As welcome as the flowers in May

Luky;
Much to the delight of my family I found myself expecting another baby at the age of thirty-six. 
It was quite an exciting feeling to be once again knitting bootees, coping with morning sickness and selecting patterns for maternity clothes. 
The thought of holding a tiny, precious little bundle of my own in my arms made me feel young all over again.
"I hope I'll have two still, so that they can be friends", I remarked to a friend.
Her vehement reaction astonished me:
"To bring up children costs money, don't you realise that?" she asked.
Well, I ought to, since I paid out a lot of money in school fees and books alone for the children at school. But, as always, God tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, and with my husband's job at the time we always managed to break even in the end.

I never went along with the theory of being unable to afford children. 
When I think of my two eldest children, I realise that if ever there were two babies whose parents couldn't afford them, these were they. 
However, their dad and I rode bikes instead of a car, we wore old clothes, and I served mealie-meal porridge for breakfast and soups and stews for lunch and supper and they flourished notwithstanding. It's nice to have children. They make you laugh.

One week during my pregnancy I had a terrific migraine, and my head felt as though an electric saw was parting it midway each time I raised it from the pillow. 
Four centuries ago the French essayist Montaigne wrote of migraine that one should treat it hospitably, since this affliction is more effectively coaxed by subservience than by impudence. 
So I stayed in bed, but the kids kept coming in to ask me things and tell me things and my head was getting worse all the time.

Looking in the mirror, I saw my face without makeup and puffy from pain, while my hair defied the laws of gravity as well as the strokes from my hairbrush, so I went back to bed, feeling not only sore but ugly, which is worse.
"This is nonsense!" my husband said angrily to my second daughter as she called in to see me for the umpteenth time. "Can't you see your mother is ill? Get out."
"I'm going to play in the garden", she retorted with dignity, "but first I'm going to kiss that pretty young girl in the bed."
My youngest son also made me laugh.
 "If you give me one of those shiny cents with a two and a nought on", he said one time, "I can get a bottle of cream soda at the tuck shop." 
Although I was as mean as Scrooge due to having to deal with the effects of inflation on the family finances, he got his twenty cents without any argument.

When I told my eldest to do her revision one day, she tore her eyes from the newspaper she was reading, and said: "Don't hassle, mom. It'll all be done in God's good time."
All right, I might have had more money if I had no children; but what would I do for laughs?
I can't deny that my children made a lot of work, were as noisy and untidy as some and noisier and untidier than most.
 All the same, our baby was as welcome as the flowers in May when she arrived, and we just took the noise and the pram in our stride.

*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette. Please feel free to use copyright free for any worthy purpose