I love this age

If having another kid meant skipping the baby stage and getting a 20-month-old, there'd be no doubt in my mind. I'd have 10.

Something new

See that photo over there to the right? It's a new thing I'm trying out, something between this blog and flickr where I can show a bit more of our life and the things that strike me, things which aren't worth a full post but have more of a story than a photo alone. Click on the photo to get the text.

I'll start off with showing you around the village, and see how I go from there...

Prejudice

Spring has burst forth, and so have the dandelions. I may have cleared them from the front garden, but the back is a different matter altogether - and one even my anal retentiveness accepts is not worth the effort.

My recent gardening aside, I do actually want the back garden to be more of a meadow than carefully tended lawns and beds (to which end I have even been pulling up grass and replacing it with weeds - weeds I determinedly eradicated from the front garden and replaced with grass. Why yes, you are right, there is indeed no end to my folly).

But while intellectually I know that a meadow means dandelions, those little yellow flowers still bug me. Even though I have to admit that, en masse, they are quite pretty just now. Even though I can't honestly say that they are really any less pretty than the other flowers I have transplanted these last weekends, flowers I would be quite happy to have invade the "lawn":

I just don't like dandelions in my garden.

Roots

This is one of the four wheelbarrowfuls of bulbs that, over the past two weekends, I dug up from my mother-in-law's and replanted around the walnut tree in our back garden.

They were doomed to die - C's parents moved into their new house just before Easter, and C's brother's family are having renovations done before they move into the old house, and the machinery that will knock down one wall of the house will pass right over C's mother's former flower beds.

I'm happy to have been able to save them. Some were flowers I already planned to plant in my garden, some were plants that C's mother wanted to keep, and others, well, they just seemed too pretty to leave to be squashed. And then I realised that some have special memories for C's mother, and while I didn't save them for her, I like the idea that these flowers have a history.

I hope they survive the move.

Egg hunt

Their sheer delight in hunting for, and then finding, small bits of crappy chocolate saw me running ahead of them all morning, hiding extra eggs, ignoring my cruel and obsessive quest to limit sugar intake at every opportunity. Just for one day, though.

Why have kids?

Good question.

When I was a teenager and well into my 20s, I declared I wouldn't be having any. The future seemed bleak, there were already too many people, why bring more into it? I was sure I'd terminate any pregnancy.

Then I turned 30. I can't say I felt the ticking of any clock, but I did feel a subtle, fundamental shift: I suspected that I wouldn't terminate a pregnancy.

Then I met C... and his family. The first time I came to their village, his parents and sister were at the station to meet me off the train, and his brother and his brother's girlfriend were waiting back at the house where we all had cake and tea. At midnight.

Even not understanding a word, the closeness of this family was palpable. I looked at everyone chatting and laughing easily, and imagined how proud C's parents must be of their children.

For the first time ever, I thought it would be nice to have a family of my own.

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Last year a friend of mine wrote an article questioning how green it is to have kids.

I work for environmental organizations. I know humanity is stripping the planet bare. I know that having a child is the single worst thing I could ever do footprint-wise. I actually have little hope for the future of most nature, entirely because of human overpopulation. Yet I still reproduced, twice. And there's a chance I may even do so again.

I do worry about the future - the possibility of war, of famine, of miserable toiling to survive ... the realities of many places today, and most generations prior to my own. I really do feel like I'm living in this little bubble of peace and luxury, a bubble that will soon pop to join the vast majority of experiences in the rest of human history.

So why did I have kids then, adding to the number of people and subjecting them to suffer the consequences of climate change and other environmental upheavals?

In her article, my friend says that when she posed the same question, she was met with resounding silence.

In trying to answer her question, I too find myself mute. I wrote the above months ago, but have come up with nothing more than I wanted a family. And the sure knowledge that despite knowing how environmentally unfriendly our species is, despite understanding the seriousness of overpopulation, despite my worries about the future, I will never, not for a single second, regret or feel guilt for my kids' existence, no matter how many I have.

Selfish genes indeed.

Talking points

Lukan's speaking picked up pace while we were in Sydney - it was the whole new word each day thing, and even a sentence (mah-mee, where yah yoo?) and counting to five. So cute! So lovely!

But any happy thoughts of how life will be easier once he can talk properly were quickly dispelled in the car yesterday.

- So, what are we going to do about ...

- MAH-MEE!

- Yes Lukan?

- Scuse me mummy...

- Hang on Téo, yes Lukan?

- Ka!

- Yes, you saw a car. Téo?

- Mummy, when is S coming to stay at our place?

- In two weeks. So then, what are we...

- MAH-MEE!

- Is S coming tomorrow?

- No Téo, in two weeks. OK, about...

- MAH-MEE!

- Yes Lukan?

- Dac-der!

- Now about...

- MAH-MEE! MAH-MEE!

- Yes Lukan?

- Dac-der!

- Yes Lukan, you saw a tractor.

- Mummy...

- Téo, you need to say excuse me. Abou...

- Scuse me mummy, it's tomorrow that she's coming?

- No, not tomorrow, in two weeks.

- MAH-MEE!

It was easier when they were mute.