Preggers

WICHITA, Kansas - A quick note: I hate Blogger. I hate Safari even more. I hate it when they team up and crash the computer and delete massively clever blog entries in the process.

War of the Worlds is on the television. It's a really intense movie for a summer blockbuster. It's daring and actually has something to say about terrorism and the post 9/11 world. And might also give me nightmares tonight, and not just because Dakota Fanning is really creepy.

Dakota Fanning is a child, and that's what I wanted to talk about today: children. People here in Kansas seem to have children pretty young. There's a woman at work. She has two children: aged 25 and 20. The 25-year-old has two kids of her own, aged 5 and 2. The younger daughter has a newborn baby. That's three grandchildren, and she's not as old as my mother. My mother will be lucky if she has three grandchildren, period.

The average age of a woman's first childbirth is now about 25 years. Here I've met people who's first kid was born long before that. Children right out of high school isn't uncommon. Some people actually do get married when they are 18. We ran a story in the paper the other day that treated it as a normal thing, not something to hold up as a model for delinquency. Hardly the kind of thing that would run in the New York Times.

I don't think there's anything wrong with teen pregnancy. Some people at age 17 are ready to have a child. Others are not, but they have children anyway. I certainly didn't, but that doesn't mean some people can't choose to do it.

I do hope to make it out of Kansas without fathering any offspring. We'll see.