Eva and Erika: Mastering kindergarten, movement and big vocabularies!

As we move into a new decade, we checked in with formerly conjoined twin sisters Eva and Erika Sandoval, who in 2016 were surgically separated at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. For a recent story on Stanford Medicine’s blog, Scope , writer Erin Digitale spoke with Aida Sandoval, the twin’s mother, who mused about delightfully typical 5-year-old stuff:

They are learning their numbers and love playing with kinetic sand, finger puppets and Barbie cars. Always talkative, the girls have also started bringing big words home from school. After a lesson about bees, they came home chattering about bee anatomy, popping out vocabulary like “abdomen” and “thorax.”
“I’m in awe at the conversations they have with me sometimes,” Aida said.

Now in kindergarten, the sisters have mastered using a combination of their walkers and prosthetic legs to get around. The long-term goal is to transition them to using their prostheses with walking sticks for balance and support.

“Erika loves to get her prosthetic on and walk around the house,” Aida said. “I can picture how she’ll be doing it on her own as she gets older.”
It’s a very positive change from the girls’ infancy, when there was much more uncertainty about their futures.
“When I see the pictures, I can’t believe we were there,” Aida said. “It still amazes me to see them at this point in their lives.”

Here is a look back on some of the key milestones in the girls’ growth since they left the hospital and returned home to Antelope, Calif. in 2017.

2018: Custom prosthetic legs allows the Sandoval twins to walk and play. Read the blog story