Today I babysat two girls, the same age as mine, for a friend who was sick in the hospital.

And I'm exhausted. Not because of running around after them or because anyone was particularly bad or anything. No, it's an emotional exhaustion that is particular to attempting to give positive attention to four people all at once.

You see, Kirsten's theory of childcare is that children have batteries. They need regular recharging of positive attention (mostly from adults) or these batteries run low. When they run low, they get crabby, won't eat their vegetables, grab things from their sisters, and whine about not getting to hold the purple elephant even when they just got a ten minute turn of holding the purple elephant.

And the problem with positive attention is that it only works when it's meaningful. You can't be like "oh wow, what a wonderful girl you are just standing there." It has to be a personalized reaction to something they said, something they did, or prolonged one-on-one attention to their activity.

And you also can't recharge one child's battery in the presenece of another if the other child's battery is too low. This causes a simultaneous shorting out of both children's batteries. So the trick is to keep everyone's batteries at a high level.

And on top of that, each child has different capacity batteries depending on their personality, the activity, how much sleep they had, and the alignment of the stars.

Which is why, my friends, I do not want more children. I don't know if I am capable of recharging more than two children on a daily basis without seriously depleting my own batteries.

Which need chocolate, coffee, internet time, and adult conversation to recharge.