Boys vs. Girls

With our family fairly evenly split between sons (5) and daughters (4), sometimes people ask us which we think are more difficult to raise. When they were younger our stock answer was, "Boys are harder to potty-train, but girls make up for that by being more emotional."

These days my answer to the question tends to a more guarded, "Well, it depends."

But there is one clear area that the boys in our family come out the whopping winner (or loser) in comparison to their sisters, and that is when it comes to exciting medical incidents.

This week our 14 year old had a run-in with an ancient table saw, requiring a hasty trip to the pediatrician and a bit of sewing up. He's going to be just fine, thank you. All digits are intact, and he'll just have what the doctor calls a divot where some flesh was lost. Perhaps that will serve as reminder towards caution in the future.

Thinking about how these things seem to happen almost exclusively to the boys in our family, I decided to do some statistical analysis, and this is what I found:

EVENT	BOYS	GIRLS
Emergency Room Trip	4	-
Hospitalization	4	-
Stitches or staples	4	2 (One caused by a brother)
Broken Bones	5	1 (Caused by a non-sibling boy)
Surgery	3	-

Total:                                         20                     3