Love and Babies, Or Something Like It

Happily for some, Valentine's Day this year followed directly on from Chap Goh Mei, the fifteenth and final day of the Lunar New Year and also known as Chinese Valentine's Day.

Double bonus for florists, chocolatiers, and restauranteurs, if they were canny enough to exploit it.

We spent the evening trying to comprehend how our lives were going to be severely rescheduled by the arrival of Bubzilla using a 24-hour clock diagram, and little pie-wedges indicating different activities, and discovering that you cannot physically fit in about 8 baby feeds-and-changes with regular hours for sleep, housework, meals, meal preparation, grocery-shopping, the occasional shower, any personal time-out or time with partner. Out-of-home hobbies and sports never even made it onto the clock.

Romantic.

Which leads me to wonder, how on earth is Australia "aborting" itself out of a future when we're in the midst of a baby boom? Or bounce, whatever the favoured jargon is. Talk to anyone in the baby industry - they've never been so busy.

Oh, and in the spirit of the cynically inclined, here's an article about why Valentine's Day is over-rated, particularly if you're dumb enough to be cheating on your partner.