Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 November 1893 — A TALK ON BABIES. [ARTICLE]

A TALK ON BABIES.

And the Result of “Getting Them Used” to Stuffing And Freezing The Delphi Journal’s Man on the Comer talked about babies last week, his text being an experience he had with a pair of twins from Rensselaer. We give the story in his own words: I came down on the train from Chicago one cool night recently and there was a man and his wife on the train who had been to the world’s fair. They had a pair of twins with them and appeared to be enjoying life immensly. The twins had enjoyed the fair, so the mother said. They were as stout and healthy as wood choppers. I asked the mother if she was not afraid to take the little ones to the fair and she said: “Oh no. We had them down to the encampment at Indianapolis for a week and they were not a particle of trouble.’ ’ 1 They were one year old. The train boy came along with his basket of fruit. The twins cried for some and the father bought them two bananas each and the little fellows soon disposed of them. Then the train boy came along with gum drops packed in a round box like the boxes we used to buy axle grease in when I was a boy. The twins cried for gum drops and they got them. And they paralyzed the gum drops. Then the train boy brought around his figs and the twins got some figs. Yearl in’ twins, too, remember.

When we slowed up at Rensselaer the father and mother commenced to shuffle around as if they expected to get off. The twins were not very warmly clothed and when the brakeman opened the door to call the station a gust of cold wind came in that caused me to turn up my coat collar. I leaned forward and asked the mother if they had no additional wraps for the yearlings’. She said they had none, that she didn’t think they needed any. “ You live near the station, I suppose,” I suggested. “Six miles in the country. My boy will be after us in the big wagon,”-she said. “Aint you afraid you will freeze them?” I asked. “The twins?” she inquired. “Yes.” “Oh no, they are used to it,” she said, with one of those happy smiles that carries conviction with it.

And off they got, the twins holding the remnants of the purchases from the train boy in their chubby hands and apparently satisfied that they were having a good time. Six miles in the country, in an open wagon, with scantily dressed twins on a chilly night in October! It makes me cold to think of it. And this leads me to observe that there are different ways of raising babies. It is my opinion that there are as many babies who die of warmth and perspiration as there are that die of exposure and scanty clothing. You take the town mother and she is inclined to over-do the clothing business. She is not content if the little one is not a regular storage box for heat, and she piles on the flannels until the child is as red in the face as a ripe peach and its little body is often damp with perspiration. And you take the stuff those twins put down in their insides and it would drive the average town baby into a succession of colics that would raise a slate roof. Bananas, gum drops and figs at midnight just suited the twins and their six mile drive, but such a mixture would have played sad havoc with the city yearlin’. The twins were “used to it.” And, after all, this is all there is to it Babies or grown people can ge, “used” to most anything.

But I would like to know whether those twins actually survived that six mile drive. 2 It will no doubt grieve Bro. Landis’s kindly heart to know that the answer to his last remark is probably found in this item, republished from last week’s Republican. One of Mr. and Mrs. Morris Thomas’s twin girl babies died Tuesday morning, of a stomach trouble, at their home a few miles west of town. Its age was a little over one year. It is true as Bro., Landis remarks, babies and grown people can get used to most anything. But the trouble is, especially with babies, that they are like the Irishman’s horse, we have all heard of, which the owner taught to live without eating. By the time you get babies used to stuffing everything into their stomachs, or to too much or too little or eating or wearing, they “up and die.” And nothing is left for the consolation of the sorrowing parents except to reconcile their minds to the “ways of an inscrutable providence.”