Hi again everyone! Thomas (above) is now a week old (I can’t believe how quickly the time goes…) and is still a beautiful little man. Shannon and Thomas are home now and the whole family is settling into the routine of a 3 hourly cycle. He is still feeding well which is a great help - although the length of feeding is quite incredible! Good man! :) Thank you everyone for your kind thoughts, prayers and best wishes, we have been extremely lucky with the amount of support that we have received since he was born.
Aside from our own little family, others in Israel are having similar ideas about the desirability of having children. In this piece originally published in the Israel Hayom, it seems as if Israeli Jewish births are on the increase. This, combined with the decrease in fertility of its Arab neighbours and a decresase in Israeli emigration means that:

"The suggestion that Jews are doomed to become a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean is either dramatically mistaken or outrageously misleading" I suggest that you read the piece as the near Middle East is an area where demography is very important politically (or is at least perceived to be so - a falling population relative to its neighbours would surely add to the Israelis' siege mentality?). PS Interestingly enough, when reading this article I was reminded of the Congress of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The statesmen from the 5 great powers: Great Britain, Austria, Russia, Prussia and France detmined during the Congress how to make the peace work after 23 years of war. One of the things they did was rearrange boundaries and redistributed physical resources and "souls" (population). Back then of course population was a major indicator of power. I'm not sure quite why this story made me think of that. Maybe I have sympathetic baby brain!