It's easy to see why twins-specific baby products — like the Maximom, a double-carrier that allows a parent to carry two babies at once, like a milkmaid, or a yoked mule — are booming. In 2003, Baby Trend came out with a twins version of its popular Snap-N-Go, a lightweight frame onto which two car seats can be clipped, turning it into an instant, easily assembled twin stroller. "We had so many consumers looking for it," said Chip Whalen, the general manager at Baby Trends; he estimated that twins parents make up about ten percent of his company's business. Needless to say, products catering to twins are becoming widespread. In addition to double strollers, there are coordinated clothing lines, as well as lines of extra tiny infant outfits, with cutesy names like "Preemi-Yums."

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The rise in twins has made urban preschools more competitive than ever. "I got up at five o'clock in the morning," said Rachel Haas, a mother of twins, of her efforts to get her children enrolled. Her neighborhood preschool, like most preschools in the D.C. area, is hopelessly oversubscribed. Parents wait in line to register, and some camp out the night before. "There were people, I am not kidding, there were people in the parking lot at five o'clock the Friday before the Saturday that it opened at eight. They slept in their cars."

The twins boom isn't likely to abate any time soon; the rate of first birth for women continues to rise every year, meaning that older mothers aren't going away. And while IVF doctors are limiting the number of embryos they implant in order to reduce the number of triplets (whose rates have also soared), many doctors see twins as a "reasonably acceptable complication." In some European countries, a strong government push toward single-embryo transfer means that IVF twins rates in these countries are lower. But here, where IVF patients are footing the bill themselves, The rise in twins has made urban preschools more competitive than ever.many actively hope for twins.

The upshot will be continued adjustment; in my own children's suburban public school, twins are so common that when my son was in the first grade, there were two twin boys in his class. These boys weren't twins with each other; their respective twins were in other classes. When birthday party time rolled around, I wondered what to do about his twin classmates: invite them alone, or their brothers as well? I asked around, and was told that one family brought both twins to a party even if the other wasn't invited, explaining, "it's too difficult to break them up." But when I asked the mother of the other set of twins if she would also like both her boys invited, she replied that the child in my son's class was grateful­ — finally — to be invited to a party of his very own.

This essay is adapted from Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction Is Changing Men, Women, and the World.