Cheaper by the Dozen

because he had known all along she would be a girl. It is doubtful if any father ever was more insane about an offspring. It was just as well that Anne was a girl. If she had been a boy, Dad might have toppled completely off the deep end, and run amok with a kris in his teeth.
    Dad had long held theories about babies and, with the arrival of Anne, he was anxious to put them to a test. He believed that children, like little monkeys, were born with certain instincts of self-preservation, but that the instincts vanished because babies were kept cooped up in a crib. He vas convinced that babies started learning things from the very minute they were born, and that it was wrong to keep them in a nursery. He always forbade baby talk in the presence of Anne or any of his subsequent offspring.
    "The only reason a baby talks baby talk," he said, "is because that's all he's heard from grownups. Some children are almost full grown before they learn that the whole world doesn't speak baby talk."
    He also thought that to feel secure and wanted in the family circle, a baby should be brought up at the side of its parents. He put Anne's bassinet on a desk in his and Mother's bed-room, and talked to her as if she were an adult, about concrete, and his new houseboat, and efficiency, and all the little sisters she was going to have.
    The German nurse whom Dad had employed was scornful. "Why she can't understand a thing you say," the nurse told Dad.
    "How do you know?" Dad demanded. "And I wish you'd speak German, like I told you to do, when you talk in front of the baby. I want her to learn both languages."
    "What does a two-week-old baby know about German?" said the nurse, shaking her head.
    "Never mind that," Dad replied. "I hired you because you speak German, and I want you to speak it." He picked up Anne and held her on his shoulder. "Hang on now, Baby. Imagine you are a little monkey in a tree in the jungle. Hang on to save your life."
    "Mind now," said the nurse. "She can't hang on to anything. She's only two weeks old. You'll drop her. Mind, now."
    "I'm minding," Dad said irritably. "Of course she can't I hang on, the way you and her mother coddle her and repress all her natural instincts. Show the nurse how you can hang on, Anne, baby."
    Anne couldn't. Instead, she spit up some milk on Dad's shoulder.
    "Now is that any way to behave?" he asked her. "I'm surprised at you. But that's all right, honey. I know it's not your fault. It's the way you've been all swaddled up around here. It's enough to turn anybody's stomach."
    "You'd better give her to me for awhile," Mother said. "That's enough exercise for one day."
    A week later, Dad talked Mother into letting him see whether new babies were born with a natural instinct to swim.
    "When you throw little monkeys into a river, they just automatically swim. That's the way monkey mothers teach their young. I'll try out Anne in the bathtub. I won't let anything happen to her."
    "Are you crazy or something," the nurse shouted. "Mrs. Gilbreth, you're not going to let him drown that child."
    "Keep quiet and maybe you'll learn something," Dad told her.
    Anne liked the big bathtub just fine. But she made no effort to swim and Dad finally had to admit that the experiment was a failure.

    "Now if it had been a boy," he said darkly to the nurse, when Mother was out of hearing.
    The desk on which Anne's bassinet rested was within reach of the bed and was piled high with notes, Iron Age magazines, and the galley proofs of a book Dad had just written on reinforced concrete. Mother utilized the "unavoidable delay" of her confinement to read the proofs. At night, when the light was out, Dad would reach over into the bassinet and stroke the baby's hand. And once Mother woke up in the middle of the night and saw him leaning over the bassinet and whispering distinctly:
    "Is ou a ittle bitty baby? Is ou Daddy's ittle bitty girl?"
    "What was that, dear?" said Mother, smiling into the sheet.
    Dad cleared his throat. "Nothing. I was just telling this noisy, ill-behaved, ugly little devil that she is more trouble than a barrel of monkeys."
    "And just as much fun?"
    "Every bit."
    Dad and Mother moved to another New York apartment on Riverside Drive, where Mary and Ernestine were born. Then the family moved to Plainfield, New Jersey, where Martha put in an appearance. With four girls, Dad was reconciled to his fate of being the Last of the Gilbreths. He was not bitter; merely resigned. He kept repeating that a