Two twin sisters have quite a few bundles of joy to chase around after they both recently gave birth to a set of twins — again!
For Kerri Bunker and Kelli Wall of Wallsburg, Utah, family gatherings have suddenly gotten a bit more complicated. The 36-year-old identical twin sisters have given birth to twins for the second time in five years, instantly increasing the size of their households and causing them restless nights.
When the sisters, who married best friends, teach at the same elementary school, and live on the same block, found out they were having twins two weeks apart, they went into labor and gave birth early – Kelli on Jan. 11 and Kerri on Feb. 13.
The youngest Bunker twins were born at Timpanogos Regional Hospital on Feb. 13, 2016. The youngest Wall twins were born about three weeks earlier at the same hospital.
“For one week, we were together in the 𝑁𝐼𝐶𝑈– they set us up with our own little section,” Kerri tells 𝑃𝐸𝑂𝑃𝐿𝐸.. “It was fun for us to share that together, just like we’ve always shared everything else in our lives.”
“When I had my babies she was there helping me and now I don’t think I can help her back because we have our hands full with our own sets!” said Bunker. “When you feed them, you put them back in the same spot so you don’t get them mixed up!”
The sisters have done double duty with diapers and bottles before, as best friends who seldom spend a day apart. Despite being warned by physicians that they wouldn’t be able to have children, they swiftly made up for a lost time, becoming pregnant with their first pair of twins through 𝑖𝑛 𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑟𝑜 𝑓𝑒𝑟𝑡𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑧𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 six years ago. Kelli’s daughters, Madison and McKell, are now 5, while Kerri’s twins, Kole and Hallie, are 4. She also has a daughter, Sadie, 2.
For their second pregnancies with twins, Kelli conceived again 𝑖𝑛 𝑣𝑖𝑡𝑟𝑜, while Kerri conceived naturally and discovered she was pregnant after buying a home pregnancy test on a whim.
“So between the two of us, we now have nine children age 5 and under,” says Kelli. To keep the noise level down, we’re thinking that every get-together we have from now on will probably have to be outside. Chaos will reign, she tells 𝑃𝐸𝑂𝑃𝐿𝐸.
Since Kelli’s twins were in the 𝑁𝐼𝐶𝑈 for more than five weeks, she had time to catch up on sleep before bringing them home.
“It gave me a chance to recover and rest up,” she says, “but now, I’m back to those sleepless nights again. I tell Kerri, ‘Enjoy it. Because you won’t get another chance for a while.”
The sisters’ husbands, Dustin Wall, 30, a diesel mechanic, and Robert Bunker, 30, a special education teacher, are also working double time, along with their mother-in-law, Ranae Park.
Kelli is getting extra help with her newborns from Madison and McKell, “who would hold the babies all day long if I let them,” she says. “They adore them. When I caught McKell peeking over Kenadee’s basinette, she told me, ‘Mom, I think she loves us.’ I’m really looking forward to watching these new relationships bloom.”
“We drive to work together, we end up wearing the same thing a lot of times, and we still call each other every night to say ‘goodnight,’ ” Kerri tells 𝑃𝐸𝑂𝑃𝐿𝐸. With little doubt that their twins will also have that unbreakable bond, she says, “wherever they end up, we know they’ll always have a best friend for life.”
