Twin sisters give birth to sons on same day in same hospital
Twin sisters Jalynne Crawford and Janelle Leopoldo have always done everything together.
Now their list of joint activities includes giving birth.
Crawford and Leopoldo gave birth to boys on the same day in June at the same Arizona hospital. They each had C-sections by the same doctor, about two hours apart.
Crawford's newborn son is her fourth child and Leopoldo's new baby boy is her second child.
"Everyone always asks how we decided who got to go first," Crawford told "Good Morning America." "Since my husband [professional baseball player Brandon Crawford of the San Francisco Giants] only had a few days of paternity leave, Janelle offered me to go first so we would have a few extra hours with him. Also, I'm two minutes older and I found out I was pregnant four days earlier, so it made sense."
Leopoldo told "GMA," "Our family is extremely close and spend a lot of time together, but there is a difference with Jalynne and me. Our husbands joke, 'If you marry one, you marry the other' in the sense that we love being together so much and talking so much. We feel when we are apart, there is a piece of us missing. Our kids already feel this bond as well," she said.
"Growing up, my twin sister and I talked about how neat it would be to get married together and have babies together," Leopoldo said. "Well, the marriage part did not work out, but the baby thing sure did! I don’t think I ever imagined how special it would be until the journey began."
Crawford got pregnant "easily," Leopoldo said, but that was not the case for her.
After a series of events led Leopoldo to use in vitro fertilization, she found out she was pregnant just four days after Crawford.
It had been a difficult year for the twins. Their oldest sister passed away due to an asthma attack.
The twins also had three miscarriages between them, one for Leopoldo and two for Crawford. "We said Jennifer [their sister who died] was in heaven and would pick our two babies for us," Crawford said.
Though Janelle Leopoldo and her husband Jason Leopoldo live in Thousand Oaks, California, and Crawford in Scottsdale, Arizona, the sisters see each other "about every three weeks," according to Crawford. It helps that their husbands are also close friends. The four have known one another since their college days at UCLA where the twins were gymnasts. Both attended on gymnastics scholarships. They lived together from their sophomore year on.
They had the chance to live together again for the three weeks before their sons were born. The Leopoldos moved to Arizona once Janelle was no longer able to travel and the sisters waited for the date they had selected to arrive.
"When we approached the doctor about having the babies on the same day, he said it was fine, they were the same gestational age and due within a week of one another," Crawford told "GMA."
Once the boys were born -- Bryson Ryder Crawford and Jace Alan Leopoldo -- the women were given rooms next door to one another. "For the three days we were in the hospital we were in each other's rooms all the time," said Crawford.
Crawford said she envisions that the boys will grow up to be very close. The sisters' other children already are. The new baby boys already have a nickname: The family calls them the "twinousins."
