins."
H/T Cosmopolitan