Karen Rodger defied odds of around one in 88,000 when she gave birth to three sets of non-identical twins. Now she has opened up on motherhood and why her busy household is “absolutely brilliant”
Home is a very busy place for Karen Rodger and her husband Colin. The couple, who live in Renfrewshire, Scotland, are parents to six children. But despite the endless piles of laundry and washing up, they wouldn’t change their hectic family set-up for the world.
“It’s a very odd feeling if I’m ever in the house by myself,” Karen says. “People would think it must be amazing, but I don’t like it. It just feels a bit weird – no noise, stillness, the quietness.
“If I don’t hear the rumble of the washing machine, I get anxious. We have a room dedicated to laundry and the industrial size washing machine is on all the time. It’s a busy household but it’s absolutely brilliant. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Karen always knew she wanted to have children, but sadly experienced a miscarriage shortly after getting married. She recalls thinking, “This is never going to happen, I won’t get to be a mum.”
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However, she discovered a couple of months afterwards that she was pregnant again. She says, “I developed really bad morning sickness, which was horrendous. I was about seven weeks pregnant when I went for an early scan and I remember them saying, ‘Everything’s fine, there’s the heartbeat. In fact, there are two heartbeats because you’re having twins.’ I turned to Colin and I just couldn’t believe it, it was such a shock to the system. It was all very exciting though.”
Little did she know that this was just the beginning and she would go on to defy odds of around one in 88,000 to give birth to three sets of non-identical twins – sons Lewis and Kyle, now 26, Finn and Jude, 23, and daughters Rowan and Isla, 11.
Four under three
It was November 1998 when Karen and Colin welcomed Lewis and Kyle into the world, and two years later Finn and Jude were born. It’s well known that “two under two” is a challenge for parents, but the couple now had four under three.
Karen “I had two double buggies in the back of the car, plus four car seats plus myself, so that was fun,” Karen recalls. “We’d go for walks and we were just like a force of nature walking around. You just felt like you were taking over the pavements.”
After navigating the tricky toddler years, an inner voice told Karen, who by this point was nearing her forties, that she wasn’t quite done with having children. The former dance lecturer reassured her husband that there was ‘no way’ there’d be more twins on the way – but the pair were in for a big surprise when she found out she was expecting again.
She went to the first scan alone, as Colin was due at an important work meeting. “The woman scanning me was a friend of mine’’ neighbour and I’d met her a few times, so she knew my situation,” Karen says. “She showed me the heartbeat but then she paused. I thought, ‘Don’t say it.’ And then I heard her say, ‘I can see another little heartbeat.’ I thought she was joking. All I kept thinking was, ‘How am I going to tell my husband?’
“When I got out I’d had a text from Colin asking if things were OK and I said everything was fine. As a joke he texted back, ‘’How many?’ I replied with, ‘Two…’ He excused himself from the meeting and called me and said, ‘You’re having a laugh!’ That was me, 41 and pregnant with my third set of twins.”
When Rowan and Isla arrived, they fitted into the family as if they’d always been there. Having already purchased bigger cars to accommodate her growing brood, Karen admits the transition of going from four kids to six was easier than going from two to four – especially with her sons old enough to help out around the house.
“We had a Volkswagen Transporter anyway so we would have enough room if we were taking the boys out and they were with their friends,” Karen explains. “My husband drove that and I drove a people carrier, so it wasn’t so bad when the girls came along. It was more just fitting in the prams with the boys and their friends in the back. That was tricky.
“I was breast-feeding too and wondered how they’d feel about that, but it just became normal. Even changing the girls’ nappies, they were so helpful. I couldn’t have done it without them.”
Hands-on mum
Even though her children are older now, Karen is still a hands-on mum. She says, “it goes from one extreme to another. One moment I’ll help out with an essay for uni and the next I’m baking cookies with the girls”.
She runs a tight ship at home to ensure everything goes smoothly, but admits it didn’t all go to plan in the past. “One time I was caught out when I went to the supermarket with the four boys. I had to take two trolleys and I put Finn and Jude in the seats and Lewis and Kyle in the other. I was having to push and pull two trolleys around Tesco. That got a few stares. I wasn’t even going in for that much. We’d run out of bread and milk, but I had to get two trolleys because it was easier to manoeuvre,” she recalls.
To ensure their children could find their individuality, Karen says she and Colin would “split themselves into pieces” to ferry them all to their various clubs. The doting parents also took care to dress their twins in different clothes.
“When the boys were younger, they all had different coloured iPods. Lewis’s was blue, Kyle’s was green, Finn’s was yellow and Jude’s was red. They were their colours. Their toothbrushes were that colour too, so were their school bags. If they had a shower and there was a yellow towel lying on the floor, I’d know who needed to pick it up,” she says.
With all her kids still at home, Karen is as busy as ever, but the family makes time to go out together. She says the three sets of siblings are as close as ever – most of the time.
But with her sons now in their twenties, she knows at some point they might want to fly the nest, and she and Colin have had a few discussions about what they might do when that happens.
“Our friends keep asking us what we’ll do when they move away,” Karen says. “We talk about downsizing but then I say, ‘Where are we going to put the grandchildren when they come?’ I reckon we’ll have grandchildren, so we might not downsize, we might just keep living in this big house.”
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