Becoming a new parent definitely unlocks a lot of new fears and stresses, and when you add twins to the mix? Totally double the trouble. New parents Nicole Giamundo and her husband Jordon Smith welcomed twin girls into the world in January 2014, and in a recent viral video Nicole posted to her TikTok account @nicolegiamundo, she shared that every twin parent’s fear happened to Nicole and her husband while they were still in the hospital: a twin mixup.
In an exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Nicole shared that they were both sleep deprived and despite trying to dress one daughter in pink and the other in purple, their exhaustion made it difficult to tell the twins apart.
Fear kicked in when they couldn’t remember which bassinet they had taken each twin from, and that was one of the ways they tried to keep track of them, Nicole told the publication.
In the video, she said that they attempted to keep each baby in a specific bassinet and put them back into said bassinet. But at one point both Nicole and her husband were holding each baby and looked at each other and said, “Who do you have?”
“At that point we were both sleep deprived,” Nicole said. “And so we weren’t entirely sure we didn’t mix them up.”
“Oops!” Nicole said in the video.
“I immediately panicked, realizing how unprepared we truly were to have twins,” she said.
Hilariously, to this day, Nicole and her husband still aren’t entirely certain if they mixed up their identical daughters at the hospital—she said the twins did have bracelets on while they were there, but they didn’t specify the twins’ names. So this will forever remain a mystery according to Nicole.
“This is something we are asked about all the time,” Nicole said. “The number one question we get when people find out we have twins is if we have mixed them up.”
And I guess the answer is, most definitely.
Nicole shared with PEOPLE that it’s been fun talking with parents who have gone through the same thing.
“The number of people who have gone through the same thing with their twins, or twins who now question if they were mixed up, was fun to read and interact with,” she said.
A version of this post was published in April 2024. It has been updated.
