She spent 90 days indoors with the twins

Karen Babirye and Kyla Nakato's birthday will coincide with the Twins Festival on August 25. 

They will be making two years. There parents — Suzan Muyanja and Richard Edgar Kato — plan to celebrate the birthday at Namboole during the fete. Muyanja says she accepted to settle with Kato after he had courted her.

They dated for seven years. Before long, Muyanja realised that she had missed her period. She went for a pregnancy test, which turned out positive. However, she was not in a hurry to tell her husband, who she says always joked about having twins to reward him for the long wait.

By the fourth month, Muyanja was too sleepy and would hardly deliver at work. During her antenatal visit, she was told the ‘baby' was fine, but too big. At five months, the doctor cautioned Muyanja against overeating, which he said was the reason the baby was overweight.

At seven months, the doctor was scared. The ‘baby' he felt was too big, so he referred Muyanja to Mulago Hospital. It was at Mulago that Muyanja was scanned and informed that she was carrying twins. "I was happy, but not shocked because twins run in our family. Besides, Kato is also a twin," she says. Surprisingly, few women can hold back such exciting news from there loved ones, but Muyanja did.

She did not tell her husband in order to surprise him. However, the doctor told her that her cervix had opened. Muyanja was than taken to the theatre for a cesarean section. The operation was successful, but the babies had to stay in the incubator for two months. It was outside the theatre that Kato asked about the baby's sex, only to be told they were twins.

He could not hide the joy. "Life was not so easy at the hospital. The babies had to share clothes for some time because I had shopped for one baby," Muyanja says. It also became expensive to buy formula for the babies because the breast milk was not enough. They were feeding through tubes every two hours. That was not all, Muyanja had another mountain to climb.

A person who was used to waking up to go and work was confined to her bedroom for three months to keep the babies warm and protect them from infections. "For 90 days, I did not go out of the house. I spent most of the days and nights in my bedroom with the babies," she reminisces.

"The girls love each other. Even when they fight, they reconcile in no time. They also share everything," Muyanja says. She adds that when one falls sick, she has to take both to hospital for checkup Karen Babirye and Kyla Nakato as instructed by the doctors at Mulago.