Free Food!

I am only slightly exaggerating when I assert that the best part of having a child is free food.  I really, really like free food.  I like free food even more than I dislike cooking, if such a thing is possible.  And free food when you are possessed of a baby and assorted other beings dependent on you for sustenance is the best kind of free food, in that, like Lassie when you've fallen into the well, it arrives as deliverance.  

Plus it's often either homemade or delicious or both.  And it comes right to your door. And people tend to throw in things like pie.  Hosannah to the lasagna!  Etc.

(As an aside, my own career delivering free food is on hiatus: the last delivery I made, to a friend who'd had her first baby, included fancy artisan soup (see: failure to cook). Approximately six hours later, long past the dinner hour, the local grocery where I'd bought the soup issued a recall notice due to improper canning procedures. My friend and her husband and their new baby then spent the remainder of the night downing emetics at a local emergency room.  Since which time, I've been casserole-shy.)

Did I have a second child to score more free food?  No comment.  

But the only times in our lives in which food appears on the doorstep are births and deaths and grave illnesses, and of the three, birth seems preferable. This is almost certainly last child, so when next free food visits my life, I'll be in some kind of terminal pain.  

I don't look forward to that.  But at least there will be pie.