1. The women are sisters, each with one child.
2. The women are sisters. Both the twelve-year-old and the eight-year-old belong to one of them, and the other is the “fun” aunt.
3. In a secret CIA experiment gone awry, two plucky orphans have been injected with a serum that has given them the ability to melt anything by staring at it intently. The women are brilliant but hapless government scientists charged with protecting the children from threats at home and abroad by masquerading as sisters.
4. The short-haired one is the frigid but clever first wife of a wealthy coal magnate; the long-haired one is the second wife. The children belong to Short-Hair, but the coal magnate has threatened to cut them off if they don’t make Long-Hair, a respected journalist with a filthy secret, feel like one of the family.
5. One has matured with such grace that even though they both look approximately the same age, one of them is the other’s mother and the children’s grandmother.
6. They are spinster teachers, and these children are the elementary and middle school winners of the diversity and inclusion essay contest, and the grand prize is dinner at Applebee’s.
7. Short-Hair is holding all of them hostage.
8. They are BFFs, and their husbands are at home watching The Big Game, while the women get themselves and the kids out of their hair for just one goddamn night already.
9. Deep in the Circinus galaxy, yesterday, an explosion violently disrupted the trajectory of an alien vessel, which crash-landed behind the Jiffy Lube across the street. Fearful for their lives, the aliens took on human forms to avoid being detected.
10. Nah. Must be sisters.