Twin boys born 63 days apart (and yes, they are still called twins)
When people ask Kim Rugg how far apart her twins were born, she has fun with the answer.
"They are thinking minutes," the mother of the two boys says. "And so I just kind of say, 'Oh, 63 days!' and just wait for their response. You see it clicking in their minds...'"
In May 2006, when Kim went into labor 15 weeks before her due date, doctors had no other choice but to deliver one of her twin boys.
"When they told us they could deliver one and keep the other one in, we just kind of looked at each other and said, 'You can do that? How do you do that?'" The boys' father, Darren Rugg, said in a recent interview on CNN.
"The operating room was just hopping, hopping, hopping," Kim Rugg said in a 2006 interview, after Adam had been delivered but Jayson was still in the womb. "As soon as I delivered Adam they just shot me up with things to stop the labor immediately so Jayson didn't come out."
Describing the procedure as one that was relatively new and rare in 2006, Dr. Richard Porreco, one of the doctors in the delivery room, said, "At some point it was thought to be a heroic occurrence or a heroic effort. It's a little more common now with the epidemic of multiple births."
Adam was born weighing just 1 pound 9 ounces, and doctors at Presbyterian St. Luke's Hospital didn't have high hopes for his survival. Miraculously, he not only survived an early birth but a subsequent heart surgery, and two months later, when Jayson was born, the twins were reunited.
Since that time, the boys have continued to grow in tandem. At Adam's first birthday, they were pretty much the same height and weight, with one crucial difference: Adam was attached to an oxygen tank (who the Ruggs, in a lovely display of humor-under-duress, named "Leroy"). Now at age 3, Adam is off the tank, very active, and towering over Jayson, who Kim describes as her "lovebug." While Adam has some of the slight development delays expected in severely premature babies, he is currently healthy and happy and very attached to-who else?-his twin brother.
