Alzheimer's Prevention: The Memory Challenges of having Twins at School

When my daughters were in Kindergarten, they were in separate classrooms. (Whether to separate or not is an on-going challenge and will likely be the topic for another post.) Since Kindergarten, they've been in the same class, and I thought this was MUCH easier, as a parent. In separate classrooms, things like permission slips for field trips and requests for Valentine's Party food would come home on different days...without a name attached to it. The school folder would be emptied into my "to do" pile and days later, I'd get to processing this paperwork, and have no idea which teacher needed the form back! So confusing!

Now, I see that having daughters in the same classroom is not without its memory challenges. The girls' classroom is in the process of a geography unit using Flat Stanley. If you don't know the back story of Flat Stanley, read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Stanley. The girls and I worked together to come up with a list of people to which they could send their Flat Stanleys, and then divided the list between them. Seemed like a good method at the time. The trouble with twins...and maybe all kids of this age...is that if they're not competing or trying to outdo the other, they sometimes have trouble distinguishing whether they experienced something alone or together. When we determined the Flat Stanley list, this did not seem like a competitive activity, so they were content to know that between the two of them, they would be contacting 6 people around the world. Who got which person and which location didn't really matter that much, and certainly wasn't worth storing away in "separate" memory. Now, however, the teacher has unwittingly made the unit into a competitive activity: as information from around the world returns to the classroom, she has the student that sent that Stanley stand up in front of the room and read/show Stanley's adventures. S & J can't remember who sent to which person, so statements of, "It's not fair, all of her Stanleys have come back and none of my Stanleys have come back...when in fact, some of each have been returned. Naturally, they expect me to remember...because Mom remembers everything. As frustrating as that is, I figure that I'm creating new brain synapses everyday, and Alzheimer's won't be settling into me anytime soon!