WANTED: BABIES WHO . . .

Multiple-birth infants: Twins and triplets have the edge. But as Rhonda Braun, mother of the triplets who played Emily on “Evening Shade,” says: “You only get paid for two of them.” With triplets, one baby is gratis to the production company.

The smaller the better: “They (multiple-birth babies) start out smaller so it’s easy to play them younger,” says Steve Peterman, executive producer of “Murphy Brown.” “We used 6-week-old babies to play Avery at 3- to 4-weeks-old.”

Prone to do things parents warn against: That would include going to anyone, being friendly and agreeable to strangers, laughing easily with someone they don’t know and being eager to perform for fruit, cake or ice cream. As “Full House” producer Marc Warren says, Blake and Dylan Wilhoite were right for the parts of Jesse and Rebecca’s boys when “one of them came and gave me a toy. You don’t usually see that. We thought those kids must be generous. They were happy to let anyone pick them up, even strangers.”

Androgynous in appearance: The “Murphy Brown” baby, Avery, a boy, is played by Chelsea and Amanda Elness, twin girls. “We hope they’ll play Avery until they start looking too much like girls,” their mother, Nancy Elness, says. “They have a wonderful temperament,” Peterman says about the girls. “They have a predisposition to be very sunny, sweet and curious.” Girls might be easier to deal with. “If you put the girls down (Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen) they stayed there, but if you put the boys (Wilhoites) down, they run away,” says Dennis Rinsler, executive producer of “Full House.”

Not afraid to leave the comfortable confines of mom’s skirt: “Some kids are just gorgeous,” but that isn’t enough, says Mary Grady, whose talent agency has specialized in children since 1958. “A kid just has to love the camera,” she says. Grady, who represented the Olsens initially, looks for babies and toddlers who are “uninhibited, very happy and secure.”

Good at taking instruction: “Not all kids can hold the pace or can take orders and do a scene five times,” Grady says.

Blessed with a longer-than-normal attention span: Sitting in a high chair for several takes cab require more patience than most children have.

Cute. Period: “The whole cast has fallen in love with them,” says Peterman of the Elness twins, now 20 months old.