Identical Twins Born in Different Years Get a Really Cool Story Out of it

(iStockPhoto/katrinaelena)

There are a lot of cool things that go along with being an identical twin–like the possibility of tricking teachers and Parent Trap-ing your parents–but there are a few drawbacks as well, sharing a birthday being a big one. But newborn twins James and Matthew Criddle from Utah will never have to worry about that, because they have different birthdays, birth months, and were actually born in two different years completely.

According to Good Morning America, Huyen Nguyen and her husband, Nick Criddle, were scheduled to deliver their twins by Caesarian on January 11. Complications occurred over the weekend, however, and they wound up going in to deliver their babies by C-section at 11:40 p.m. on December 31, 2016. The procedure went quickly and as expected, but a side effect of the schedule change was that James Criddle was born at 11:59 p.m. on December 31, 2016, and Matthew Criddle was born at 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 2017.

“It wasn’t anything we tried to plan, but it’s a fun story,” Nick Criddle said.

They aren’t even the only set of New Year twins this year. GMA reports that over in Arizona, Sawyer Shay was born at 11:50 p.m. on December 31, eleven minutes before his twin brother, Everett Shay.

Of course it’s a weird effect of timekeeping that these birthdays happened like this. If the Criddle babies lived in New York, they’d both have been born hours before New Year’s. Now, however, they get different birth years on their birth certificates despite being identical twins born just two minutes apart.

It’s a quirky story that will probably entertain both sets of twins for some time, but celebrating birthdays has one obvious solution once the kids are a bit older: Two-day ragers, starting on December 31 for James’ birthday and continuing straight through January 1 for Matthew’s. There’s no party like a New Year’s twin party, because a New Year’s twin party is days of parties.