Touch You Last

You're welcome.

Sarah’s been really great at suggesting some of the best baby books a parent should read, and I’ve been really great at convincing her to just give me the gist of them. The book that’s particularly relevant to today’s post is “The Wonder Weeks” by Hetty Vanderijt and Frans Plooij. The weeks referred to are weeks 5, 8, 12, 19, 26, 37, 46, and 55, which are periods in your kid’s life where they undergo huge developmental leaps. Your kid acts weird for a few days (eats insatiably, sleeps like a coma-patient) and once they get to the other side, they’ve learned a new skill. Vocalizing, grasping for things, attaining massive gains in neck or leg strength, etc. Right now, Teddy has just emerged from one of the stormiest transitions—the eighteen to nineteen week mark. We were warned. The book told us: kids with established sleep patterns go all squirrelly, kids that were good eaters get all spitty-outty, and it makes the parents go WTF. True, true, and true. There were nights when he...

Just read this post from Blogger Buzz about all the third party templates out there. I'm trying this one out not because it reflects my lives-to-dance/goes-to raves personality (which, of course, it does) but just to see if it would cause my page to go haywire in some way I didn't expect. Seems to work just fine (despite a few widgets that need restoring). Interesting. Expect a lot of me frigging around with templates over the next short while.

I remember having a conversation with my brother after my niece Rachael was born. She was a few weeks old at this point, and Barry was looking a little haggard, but no worse than to be expected. I was twenty years old, and I asked the most important question I could think of about parenthood: “How are you doing without the sleep?” He said, “After a while, you realize you just don’t need it.” Fast-forward fourteen years and that’s proved true. Sort of. My brother has a far greater capacity than I do for getting by without much sleep, and I haven’t turned out to be the superstar he’s been in that regard, but I’ ve definitely learned to get by with a lot less. For at least the first three weeks, admittedly, I did not cope well with the sleeplessness. But after that, something happened. Things just… got better. Maybe my body realized that this is the new normal. And it’s not that I don’t feel tired, but I’ ve just found a way to push that fatigue off to the side somewhere. I don’t nod of...