Joy, surprise, amazement. These are just a few of the adjectives parents use to describe their feelings when they receive the news they're carrying twins.

Although parents often start with delight, they can be quickly overwhelmed once they contemplate the extra work involved in preparing for two babies. Lynn Clary, of Portland, Ore., recalls feeling ecstatic when she first learned she was having twins. Though that never changed, she also felt trepidation over the many preparations required for the new additions to her family.

"We had been trying to get pregnant for a while, so this news made us feel doubly blessed," says Clary, whose twins are now almost 1 year old. While she feels that educating oneself about twins is important, she also believes that too much knowledge is not always beneficial.

"The more I learned, the more I felt I had to do," says Clary. "Of course, after a while I got tired of reading about all that could go wrong, so I put all the books away about 7 months into my pregnancy."

In preparing for twins, Nancy Bowers, president of Marvelous Multiples and author of the Multiple Pregnancy Sourcebook (McGraw-Hill, 2001), believes that women need to find a healthy attitude about the risks of a multiple pregnancy.

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