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"a portrait of my children, once a week, every week, in 2014."

Stella: Running down the sidewalk on the way to school. She's so excited to meet her best friend who just pulled up in a three-wheeled bajaj.

Hugo: He's really on the move now. Cheeky as anything, throwing toys, getting into things, escaping down the hall. He asks to be picked up, then immediately wriggles to be let free. It is a lot of work, this mobile baby business, but I do love it.

***

I keep thinking about how different Stella's childhood is from my own. I used to walk to school, holding my mum's hand, while she pushed my sister in a pram.

Stella runs through a grand lobby, racing her two little blond-haired friends past lobby girls, bellboys and security officers. Her brother stays home with the nanny. She piles into a waiting taxi, and drives past car-jockies who might make three dollars in a day. Then, it's into a leafy green residential area filled with grand houses, some the size of a small elementary school. We drop the little one off at his school, and she walks the rest of the way along broken sidewalks, dodging open sewers and roadside stalls selling noodles or spicy fresh fruit. She waves at her friend as she whiz past in a bajaj, and another friend who are dropped off in a chauffeur-driven luxury car. A security guard ushers her into the gates. 

I really wonder how she'll look back on this time in her life, what she'll make of it all.