What is kid counting?

I've been kid counting for as long as I can remember. This doesn't mean I spend hours lulling around the local library (where I am right now) creepily counting off the number of smallish heads that cross my path. My kid counting correlates directly with families: I've always counted the number of kids in any given family. When I was little girl and met someone new, I'd try to figure out how many kids were in my new friend's family before having to ask them directly. I'd listen for names, points of identification (Lisa plays soccer. Paul pulls my hair. Julie is away for the summer), piece together stories and chance sightings (a brother who drives carpools, a sister who can jump off the high-dive) and create miniature family trees in my head. I'd envision what life was like at their house, on their vacations -- busy, chaotic, fun. And I'd feel envious. Not because I didn't have a big family myself. I'm the youngest of five. But because my big family was different.

I wrote a long essay about my fixation on kid counting last year, which I'll post above as a prologue for what this blog is going to be all about (fear not: future posts won't be anywhere near this length). In the coming months, I plan to use this site as a way of analyzing kid count; quite simply: how many kids is the right number of kids? This question will undoubtedly lead in many directions: personal anecdotes (my son was up for four hours last night, I'm seven months plus pregnant, and the idea of bringing one more child into this world is inconceivable today...), eyewitness testimonies (I saw a family with six impeccably dressed (and well behaved) children -- white smock dresses, shiny pastel ribbons twisted into perfect pigtails, sailor caps tilted just so, and finger puppets waving -- waiting in the terminal of an airport in the south of France and, hard as I tried, I couldn't stop staring...), real research (studies show that fuel prices pale in comparison to the daily cost of raising a child, much less four of them...), and interviews (what is it like to be an only child, or, conversely, what's it like to raise a dozen?)

So whether your face turns green and slowly begins to rotate at the idea of more than two children under one roof or you can't imagine a household without a scab-kneed toddler tearing around the corner in a well-soiled diaper or you grapple day-to-day with how many kids you want to have, I hope this blog will give you a tad of good-humored insight on the ups and downs of any kid count. Enjoy.