Lots of people had lots of opinions about the best way to look after twins, which is understandable because there are more and more twins around. The incidence of twins in Western countries has almost doubled since 1980, and now accounts for about one in eighty births. This can be attributed to more than IVF: mothers are older these days and, even without help, an older woman is more likely to release two eggs in one cycle. I gather this is what happened to us. Not that Jenny was old. I never said that. Let the record show that she wasn’t old then and she never will be. Triplets, on the other hand, come round once in every 2,500 births.
In the months leading up to Jacob and Clare’s birth, I read everything I could find about triplets. There was much less stuff to wade through and the more I read about triplets the more I was convinced that having twins wasn’t going to be so difficult after all. We went to the big smoke to buy a pram and chose a serious item of equipment which had been designed to the millimetre to fit through most doors as long as you remembered to keep your knuckles out of the way. The woman who served us had been selling prams from the same store for over twenty years and had customers coming back whose mothers had dealt with her in the past. The expectant grandmothers stood to one side and listened while their daughters asked all the questions they had asked a generation before, thinking they were the first person to ever ask them. The woman said that when she started, a twins’ pram required a special order. Now she had four or five right there in the shop for us to choose from, a tribute to the increasing prevalence of twins as well as to the fact that people who have families later, even if they don’t have twins, may well have two children in a period of twelve months and they will need to be wheeled around together. The woman had no hesitation about the pram she’d recommend.
‘Why this one?’ I asked. There were others with cup holders and even one with a facility for an MP3 player so the babies could listen to Baby Einstein or Baby Mozart or Baby eBay or something else that might give them an edge in life; it’s never too early to start working up a lather of anxiety about education. I wondered why the woman wasn’t recommending one of these funkier versions.
‘I get lots of feedback,’ she said. ‘And the babies sleep best in this one.’ We had the credit card out of its holster before she could get to the reasons. The company that made it also had a modified version available for triplets and I asked if there was one of those to look at.
‘I’m afraid that’s still a special order,’ she said.