Twins, twins and more twins: Maj. Tony Lopiccolo holds son Ryan in the back row as his wife, Nancy, holds their daughter Maria, 3½ months old. Twins Amanda, left, and Samantha, 8, stand in the middle row while twins Anthony and Alexis, 5, are in front. (Raymond T. Conway / Stars and Stripes)
HEIDELBERG, Germany — It’s not every family that has to trade in their seven-seat Dodge Caravan for something larger.
But then, the Lopiccolos have been a statistical anomaly for a long time, starting when they had Amanda and Samantha, their first set of twins, now 8.
About two years later, Nancy Lopiccolo was pregnant again. Her doctor looked at the sonograms and assured her she was carrying just one baby. The sigh of relief lasted until the fifth month, when it became obvious there were two. Alexis and Anthony arrived soon thereafter, the second set of fraternal twins.
“We had two on formula and four in diapers,” said Maj. Tony Lopiccolo, the departing chief of logistics for Heidelberg Army Medical Center. “On a captain’s salary in the Washington, D.C., area.”
To make ends meet, Lopiccolo worked weekends and evenings waiting tables, changing out of his Army uniform and into his waiter uniform at the Woodmont Country Club. “I never saw the kids,” he said. “But you gotta do what you gotta do.”
The money was tight, the hours were long, the 2-year-olds were more work than the babies — but they just weren’t complete yet.
“I just looked at my family and said there’s something missing,” Tony said. “I wanted another son.”
In February, he got one, Ryan. And he got another girl at the same time, Maria. By then, twins were not only expected, the Lopiccolos wouldn’t have had it any other way.
They know it’s unusual — nearly unheard of, in fact — to have three sets of twins. But to the Lopiccolos, who used no fertility drugs, it’s almost routine.
“Sometimes, when people say the number six [children] I’m surprised,” Nancy said. “We think three.”
They are “the babies,” “the twins,” the middle set, and “the girls,” the oldest set. Each set contains a dark-haired, brown-eyed member, resembling their father’s coloring, and a blonde-haired, blue-eyed member, to match their mother’s coloring.
It’s undeniably cute, but having all those twins has been a workout for both parents, whose first date more than 10 years ago was spent in church. And in the midst of all the child rearing, Tony has held high-intensity military jobs. Nancy this summer earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Maryland.
“We don’t get a lot of sleep,” says Tony, 40, who gets up at 4:30 a.m. and tends to fall asleep as soon as he returns home from work to four kids shouting, “Daddy’s home! Daddy’s home!” followed by Anthony’s ritual removal of his father’s Army boots.
“You have to have a sense of humor,” says Nancy, 38. “And I think he has patience when I don’t have it. And I have it when he doesn’t.”
And then there’s the Holy Grail: the schedule. Snack time is 3 p.m. Dinner is about 5:30 p.m. Quiet time, now usually spent watching a video, is 6:30 p.m. And bedtime is 7:30 p.m.
The babies, too, are fed on a schedule, every four hours, 30 minutes apart.
The couple has enjoyed watching the twins all interact: Alexis and Anthony, for example, had a secret twin language. “And when they’re eight months old, holding hands, it’s just something [most people] can’t experience,” she said.
After more than four years in Heidelberg, the family is moving to San Antonio, where Tony will teach logistics. There’s the matter of the flight, from Frankfurt to Chicago to San Antonio, with two infants and four young children in tow. They’re viewing that experience with more trepidation than any of Nancy’s three Caesarean sections or the time she went into labor in the middle of a Washington traffic jam.
“We keep talking about the trip,” Nancy says. “We’re going to have to laugh at everything.”
This time after Nancy delivered, the Lopiccolos decided six was the perfect number of children.
“We looked at each other,” Tony said, “And we said, ‘We’re through.’”
How common are twins?
The occurrence of fraternal twins, resulting from fertilization of two eggs instead of the usual one, are more variable than that of identical twins, which result from one egg that splits after fertilization and is both rare and stable across populations.
The incidence of fraternal twins changes with race, the mother’s age, family history and even, according to one recent study, how tall the mother is. It has also risen sharply since the 1980s, because of increased maternal age and, most notably, fertility drugs.
According to MDAdvice.com, fraternal twins occur in about one of every 100 births.
Twins are more common in women in their 30s and 40s. And surprisingly, women who’ve carried fraternal twins have twice the chance of having twins in a subsequent pregnancy, according to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation.
— Nancy Montgomery
