Look, Mom, No Hands . . .

So I had an epiphany moment today. I was trying to do something, one of the many daily, mundane, no-big-deal things that I do all the time, yet I could feel my temper rising and my frustration mounting. Of course this all became evident when one of the girls asked me a question and I barked back at them that I couldn’t listen right then because I was busy. The very small sane portion of my brain then piped in “What, you can’t listen and work at the same time?” I proceeded to put whichever baby was in arms at the moment down and, in spite of the crying (not mine, I might add), I felt a little bit better. I then and there realized that the world is just a whole lot easier to manage when you are doing things with two hands instead of one. Now, I know this seems fairly obvious, yet with a toddler and a baby sometimes a person can no longer see the obvious.

This further led me to consider something that I had stated long ago, which is that every time a woman gives birth she should also sprout and extra set of arms. I know it sounds strange, but think of the practicality of the system. A pair of arms per child, and the original pair as a spare to get everything else done. Then when you go to the grocery store and, hypothetically speaking of course, two of your kids are screaming and the other two are playing tag around the cart the old woman who passes you would no longer say, “Wow, you really have your hands full.” You would have enough hands to engage each one of the little beasties, so you could smile at her and say, “Oh, I see you had four as well.” Darwin didn’t put a limit on the evolutionary timeline did he?