Yesterday, Luna and I enjoyed our first evening out together sans Sophie (who’s in her seventh week, now). My Mom agreed to watch Sophie, amiably enough, but this was her first time. Luna already had everything laid out: outfits, burp cloths, diapers, and milk expressed into two Dr. Brown’s bottles. I made a plate of cookies and drew a glass of water for Mom, then changed Sophie’s diaper. I said, “The easiest ways to calm Sophie are to bounce her on the yoga ball or to take her onto the deck.” We’d only be gone four hours! Then we were off.
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I just signed Sophie up for a Gmail account.
Obviously, it’ll be some time before Sophie starts writing emails. But I wanted to register a reasonable user name for her before they were all taken. More than that, though, I want to start writing emails to Sophie. Writing about your infant daughter on a public blog is one thing, but addressing email to her is 100 times more intimate.
It’s like sending moments of life, in a bottle, to a future Sophie from an older version of myself whom she won’t ever remember. When she finally come across them, they’ll be as fragments from a time capsule.
We had Luna’s first, post-delivery sushi dinner at Kisaku, a terrific neighborhood restaurant in Green Lake. Mmmm, the panna cotta was delicious. Sophie was so sweet as to pose with me while Luna snapped away with the Nikon.
Sophie’s asleep in the crook of my left arm, so I thought I’d try to write one-handed. I’m on Sophie duty full-time so that Luna can clean and cook before her friends from the shop arrive. She’s definitely growing. Everything’s a bit bigger (though still tiny): her hands, her length (her little outfits are starting to stretch), even how much poop she makes!
Everyone knows that babies rob big people’s sleep. What nobody mentions is how they fragment your attention to the point that getting into any sort of flow state is impossible. I keep forgetting to load an audiobook onto my iPod Shuffle: audiobooks may be the only comfort for a parent whose hands are occupied with baby.
Little baby Sophie nears her fifth week. What a month we’ve had!
Some of my favorite things:
How Sophie ends a clutch of sneezes with an little, endearing vocalization. Her gaze, attentive and oh-so-alert. The warmth of her body (against my tummy) through the wall of a sling. How she melts happily into a warm bath. Feeling her suck my pinkie-joint. Seeing her head-control strengthen and her eyes gain their focus. Talking in stream-of-consciousness to her like a daddy James Joyce. Dancing with her around the bedroom and listening to tunes (Bob Marley and Lisa Loeb/Elizabeth Mitchell). (more…)
