Babies smell amazing, but I'm not one of these women who smell a baby and go, 'I want one.' I see a dog over the field and go, 'I want one.'
I may get married later or may never get married. But I want babies, so I'll have to get married. I want fat, cute babies. Every girl has to think about it at some point. For me, marriage is about family, and that's why I find it necessary. Till then, it's normal to have a partner and do your own thing.
The seventeenth-century baby slept, as his nineteenth-century descendant does, in a cradle. Nothing could be prettier than the old cradles that have survived successive years of use with many generations of babies.
Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.
Ours is an age of pedagogy. Anxious parents instruct their children more and more, at younger and younger ages, until they're reading books to babies in the womb.
Our babies are like penguins; penguin babies can't exist unless more than one person is taking care of them. They just can't keep going.
Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.
In most places and times in human history, babies have had not just one person but lots of people around who were really paying attention to them around, dedicated to them, cared to them, were related to them. I think the big shift in our culture is the isolation in which many children are growing up.
The science can tell you that the thousands of pseudo-scientific parenting books out there - not to mention the 'Baby Einstein' DVDs and the flash cards and the brain-boosting toys - won't do a thing to make your baby smarter. That's largely because babies are already as smart as they can be; smarter than we are in some ways.
I'm the oldest of six children and I had my own first baby when I was 23. So I've always been interested in babies, and I had lots of opportunities to watch them.
