Things I'm learning

So about this whole “having a baby” thing.

First of all, photos: I’ll be posting a batch of them here today, since many family members have been asking for them and it’s not until now that I’ve had the time to do anything about that. But I’m sure most of you won’t care to see a new photo every time Stellan does another cute thing, so from here on most of the baby pictures will be at http://stellan.shutterfly.com (I may still occasionally post one or two here, but only the ones that seem like they’d be interesting to someone who isn’t related to the guy.)

Biology is inherently unfair. Years of chronic insomnia has prepared me well for having a baby — I’m still pacing the halls at 3 am, but now I’m doing it for a good reason! — but I’m still having to wake Emily up every time the kid gets hungry, which can be as often as every two hours. And it takes almost an hour to feed him. So she’s a little wiped out.

(Yesterday she woke up in the middle of the afternoon, because she’d dreamed that I’d come to wake her up. Since she was up anyway, she figured she’d just wait until he was ready to eat, rather than being interrupted again so soon. So of course he was completely comatose and unwakable for the next four hours.)

Baby clothes are stupid. And I don’t just mean the obviously silly stuff like pockets. The perfect baby clothes would be basically a fleece bag; it’d snap around the neck, have a zipper at the bottom so you could open it up to change diapers, and if you got really fancy would have straps around the outside you could tighten to turn it into a swaddle. No socks to kick off, no sleeves or leggings to get stuck in. You have to undress a baby a dozen times a day, and having to play thread-the-needle with every kicking limb every single time gets real old real fast.

We have good friends. Really good friends. All of you who’ve brought food or run errands for us or made us things or just wished us well, seriously, thank you. It really does mean a lot, all of it.