If parents are the fixed stars in the childs universe, the vaguely understood, distant but constant celestial spheres, siblings are the dazzling, sometimes scorching comets whizzing nearby.

Preschool kids learn best when exploring, but kids in school learn best when they do things, interacting with a master. Unfortunately, our schools don't do much of either. Also, kids do need to learn how to deal with technology, and online education and otherwise using electronic devices as learning tools facilitates that.

To support the people we care about is intrinsic, it is not instrumental. It's not something we do because we're hoping to get some other outcome.

Being a grandmother is a wonderful thing, so my advice is skip the children. Go straight to the grandchildren.

Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. It's actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention.

What's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos.

All of us gardeners know that nothing comes out the way you planned. It's a different garden every year, and it's always sort of different from what you were thinking when you began. What it really means to be a good gardener is to work hard to produce an ecosystem that will have enough diversity, enough possibilities, so it's robust, and it's resilient, and it can change when the seasons change. And that kind of robust, unexpected, variable, messy system - that's what you want to create when you're having children, too.