Our First Twins Days

For those of you who haven't heard of Twins Days (I never had before having twins), it is the largest annual gathering of twins in the world (yes, the WORLD). What was even more exciting for us is that this festival was only 3 1/2 hours away from home. Just outside Cleveland, Twinsburg is a small, little-known town in northeastern Ohio. It's a fairly exclusive area and doesn't even have its own Wal-Mart, much to our surprise. Twinsburg is known worldwide by twins, and this festival has been taking place for 34 years. Twins come from all over the planet, and this year there were sets from the Czech Republic, Australia, Japan, Canada, and more. At last count when we left on Sunday there were over 1800 sets of multiples registered for the event.

Twins Days is three solid days of twin-centric celebration starting with a twin-only event Friday night. This private event is only for twins and their families, and includes a prize raffle, free hot dog dinner, and lots of socializing. Not being a twin myself, I almost felt like I was crashing some private club meeting. I had never seen so many multiples in one location before--it was amazing. While we didn't win anything in the raffle, we met lots of really nice people as well as some great parents of young twins. People watching is an official pasttime here.

Saturday and Sunday was the actual festival itself, open to the public but still attended mostly by twins. Saturday morning was the parade, which we missed. There were also several contests, and we entered the boys in the "least alike under 12 months" contest. They ended up winning 2nd place and two "silver" medals! We were so incredibly proud of our beautiful little guys. We didn't even get to see much of the talent competitions or entertainment going on because there was so much to do. The festival grounds itself isn't that large, but there is still a lot to do, see, and eat.

This year we got a good feel for what the event is all about and if we would want to go again. The boys were too little to really enjoy it, but seemed to have a good time being outside and getting so much attention (as well as banana popsicles). We've decided that Twins Days will now be an annual family tradition, and unless we're living across the country, we'll make the pilgrimage back to Twinsburg every August until the boys don't want to go anymore.