This is war

'This is war now,' says the Niham, Palestinian health worker to me as she prepares to prick the Pea's dough-like thigh with a vaccination shot. 'Life here for us is unbearable and we are afraid. Afraid for everything.'

Our East Jerusalem neighbourhood has changed over the last couple of weeks. It's littered with hurriedly assembled checkpoints of cement roadblocks, groups of border police and soldiers and the ubiquitous blue and white Israeli flags, for extra salt in the Palestinian wound. Although our area is administered by Israel, it is still officially Palestine - and houses the Old City and contentious Haram e Sharif, or Temple Mount, the third most holy place for Muslims, their sovereignty of which is continuously threatened.

I collected the dwarfs from school and on the way back, we passed at least three groups of Israeli border police - heavily armed in flack jackets, carrying out impromptu searches on skinny Palestinian youths. The young men, most with the de rigeur hair cut with shaved sides and a strip of hair on top like a racoon, were standing with their hands raised, shirts lifted to reveal a naked torso. The dwarves gawped as I snarled under my breath - 'just leave them alone.' I imagined what I would feel if they were my boys. And I also wondered how much more anger these police were stirring up inside the young men - perhaps further radicalising them with every poke and prod.

The atmosphere is tense and you feel like one spark would send it all up again.

As Niham measures the Pea's dimensions she cries: 'Mashallah!' (God willed it!) in relation to her growth curve. 'She is doing well, mashallah!' Although she expressed concern abut the size of the Pea's head which was off the scale compared to local babies. She pointed a biro above the top of the curve on her graph. 42cm - this is veeeeery big! 'How is the father?' asked Niham, enquiring about the size of J's head. 'I'm not sure actually,' I said, laughing. After 12 years you'd have thought I'd know if J had a big head or not. 'Well, maybe she's just got a lot of thoughts in there,' I said. Despite Niham's difficult circumstances she is chatty and friendly to me like everyone we've dealt with in the realm of health since the Pea was born.

Our room in Bethlehem where we stayed for those first two nights during a hot week in August, a clutch of nurses became our regular visitors: Samah (forgiveness); Ahlam (dreams); and Jamila (beautiful). A healthy recipe for life in their essence by the meanings of their names. We were comfortable in the little room which looked out onto a hibiscus bush - the vermillion flowers bursting open at daybreak and folding sleepily at dusk. Just like ourselves. Labaneh, olives, a boiled egg and warm flatbread arrived on a tray at breakfast and during the night if the Pea wailed for longer than a few minutes, Jamila would pop her head around the door: 'Would you like me to take her so you can sleep a little habibti (dear)?'

'How many babies are you looking after tonight?' I asked.

'Just 24!' she laughed.

I went with her down the corridor, a large Bedouin family spilling out of the adjacent room talking excitedly and drinking tea. An older lady cast a bemused expression towards my legs which were bare from the knee down.

I could see, when I saw the rows of Palestinian babies lying under brightly coloured hand knitted blankets, with heads of thick black hair peeking out, why the Pea had caused so much excitement amongst the nurses. She seemed like a shining smooth boulder compared to the other little shaggy haired pebbles around her. Perhaps a kilogram more than the average, and hair dark hair seemed blonde compared to her tiny neighbours.

'Isn't it amazing how each one is so completely different to the other,' I sighed to Jamila looking at the little bodies, gently breathing under their blankets.

'Yes, and they are aaaaaall beautiful,' Jamila said, smiling warmly.

'How many children do you have yourself?' I asked.

'I have no children of my own, so I have all the space in my heart for the babies I look after here.'

Beautiful by name and beautiful by nature.

J spent the first night with the Pea and I, and then collected a duo of exciteable dwarfs and St Grace the following day. We'd phoned home earlier and told the Lozenge he had a baby sister. 'Oh, that'th nithe!' he'd said. From an adult that would have sounded so trite. Yet this comment came from the depths of the Lozenge himself - we could hear that.

Mum arrived that afternoon and came for dinner and a glass of sherry in our little room. I hoped the alcoholic wafts didn't disturb any of our neighbours.

The atmosphere in our house has changed almost immediately for the presence of the Pea. I had wondered before we brought her back home, if the dwarfs would feel threatened or bored by the demands for constant feeding and lulling her to sleep. But back home the dwarves proved themselves to be enthusiastic mannies. They sang and stroked and swaddled her, leaning their full weight on her tiny body as they bent to kiss her. 'She smells nithe!' said Rashimi, with a slight Arab lilt to the way he pronounced,' Smell'. Like the way he says 'littel' and 'tabel'. 'And Mummy, I want her to stay small for ever and ever.'

That evening I'd watched the dwarfs playing with a matryoshka doll as I fed the Pea on the sofa. Rashimi's nut brown, sticky hands pulled the little dolls apart revealing one doll inside another and then another inside that one. It was like an onion, I thought, as you peel off the outer layer to reveal another almost identical but smaller one within. And it struck me that the matrioshka could be the symbol of a matriarchy - the female line. I looked at the Pea snuffling at my chest and remembered that she has all her eggs in her body already. And I've had mine since birth, and Mum had hers, and so on. We women are the matryoshka themselves. Smaller buds of bodies within each other's bodies.

So it's no wonder that for having an, albeit tiny, female presence about, the dynamic and balance of our little family has changed for ever.

Later that night, J and I lay mulling over our brand new order of things, the Pea lying between us. 'I've never been in bed with two girls before,' he said as he fell asleep.

Sleeping lion and small lioness

Cubs contemplating one another