Raising A Pigeon Pair

Raising A Pigeon Pair

You can start trying to have kids when you're ready, but you'll get more leverage raising a Pigeon Pair.

The Pigeon Pair is a pair of kids born in quick succession. One has the advantage of an older sibling, and the other the advantage of being one of two.

You can't reliably have a Pigeon Pair. To increase your chances, you want to be as young as possible (to maximize your odds of conceiving), and as old as possible (to minimize your odds of having another kid). This is hard to do. If you're 30, there's a 10% chance you'll conceive within six months. If you're 35 that drops to 5%, and if you're 40 it drops to 1%.

There's no guarantee they'll be good kids either. You can do all the right things, follow all the good advice, and still end up with a bad kid. That's life.

But if you want leverage on raising good kids, starting with a Pigeon Pair is useful.

The expression “pigeon pair” was an old one, used for decades to mean “a perfect match.” When it came to the distribution of chromosomes between cells, a pigeon pair was exactly what a perfectly normal person had. But the idea that genes were arranged in pairs on chromosomes had been around only since 1910, and no one knew yet whether they could be affected by the environment.

If they could, there would be hope for Marfan syndrome. And that hope was enough to turn the lives of a few families upside down. In those days the only treatment for Marfan syndrome was bed rest, but Lili and Fritz Herrmann did not find that easy to manage with two young boys. Fritz began taking them on trips—to Austria and Italy, where they climbed mountains together—and Lili joined them as soon as she could. The boys put on weight and grew stronger; their connective tissue became more elastic. They were not cured, but neither were they dying anymore. They were living a normal life instead.