Melisa La Tour starts each day with the best intentions. She makes intricate lists to stay organized as she cares for her almost 2-year-old twins, Venezia and Rocco, and works at her Hoboken, NJ, home-based PR company. But as most moms find—especially those raising twins—the best-laid plans often go awry. On this morning, Venezia is bawling because Rocco has swiped her Big Bird book, and she retaliates by grabbing a fistful of his hair. As Melisa tries to intervene, she gets a text message from her husband, David, who needs directions to his doctor's appointment. Simultaneously she hears sizzling as the water she put on for oatmeal boils down to nothing. Through it all, she's on the phone with a client, fortunately a mom who can sympathize with Melisa's juggling act."I try to do it all," says Melisa, 34, with a wry laugh, "knowing that most of the time, things won't work out as planned."Laughing in the face of chaos is part of Melisa's personality, a coping mechanism she developed while confronting her share of challenges. For much of her pregnancy, she was on bed rest—she had previously had cervical cancer and at 17 weeks suffered complications. "I was rushed to the hospital, where they basically hung me upside down and stitched me up. I couldn't get out of bed except to go to the bathroom and take a shower once a week," she says. As tends to happen with Melisa, several things hit her at once. While she lay in bed, trying to carry the twins to term, her 16-year-old nephew, Mark, was in a coma, dying of cancer. His father, Melisa's brother, Rocco, had died of a brain tumor a year and a half earlier, so this illness was especially difficult. Unable to see Mark, Melisa said goodbye to him by phone. He died a few hours later, and Melisa's doctors had to give her morphine to pacify her. Two days later, her twins were born."I come from a very sarcastic family," Melisa says. "We have this attitude like, 'You want to give us cancer? Bring it on!' Many years ago, my dad had to have heart surgery, and before the operation the doctor told him to go for a walk. He got hit by a car. Luckily, he only ended up with minor injuries, but this is what happens to us, and we cope with humor."Melisa's sardonic sense of humor was called into play yet again a month after Rocco and Venezia were born, when she had to undergo emergency surgery to have her gallbladder removed. "One in a thousand people gets pancreatitis after having gallbladder surgery," Melisa says. "Of course, I got pancreatitis, and two days later was back in the hospital. Then my father succumbed to leukemia two days after that."The string of tragedies gave Melisa perspective. So while the thought of caring for infant twins might seem daunting to many, she reveled in it. "I truly understand the meaning of those clich