Raising a baby is easy. There, I said it. If you have a single newborn in your life and it doesn’t have colic (there’s an exception to my thesis), then on the baby-raising scale, you’re still on the easy side of the chart. The breakdown goes like this:
No baby – don’t even talk to me
Single baby – easy street
Twins – Good God this is challenging
Triplets – I will pray for your soul
Quadruplets and higher – There is no hope for you
As you can see from my scientific listing, raising a single baby is actually quite easy. Having lived with twins for over two weeks now, and having had a single baby in the past, I can testify to the reality of this comparison. Don’t get me wrong, we love our baby boys, but the endless flow of pee and poo alone is enough to give a childless person pause about the calculated risk of ever having children of their own (about one in a hundred pregnancies results in multiple births). As one single woman so eloquently attested after hanging out for an hour before rushing off in fright for her own future, “Wow, you have to do two of everything.” Understatement. I’m sure we will never see her again which is a shame as she was an otherwise competent ayi. Sigh.
But I digress. Another interesting way to look at the difference of raising a single baby verses twins (there’s an exciting new reality TV show) is in the number of hands involved. Yes, hands. Assuming there are two consenting adults involved, the typical single baby has 4 hands assisting her in life. That’s a 4:1 ratio that has worked for, well, a really, really long time. Now, when you have twins, the ratio is reduced to 2 hands per baby 2:1. That doesn’t sound bad until you have been holding, feeding, changing, and otherwise looking after two newborns for a couple of hours. Even if an expert ayi is hired to assist, the ratio only goes up to 3:1. And although hiring a second ayi (or six) might look good, the financial constraints sadly prohibit this. HELP!
Photo by Christopher Lay
