Barely promoted

Early gladness

She's thinking about smiling. Little flirtatious hints, as she lies in the bright daylight on the changing table and we laugh and sing and wiggle-waggle her ever-chubbier little limbs. She's happy, yes, but always the tongue is on the verge of sticking out: there's a boobie coming, right? Soon?

I've joined the local library at last. Mostly for the free DVDs, I admit. But they have a few older editions of classics, and I'm spending a lot of time on the couch now. There's a set of George Eliot from 1926: tiny volumes, bound in leather, set in clear well-spaced type on very thin miraculously white and opaque paper. Ideal for reading one-handed in poor light.

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood.

George Eliot, Adam Bede

A tasty seasonal snack

1) Spot Italian plums at market. Remember that terrific plum cake you always make. Buy three pounds.

2) Five days later, find bag of plums on counter. (Ooops.)

3) While partner changes diaper, cut plums in half, remove stones, throw into heavy saucepan. Add small chunks fresh ginger (don't bother peeling), a little cinnamon, a little sugar, a little water. Cook uncovered over low heat.

4) An hour later, plums will be mush. Transfer to plastic container and place in fridge. (Be careful to not scald or drop baby.)

5) Three days later, come down to kitchen once baby is asleep after two-and-a-half hour feed. Find plum goo in fridge.

6) Scoop 1 cup plum goo into small bowl. Microwave 1 minute at full power.

7) Top with full-fat Greek yogurt.

8) Eat before baby wakes up (and watch out for the ginger chunks).

Sound and pictures

Remember This American Life? Remember how cool it was, like, ten years ago? Before you realized that it was, like, just another clique of snotty post-ironists, and that you maybe knew people who knew people who had slept with some of the regulars? Well. This past weekend's show:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, each week we choose a theme, and bring you three or four stories on that theme. Or one big epic story on that theme. That's our show. Except for this one. We throw all that away and bring you twenty stories, yes twenty, in sixty minutes. Featuring works by Jonathan Goldstein, Etgar Keret, Chuck Klosterman, David Lipsky, Jay Allison and Atlantic Public Media, and David Sedaris. One story – made by a teenager locked up in juvenile detention – came from Blunt Radio. Inspiration for this week's show came from the Neo-Futurists, whose long-running Chicago show Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind promises 30 plays in 60 minutes every single weekend.

It turns out that I have no internal ability to judge the length of a This American Life segment. The voice drones on in front of the excessively hip bass, and I just go into a trance. Hence, this program, with its twenty-odd stories, each of which might as well have beeen twenty minutes long, just felt like the longest damn This American Life ever. It nearly killed me.

Meanwhile:

A chill in the air

We went straight from August to November, it seems. One day it was 85 and sunny; the next, cold drizzle hung in the air, where it's stayed for a week now. Still no hard frost, so the crickets are alive, though their chirps come ever slower.

Remember how my department has gone crazy—except for me, of course? It got bad enough that now something Very Bad, or perhaps just Very Sad, has happened. Most of the time the politicking is just a nitpicky game, but sometimes it can hit people's lives so hard. The rest of us will have to keep on living with each other, of course. But I am now counting the days to some retirements. Retirements I used to dread. It's odd to realize that I'm the youngest tenured member of the department: damnit, I need to care what happens, more than anyone else does.

Dr. Wow wrote today. "No pressure," but, um, when the hell will I be getting back to work on the manuscript? We've been trying to get me some computer time, but Miss T isn't real down with that yet. Especially since Beaker is convinced that he can get work done, too, at the same time. When his work is, well, sitting at a computer.

(Blogging doesn't count, of course.)

One month checkup

Nine pounds, five ounces! Nearly twenty-three inches long! Perfectly healed navel! Chubby little cheeks! Forearms like little yummy drumsticks!

It's all been working!

(Note: Miss T still sleeps seven hours at night. But I still get up to pump. And she still eats all day, most days. But the last couple of days, there's been a real increase in quiet alertness time, and a real increase in her ability to pay attention to the babbling parents poking at her limbs and ears and belly and perhaps be a little tiny bit amused by it all.)

(Note: her pooping went abruptly from the scary yet miraculous once every three days to every damn diaper for a while; now she's back to two or three times a day. We'll take what we can get. Our diaper laundering has been working well so far, no matter how often she goes.)

(Note: my nipples are still sore, but I can tolerate it. It doesn't hurt while she's nursing, unless she's really close to being asleep.)