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Thursday, January 2, 2014

On reproduction

You know how in science there's this fine line between needing to reproduce previous results and not wanting to do something that someone else already did? I recently reproduced part of this work from Prof-like Substance and all I can say is:"WHY DIDN'T I BELIEVE HIM IN THE FIRST PLACE?!?" Because OMG 2 children is definitely more than twice as much work as one. And I am in the luxury position that when I'm home by myself with Little Brother, BlueEyes is usually at daycare and when both of them are home Dr. BrownEyes is also home. Because I honestly don't understand how people do this by themselves or have more than 2 children… And I don't think I want to reproduce the rest of that graph from Prof-like Substance, because it seems that has already been done by others.

7 comments:

  1. Congrats! In my experience, the new baby disruption phase ends earlier the second time around.

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  2. An interesting note: I think this might be isolated to two kids of different ages. I nannied some twin babies for awhile, and they were definitely not twice as hard as one baby. They entertained each other a lot, and they also took naps at roughly the same time (but slightly different -- enough so to let me change a diaper and feed before the other woke up). Even as 2.5 year olds, they do a good job keeping each other occupied.

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  3. Thanks for your comments! I think the "OMG this is so much work" comes not so much from Little Brother, who is still a very relaxed and sleepy baby, but from BlueEyes. He was already in a stage where he would get angry about many things, mostly when he wants more control over a situation and that has gotten only more with the arrival of Little Brother. And as much as I would like to be all relaxed and understanding towards him, when I'm nursing Little Brother and BlueEyes is standing right next to me yelling that he wants something RIGHT NOW! there's not so much relaxed-ness left in me...

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  4. Intelligent parents produce intelligent children. These in turn come up with more varied and imaginative ways of torturing their parents.

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  5. This just terrified me a little bit, so thanks for that! We found out last week that my wife is carrying twins, and we're both two years into our postdocs. Better start generating a lot of data now, because I'm sure there will be LOADS of time to analyse and write during parental leave...

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    Replies
    1. Congratulations! And good luck. My experience of n=2 (separate though, not twins) is that it really depends on the baby how much you can get done during naps etc. But with twins I would be proud if they are both fed and diapered at the end of the day! ;-)

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    2. Thanks! I'm alternating between excitement and terror. If they're clean and fed, I think we'll be doing okay. At least my institute has a parental leave policy - wifey only gets a few weeks unpaid leave. Sometimes, I really miss Europe...

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