One month later

Sweet Jane is one month old today. It feels both way longer and much shorter than just one month. So what have I learned since her arrival?

1. King Kong is a terrible movie. Why do I know this? Because Jane tends to be wide awake between 11 or 12 and 2 or 3 each morning. Since we pay for HBO, and I was sitting in the basement rocking her anyway, I figured I'd give the movie a shot. You know a movie is bad when Naomi Watts and a giant computer-generated ape can't save it. Just really, really bad. At one point Jane fell asleep and I woke her back up just so I didn't have to hear the ridiculous dialogue. OK, not really, but you get my point.

2. Being a good daytime sleeper is sort of overrated. Actually, it's way overrated. Like best football team in Alaska overrated. My earlier proclamations about Jane's sleeping prowess were, like that Chicago Daily Tribune headline, perhaps a little premature. As I write this, Jane has been up for three hours, been rocked, swaddled, and even lain on the dryer with it going in the hopes the motion would be soothing. Nothing doing. Of course, she's not crying, so that's a plus.

3. Newborns poop with surprising force. I don't remember this from Samson, but apparently it was the case then too. Which leads me to number 4:

4. My memory is gone. Seriously. The amount of stuff I don't remember from just two years ago is frightening. I wonder if there's some kind of program that converts years of parenthood and the resultant short-term memory loss to years spent touring with the Grateful Dead. Unfortunately, the only people who'd have any interest in creating such a program are either asleep right now, busy cleaning up toys, busy changing a fussy newborn, or having an incredibly animated (and totally earnest) conversation about the relevance of "The Hobbit" to the situation in Iraq. Over a big bowl of mac and cheese.

5. That thesis I was supposed to defend in May? I was probably a little optimistic about how much time I'd have to work on it. Not wildly optimistic in a "they'll welcome us as liberators" kind of way, but probably slightly more optimistic (and unrealistic) than the folks who thought that what we really needed to fill the void in our lives was a fourth hour of the Today show.