[thombat]

I'm similarly haunted by the question of an avuncular Anglo-Indian office manager some thirty years ago who upon learning that I had no kids exclaimed "How do you know that you're not just shooting blanks?!" I've wondered ever since how is have explained to that putative first-born that really they were just the pipe-cleaning debugging trial run, just making sure that the baby-batter cannon didn't need a rebore before settling down to a proper production run. (I'm sure that he'd have regarded my eventual brood of two as being confirmation of my lack of earnestness...a dilettante of the dong department)