Inside the drawer of our lounge-room cabinet you will find the detritus of a modern woman and her hunter-gatherer husband: takeaway menus, a spare pair of car keys, old birthday and Christmas cards, unused TV remote controls.
But it's also home to something far more valuable — an envelope containing the ephemera of the first week of our son's life: cards welcoming him into the world; hospital information detailing his birth weight, height etc., his birth certificate, a tiny polystyrene arm splint, a hospital wrist band and photos of him moments after birth.
It's not a drawer I often open, let alone look into. In fact, due to the visceral nature of those photos (showing an unconscious newborn fighting for his life) I usually go out of my way to avoid it. So why did I feel compelled to rifle through it now and fan out the envelope's contents before me? Two words: Peter Costello.
Allow me to explain.
Last week, as the Victorian Abortion Law Reform Bill was passed in the Lower House, I caught myself doing what I never thought was possible: siding with the man known for his Cheshire Cat smirk as much as his sound economic record.
On the eve of the release of his memoir, the Liberal Party's former deputy leader and federal treasurer took the opportunity to wade into the abortion debate.
'We will have a situation in this country when in one part of a hospital babies will be in humidicribs being kept alive,' he said, 'and in some other part it will be legal to be aborting them.'
With this off-the-cuff comment Costello achieved what he never could under the pressure of his former leader's thumb. He hit the mark and crystallised the debate, taking those of us on the sidelines along for the ride.
As Frank Brennan pointed out in Eureka Street last week: 'Peter Costello is not alone in his ... quandary.'
For one long week my husband and I knew what it meant to be on the other side of a humidicrib's perspex window while our son lay strapped to an arsenal of tubes and wires in the Royal Women's Hospital's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
To us, our son, who found himself in such exalted company courtesy of a bilateral pneumothorax (collapsed lungs) at birth, seemed as fragile as a fig. And yet at full term