Sometimes I envy people without children

Bear with me: I am soulfully and deeply happy with my daughters and would never have wanted my life any other way. And of course I'm not jealous of the childless with desire to have children either, that would be pretty unkind. But I also have quite a few consciously childless people in my neighbourhood, and apart from the rude questions they get torpedoed at every random birthday, I can quite envy them in some situations.

1. Go wherever you want
And when, that too. Is it cosy somewhere? Then you stay the night. Want to turn off the lights in the pub? No problem. No babysitter for whom you can't make it late coming home and who is going to tell her mother anyway how, in apparent condition, you couldn't even calculate the number of hours she was babysitting x 7.50.

2. Your monthly budget
No babysitting fees, hockey shoes, stolen bikes, sports club fees, school fees, dressing fees, pocket money, street jump, cinema, children's parties and so on. Oh guys, you are swimming in your monthly cash flow. And you can probably work more and earn more too.

3. Long nights
No croaking under beds, no nocturnal peeing or spitting, no ‘can I join you, I can't sleep’; just a peasant night of about eight hours.

4. Less worry
You are as happy as your least happy child, they say. And so it is. That stupid five for maths when she had studied so hard, those annoying girls who shut out, no suitable educational place, the braces pain. Ah, there is always something in a young life that chafes and bruises and you feel it in your heart.

5. Cooking a dish
OK, I may be a mother with the backbone of a cooked-through pasta sling, but I think it's pathetic when they eat something we don't like. So I cook for one this, for the other that and then something for us. Just cooking a dish and being both happy with it: blissful.

6. Eating late
Also something like that. Just at eight-thirty or so...

7. Turning on your dishwasher once every two days
Instead of twice every day.

8. Off-season holidays
Is also cheaper again, so go back to 2.

Moral: I quite understand the consciously childless. You are not accountable to me, even though I am overjoyed with my bevy of children. Even if it costs me a million and a thousand hours of sleep.