Deceptively Simple Join / Select Question

Ok, I have two tables with a child/parent or one -> many relationship:

parent_table:
pid int primary key
pname varchar

child_table:
cid int primary key
pid int
cname varchar

Say the contents of these two tables are:

parent_table:
pid pname:
1 Ben
2 Jesse
3 Michael

child_table
pid cid cname
1 1 ben_Child1
1 2 ben_Child2
1 3 ben_Child3
2 4 jesse_Child1
2 5 jesse_Child2
2 6 jesse_Child3
3 7 michael_Child1
3 8 michael_Child2
3 9 michael_Child3

Now what I would like to be able to do is:

select pname, cname
from
parent table a,
child_table b
where a.pid = b.pid

Except! Instead of getting the results in the form of:

Ben ben_Child1
Ben ben_Child2
Ben ben_Child3
...

I would like them in

Ben ben_Child1 ben_Child2

Now normally this would be impossible (I think) since the query would return an unknown number of columns. But in this case I only care about the FIRST TWO children for each parent. So I'm sure there's some way to do this with a simple select, but I don't know how. Anyone?