Five months today

[Image of Humuhumu in her peach onesie, smiling broadly with Granddad while standing on his lap as he sits in his wooden rocking chair, both facing the camera.]

Humuhumu is five months old today. Today, I'm reflecting on how fortunate she is to have been born to affluent, educated parents in a country with high standards of child care and education. She's fortunate to have been born to parents who were able, through the support of easily accessible family planning services, to wait until they desired and were financially and emotionally prepared to have a child. She's fortunate (probably) to have been born a dual national, able to live and work without a visa in countries with notoriously strict immigration laws. She's fortunate to have parents who will do their utmost to provide the best of everything for her and have the resources (through fortunate births of their own and reasonably good management of their life choices) to do so. She's fortunate to have four doting grandparents. She's fortunate that one of them is a granddad who will sing sea shanties to her for hours.

If only it were so for every small child in the world.