Development III -- Teething (Part I)

5:06 a.m. -- 7 months, 28 days

"So, you looking forward to going back to work?"

I get this question a lot. Until a couple of weeks ago, each time I'd answered with some variant of "Not really."

It's not that I dislike my job or my employer or my colleagues. It's simply that spending time watching Baby A grow has been a privilege. Every day sees some development, some new physical ability ("She sucks her toes!"), some synapse firing that hadn't fired in the weeks or moments before ("She hears cars!").

Plus, being the primary parent has alleviated much of the biological imbalance that allows (and requires) breast-feeding mothers hours of nurturing time. Though she's gone for most of the day, M maintains a tie to Baby A that I'll never share. It's a complex bond -- when she catches sight of M returning from work, Baby A usually smiles broadly, then bursts into tears. There is need and elemental hunger mixed with the love and nurturance. But its level of intensity is unmatched by any connection a father can provide.

Still, spending the bulk of time with the kid has built ease into our relationship. Baby A likes me, and she's confident that I understand her needs. Thus I can calm her just as easily as her mother can. (More easily, at times.) Indeed, since I understand the rhythms of her day, on the weekends I often find myself explaining to M that the baby always, say, gets tired around 9 in the morning, or hungry at 3:30 in the afternoon.

When I see a father awkwardly struggle to placate his infant or quickly hand the fussy child to its mother, I feel grateful that these months have enabled me to put the "co-" in co-parent.

Of course, for her first seven months Baby A was an "easy baby," "good" in the sense (to use my mother's definition) that she generally proved convenient for her caretakers. Indeed, she was a godsend for nervous new parents. When M and I anxiously pondered the reason for her tears, our standard cry became "First principles!" And sure enough the reason was usually a wet diaper, or hunger, or fatigue.

Also, bless the fates, we haven't had a lot to worry about. Baby A's growth has tracked classic patterns, and for the most part she's stayed ahead of the developmental curves. And her growth has been largely linear, her progress coming in steady steps. First, for example, she slept for a couple of hours straight, then a solid three hours, then mostly a steady four or five, throwing in an occasionally blessed six-hour stretch.

Then the kid grew her first tooth. And suddenly I began anticipating my return to the daily slog of commuting, lesson planning, teaching, and essay grading with renewed verve.

Crawling Update

5:06 a.m. -- 7 months, 9 days

Baby A crawls.

To date this has proven true only for brief spurts, under the most limited and specific of circumstances. That circumstance involves the greatest book in the history of the Western canon: "Who Hoots?"

From my perspective "Who Hoots?" is, to be generous, a modest achievement of children's literature. The drawings of animals on each page are brightly colored but clumsily rendered. The author, Katie Davis, distracts from the narrative thrust by tossing silly asides into the animals' mouths. (E.g., "You need to brush your teeth," a hippo and alligator say to each other, mouths agape.) It's kind of dopey and, to my eyes, of limited charm.

But I don't share my critique with Baby A, who for the chance at a fresh reading of this orange- and yellow-covered tome would no doubt crawl over shattered glass. (Having had a similar childhood passion for a book called "The Camel Who Took A Walk," I empathize.)

Much of this has to do with her developing sense of humor. Baby A likes to laugh, and what makes her laugh most are situations in which the set-up builds in a repeated, rhythmic routine, so the development provides more joy than the punch line.

To wit: I was driving and M was beside Baby A in the back when the windows began to fog. M asked in a voice of mock outrage, "What is going on back here? Is there snuggling in the back seat? Is there snuggling in the back seat?" This was followed by further snuggles and smooches and general merriment. Now in the car all M has to do is ask, "What is going on back here?" and Baby A will grin with anticipatory delight.

The same principle works with all of our best routines: "Rain," "Circus Act," "National Security Sniffing," "Oodle Boodle Noodle Cheese Doodle Poodle," "Piledriving Smackdown" (including the failsafe "Upside Down Baby"), "Who Fell Down?" etcetera, ad nauseum.

M's expressive face has been a godsend in spurring Baby A's appreciation of slapstick. If the kid's in the right mood, all we have to use is one of two moves: elongate face, purse lips, and bug out eyes; or scrunch face, squint, and shift eyes from side to side. Cue the sniggering.

(All of this baby entertaining has made me want to take a course in advanced physical comedy: Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, The Little Rascals, Jonathan Winters, Richard Pryor, and Gene Wilder could surely teach me some new, which is to say old, moves.)

The singular brilliance of "Who Hoots?" stems from its repetitive combination of negation, delayed payoff, and expectation reversal. The reader is asked a question: Who hoots? This is followed by three pages featuring animals that do not, indeed, hoot (a dog, pig, and horse). Then comes a page saying, "Owls don't hoot," featuring a picture of a surprised and perhaps insulted owl. (As I said, the drawings are crude.) The next page responds, "Yes they do!" and under a picture of a satisfied owl are listed a couple of owly facts (they hunt at night and have swively necks). The book then answers similar questions regarding buzzing, squeaking, roaring, and quacking.

(Come to think of it, "The Camel Who Took A Walk" also featured negation, delayed payoff, and expectation reversal. A series of animals in a jungle thicket poise to pounce on each other, waiting for a strolling camel to reach a certain sun-dappled spot. At the last minute, just before reaching the spot, the camel turns and goes back. The end. Possible Ph.D. thesis: "Epistemolgies of Anticipation and Repudiation: 'The Odyssey,' 'Young Frankenstein,' and 'Who Hoots?'")

I believe that the genius of "Who Hoots?" resides less in its text than in its performance. M and I have developed an inspired reading that features a number of interpolations that are, while much appreciated by our audience, at best only implied by the author: abundant animal noises; a slow, confused rendering of the false statement ("Owls ... don't ... hoot"); an outraged howl, registering somewhere above falsetto, that appears nowhere in the text ("WHAT?"); followed by a similarly outraged declaration, at the same pitch, of "Yes they do!"

At any moment of the day or night we can grab Baby A's attention by uttering in our accustomed tone either the phrase "Yes they do!" or its cousin, "That's not right!" The infant's own swively neck is often employed when she hears one of these phrases across a crowded room.

At any rate, Baby A could pass every waking hour pawing through and hearing performances of "Who Hoots?"

So a few nights ago, in a crude experiment designed to improve the child's crawling skills, M followed a reading by tossing the book a few paces and asking, "Baby A, who hoots?" Baby A spun out of M's lap, dropped to her hands and knees, crawled without a second's hesitation, and slapped her hands on the beloved volume. Repeated tossings had the kid crawling half-way across the Buddha room, proving the thesis beyond scientific doubt. Baby A won't crawl for any old thing, but she'll crawl for "Who Hoots?"

Librarians across the land would no doubt be pleased.

Development II -- Crawling

6:34 a.m. -- 7 months, 1 day

When M was pregnant, we pondered what would happen if our child developed our worst traits. Combining M's tendency toward rigidity with my inclination to delay, we decided, would create one worst-case scenario: a militant procrastinator.

"A militant procrastinator?" said our brother-in-law J, who directs a social justice agency. "That's me!" We could do a lot worse than create another J, so we moved on to other concerns.

Baby A wasn't long in the world when we realized she'd developed another trait that each of her parents unproudly possesses: impatience, especially with herself. Most observers agree the kid is a quick study, but you can't tell her that. The moment she realizes there's a skill she wants but hasn't mastered, then Katie bar the door, for the tantrums will surely follow.

Exhibit A: Baby A wants to move, but she's not sure how the crawling thing works. These days, nothing turns her infant joy to rage faster than the frustration of limited motility.

Perhaps it's her parents' fault. Another possibly difficult inheritence for the child will be her father's clumsy fine-motor coordination, which renders almost impossible such tasks as buttoning tiny buttons or inserting tiny tabs of toddler arms into skinny slots of toddler sleeves. Wanting to spare both me and Baby A painful moments of garment wrestling, M has from Day 1 provided a wardrobe consisting almost entirely of onesies, which among their advantages are easy to snap and remove.

But keeping the kid in footie pajamas 24 hours a day prevents her from gripping the world's surfaces with her toes, which makes crawling slippery.

Then there's our desire to keep the kid well herded, which means she spends long minutes either in her secure playpen or in the one area of the house not covered with hardwood floors: the carpeted sunroom we call, by virtue of its most prominent feature, the Buddha room. For adults, it features lots of low furniture like floor cushions. (We don't spend much time with the grandparents out there.) This means that Baby A's prime crawling space often features her father sprawled on the floor nearby, his head propped on a cushion.

As a result, Baby A has become exceptionally good at climbing and standing. She'll be on her hands and knees, ready to move. Then she'll see me, and rather than keep her limbs on the ground she uses her strong legs to frog-hop onto my body, where she practices rock-climbing moves on my limbs, torso, and face.

She wants to be vertical, glorying in her ability to push or pull herself up, hands placed flat on my torso or some other low surface, pleased no matter how tottery, oblivious to hovering parental hands ready to arrest her tumbles. The other day she pulled herself upright from a sitting position using only the edge of a low glass table (which we've covered with thick, taped towels but which remains dangerous enough to alarm her father): her best stand yet.

But crawling? Not so much. Perhaps it's because she has no role models. I try to demonstrate, but I can't even tell if crawling involves moving one's hands and knees in opposition, as in walking, or together (left-left, right-right). It sort of works either way, and my crawling instincts are shot. And I keep forgetting to watch when I meet other toddlers. Maybe there's an instructional video on the Net. In any case, Baby A watches my lumbering around the carpet with engagement but no obvious benefit.

Of all the toys in the Buddha room, the stuffed monkeys and bandy-legged giraffes and vibrating elephants and candy-colored rattles, Baby A's favorites are the plastic rings used to attach them to the playpen frame. So yesterday, while sitting and conducting a favorite experiment -- testing a ring's air resistance by using her right arm to shake it vigorously through the atmosphere -- she mistakenly hurled the ring out of reach.

Wanting the experiment to continue, she turned toward the ring, dropped to her hands and knees, and without a second's hesitiation crawled forward two-and-a-half paces before grabbing it, sitting, and restarting the shake test. I startled her by cheering and applauding, my joy checked only by my annoyance that I hadn't noticed if she'd moved her limbs oppositionally. Delighted that I enjoyed her ring-resistance research as much as she, she redoubled her efforts.

A few minutes later, her attention was engaged by a distant cloth rattle shaped like a pig's face. (Don't ask.) This time, after dropping to her hands and knees, she made the fatal mistake of thinking. She considered her next step, butt rocking back and forth. How the hell does this work? It makes no intuitive sense whatsoever. Why can't the toys just bring themselves to me?

Finally she lowered her head, pushed off on her arms, kicked her legs, moved two paces backward, looked up, noticed her regression, dropped her hips and head to the ground, and began to wail.

Her rage could have concerned the absence of the distant toy. But, speaking as one well practiced in self recrimination, I thought I knew better. Not that my knowledge proved any consolation to either of us.

I've got to go find a crawling how-to video.

Quick Check-up

6:34 p.m. -- 7 months

Baby A saw our pediatrician this morning. She hates him as much as ever, if not more, freaking out as soon as her back touched his examination table and not stopping until she was certain the nightmare was over.

She also didn't take to a painless eye exam, crying so much that the eye not wearing a pirate patch was closed too often for the nurse to gauge how often she looked at animated animals on a computer screen. So we'll have to try that again next visit.

But the kid has no cause for concern, since the doc says her progress is "like clockwork."

She's 28 inches long (95th percentile), 19 pounds and 6 ounces (90th percentile), and her head is 18-1/2 inches around (again off the charts).

The big news: she gets to end her all-cereal diet and begin to eat fruits this month. We'll start on bananas and progress from there. By the time we see him again in two months, he says she can be eating not just vegetables but meat. Since M's post-partum food allergies began, we do bring chicken into the house. But we've never bought red meat (or pork or veal, etcetera); I wonder if Baby A will alter our shopping and dining habits.

Development I -- Syllables

5:09 a.m. -- 6 mos., 26 days

Almost too much going on with Baby A these days to recount, almost all of it more typical of infant growth from 8-12 months. As our pediatrician said a few months back, she's a baby in a hurry. We'll try to summarize a few major developments in the next few days, in descending order of parental pleasure (or ascending order of parental annoyance).

Three weeks ago, Baby A awoke in an unusually good mood and, sitting on M's chest, declared "Ah-di-bah" -- the first time she'd put consonants together with vowels. We exulted. She noted our response, and she's hardly shut up since.

"I'm shocked," said my unwontedly ironic mother, "that a child growing up with you two as parents would think that talking was important."

It's true: Baby A is not growing up in a household of the taciturn. And it's true that we've encouraged her vocalizations from Day 1, spending long minutes with our faces inches from hers, cooing, babbling, howling, imitating. Whether this has paid off depends upon your tolerance for infants saying "Ya ya ya ya ya ya ya" for 10 minutes at a stretch.

We particularly like the moments when she practices sotto voce. From across the room you can see her jaw moving up and down rapidly, like she's chewing gum. Up close, you'll hear her whisper "Chuh chuh chuh chuh. Chuh chuh chuh chuh." Then, after the private recital, she'll decide the sound is ready for public utterance: "Chuh! Chuh chuh chuh!"

The short "a" sound (as in "mama" and "dada") must be the easiest to say, since it's her standard vowel. A couple of weeks ago she was sitting on M's lap at the breakfast table when M pointed me out: "That's your daddy. Da-da." Immediately, Baby A said, "Da da da da da."

Cue double takes and dropped utensils. Was this her first word? Was she even more of a genius than we have not-so-secretly wished for?

She smiled at me. "Da da da da."

M was certain she was connecting sound to idea: "She knows! She's doing it!"

"Da da da da."

When do kids start speaking, anyway?

"Da da da da da."

"There's your mommy," I said. "Ma-ma."

"Da da da da da."

"M's are harder to say than d's and b's," I consoled. "I've heard 'Da-da' is a typical first word."

"Da da da da da."

When Baby A settled for her morning nap, her parents contemplated early university admission programs.

I decided to spend the day with her practicing both "Dada" and "Mama," with sign language gestures for each, to surprise her mother when she got home from work.

But, despite guidance ranging from enthusiastic to exasperated to unhinged, since that morning Baby A has not in my hearing uttered the "da" syllable one time.

She loves the vowel sound, but, like a capricious kid at the height of a playground fad for yo-yos, she tried the "D" consonant, enjoyed it, and dropped it. She probably looks at us, babbling "Da-da, Da-da," the way hip kids view the nerds still trying "Walk The Dog" and "Around The World" months after everyone has moved on to skateboards or "High School Musical" or the latest Nintendo craze. "Y" is clearly the syllable of the moment.

I knew my kid would make me feel hopelessly old and out-of-touch and uncool. I just didn't imagine it would happen in her sixth month.

Opening Day

5:23 a.m. -- 6 mos., 17 days

My sister told her boss that she was going to the Mets' final opening day at Shea Stadium with her brother and 6-month-old niece.

"Six months?" her boss said. "The kid'll last two innings."

We'll show him, I thought.

M said our first priority would be to keep Baby A alive. I told her that, given our seats, the chance of death by foul ball was remote but that nevertheless I would watch diligently. I added that I would equally protect our child from testosterone- and alcohol-addled fans.

"You won't get in any fights?" she said. I assured her my conduct would meet Gandhian standards.

"Just bring her back in one piece," she said.

We'll show her, I thought.

I've been acculturating her to baseball from the start. In her first month, back in October, she often fell asleep listening to the playoffs and World Series. She loves my San Francisco Giants cap. (Though, truth be told, she seems to love almost any piece of headgear worn by her parents.) I've been singing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" for weeks. We do the "Charge!" call almost every time she has a dirty diaper, though we substitute the word "Poop!" I've even learned to play on our mini-xylophone the Jose Reyes theme song. ("Jose, JoseJoseJose, Jose, Jose.")

Baby A had been to Shea a couple of times last year, in utero, and I seem to recall that she'd responded well. Since birth, she'd gone on lots of outings, though not many with just one parent. Still, my sister would be there to help.

I packed the diaper bag with blanket, Snuggli, extra outfit, two pacifiers, enough diapers for the direst contingency, and the tiny S.F. Giants cap that was her first gift. (From my brother, the hardest of die-hard Giants fans.) Worried our large collapsable stroller wouldn't fit under the seats, I went out the night before the game and paid $20 for a more compact, if flimsy, model. We were good to go.

The plan was to walk the half-mile to our local Long Island Railroad station, then meet my sister at the park. Baby A has ridden the train plenty of times, always either sleeping or looking happily out a window. I planned it so her naptime would come as we boarded the train. I fed her some cereal and left with plenty of time to spare.

Baby A didn't seem to like her initial fitting into the stroller -- maybe its canvas seat bothered her, or its less reclined tilt. But she settled down, and we started off down our steep neighborhood hill. The stroller's wheels veered unaccountably, first to one side and then the next. But no bother. Then, three-quarters of the way down, my brain running through a list of contingencies, I realized I'd forgotten one thing: milk. Criminey. I reversed course and ran up the hill as fast as I could, the stroller rattling and swerving. Baby A seemed rattled herself, but she stayed quiet.

I ran into the house, grabbed two bottles from the fridge, stuffed them in the bag, and set off again. Ten minutes to train time. The walk took ten minutes. I tried to run down the hill, but the stroller careened wildly. Baby A started to fuss. My thigh muscles pulsed, but I kept my clip as steady as the stroller would allow. The day was cool, but sweat pooled in the small of my back.

When we got the station in sight and my heart rate slowed, Baby A decided to break into a full-fledged squawl. She kept it up as walked along the platform past a gauntlet of Mets fans. We happened to walk behind a lone man wearing the jersey of the Phillies, the Mets' opening day opponent. At least five people decided it would be funny to mention that my child must object to his jersey.

We found an open spot on the platform, and she settled down once I stopped panting and removed her from the stroller. The train pulled up, and we sat at the front of a car in the space for wheelchairs. Baby A didn't want to return to her rickety new contraption, but she sat in my lap happily enough.

Then, as more fans poured in at each station, she began to fuss. I stood, but there was no way to move to a window. The car was packed. Faces loomed over and around us. Mewling turned to bawling. Bouncing and singing solved nothing. She kept rubbing her face on my shoulder, her signal for extreme fatigue. But with too little movement and no music, she wouldn't go to sleep. "Must be a Phillies fan," someone said. I smiled thinly. After a longish quarter-hour, the train pulled into the Shea station.

"Any elevators?" I asked a railroad employee on the platform. Nope. A woman behind me offered to carry the empty stroller up the long flight of stairs. I thanked her profusely. "I'm a grandmother," she said, shrugging. On the ramp to the stadium Baby A settled back into the stroller, looking sleepy and stunned.

We negotiated two more flights of stairs, as I found one of the crappy stroller's few benefits: it lifted easily with her in it. As we waited for my sister I rolled the stroller furiously, hoping she'd drop off, but there was too much activity: the parade of fans, MTA employees with bullhorns telling people to buy return tickets, a police dog barking at the bullhorn user.

My sister arrived, and we walked to Gate D to find a massive line created by security's need to search bags and wand patrons. Baby A sat calmly for a while, but as we inched forward and the crowd pressed closer she began to cry. I picked her up and we folded the stroller. Baby A rubbed her eyes and sobbed occasionally. The sun broke through the clouds, and I fumbled in the bag for her Giants cap. I pulled it on, tugged, adjusted -- too small. Baby A began to cry steadily.

The crowd grew denser. The line barely moved. I was sweating again. I thought Baby A might be drifting off when a couple of military jets did the obligatory Opening Day flyover. The crowd roared. Baby A began to give it her full-throated best.

I decided to stand by a couple of cops, away from the crowd at the line's edge. She immediately calmed, though her eyes remained open. A nice cop let us walk through the barriers once my sister arrived at the front of the line. We headed through the turnstiles just as the first pitch was being thrown. OK. Things would be fine once we reached the seats.

We inched past a half-dozen fans into our seats. We sat in the mezzanine reserved level, just under the concrete roof of the upper deck -- good for rain delays, bad for noise. Worse, a speaker sat just above our heads; the public address announcer's every syllable reverberated in our brains. A trio of large young men sat to my immediate left, with, I was dismayed to note, booming voices. Baby A looked fretful.

The stroller fit under the seats reasonably well, but the diaper bag was stuffed at my feet, pressed against the seat in front. The Phils had a couple of men on base. My sister went to get hot dogs. I decided a bottle might put Baby A to sleep. She sucked for a second, and then Oliver Perez dropped in a strike-three curve on Pat Burrell for the third out: bedlam. Baby A paused, then opened her mouth and wailed.

She'd just about settled down by the time my sister returned with the dogs and an $8 beer. But Opening Day crowds are not filled with quiet, contemplative fans, awaiting slow-building moments of baseball drama. They're jacked up, screaming at every pitch. At one point -- I think Luis Castillo had just drawn a one-out walk in the bottom of the first -- my bellicose neighbor issued a full-throated "Hell yeah!" I tapped on his arm and indicated Baby A, who'd responded with a fresh round of screaming. He laughed with delight.

For a couple of minutes in the top of the second, Baby A seemed to calm down. But her eyes were wide open and glazed; she looked comatose. The yells seemed to have no effect. I'd never seen her like that. I checked: she was still breathing. I shook her gently: she moved her head, but her eyes stayed glassy. Then the Mets turned a double-play; the crowd erupted, turning Baby A's mini-coma to a fresh round of screams. I decided to head for the concourse to find some relative peace.

As it turns out, even in its farthest recesses, Shea Stadium is a loud place. We stood on a ramp overlooking the parking lot, but a thoughtfully placed loudspeaker kept us attuned to the p.a. announcer, whose between-innings prattling was far worse than his announcements of each batter. I found a family restroom and changed her diaper. Baby A cried the whole time, drowning out the loudest version of the diaper song I'd ever attempted.

I moved to another section of ramp -- another loudspeaker. A steady stream of fans came out to smoke. Three different people said it was great that I was taking my boy to his first game. Carlos Delgado hit a homer, and the crowd roar sent Baby A into another paroxysm.

I moved half-way up a ramp leading to the upper deck, sitting on the hard concrete in the sunshine, as far away from the smokers as I could manage. Baby A wouldn't lie still. I gave her a bottle; she pulled for one second, then opened her mouth and let the milk drip down her chin. She'd never refused milk. I put the bottle away, stood up, and bounced her until she seemed to head toward sleep. But as soon as I returned to our section, she again began to shake and sob.

I told my sister I needed to leave, and though it was the top of the fourth inning, she gamefully said she'd come with us. We headed down the ramp, and by the time we'd descended a couple of levels Baby A fell asleep. "Why don't I take her and you can watch a couple of innings?" she said. So she stood on a field level ramp, Baby A sleeping fitfully on her shoulder, and I stood in an aisle and watched the Mets scratch out another run in the bottom of the fourth. But I hardly enjoyed it, walking back down the ramp between batters to see if they were OK.

So we put Baby A back in the stroller and headed home. As soon as we got outside the stadium she awoke, apparently refreshed and happy. We had a long wait for the train, but Baby A bobbled happily in my sister's arms. She was delightful for the entire train ride, and cried only briefly on the walk home. She'd never been so happy to walk in our front door. Then she enjoyed a lovely afternoon in her playroom while my sister and I chatted and listened to the radio as the Mets bullpen fell apart.

When the seventh-inning stretch rolled around, I decided, churlishly, not to sing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame."

I've been to 400 or 500 baseball games in my life, and this was my first Opening Day. It also marked the third time in my life that I've left any game before the final out: once when I was 11 (and the game was completed in the 19th inning the next day); once when my prospective father-in-law insisted on beating the post-game traffic; and then Baby A's first game, when I saw about nine batters.

She sure showed me.

Milk

5:04 a.m. -- 5 mos., 25 days

Baby A eats solid food. That is, if you can define milky rice cereal as "solid."

For weeks she's been gazing at our forks and spoons and wine glasses with murderous intent. She doubtless could have eaten sooner, but our pediatrician was concerned about M's food allergies and our family histories of diabetes. But last week he decided it was time, so for the past three days she has begun wolfing with unadorned delight a tablespoon of rice flakes drenched in three tablespoons of formula. Mouth agape, arms aflail, tremblingly awaiting her tiny spoon, she looks like a ravenous baby bird.

Last night she sat for the first time in her highchair at our dinner table. She was most pleased at the development, banging her multicolored plastic cups on her new white plastic tray with vim.

Though breast milk is no longer Baby A's sole means of sustenance, this doesn't seem to have reduced its significance. Both M's visiting mother and I have had an easier time feeding with a spoon than M. Her proximity apparently leads Baby A to conflate the "food" and "boobie" categories, and she loses focus on the milky cereal and whines for her first and best food source, the nipple.

And the development hasn't meant the demise of the unholy troika of all working mothers seeking to limit formula intake: pumping, freezing, and reheating. Keeping Baby A in breast milk has taken an inordinate amount of parental attention, and the moment our reliance upon it promises to diminish seems an opportunity for reflection.

My recreational drug use is long behind me, but nothing calls to mind the activity of scrambling for every last twig and seed of your quarter-ounce like storing and using breast milk.

For starters, there's the baggie. For a while we were using the breast pump manufacturer's Official Storage Devices, specially demarcated with ounce measurements, made of unusually thick plastic, and costing about 50 cents a pop. Then we realized that we could save about 49 cents by using a regular, thin, undemarcated baggie with a twist tie. So we spend a lot of time opening, sealing, twisting, and unrolling devices designed to store sandwiches but that do a fine job storing liquid.

I can't empathize, but I have some idea what M endures to provide the 8 ounces or so of pumped milk we give Baby A on a typical day. She's lucky in that she has her own office. But in an hour she might get three or four visitors, and few are likely to be unstartled by the sight of a plastic suction device attached to the boss's breast. So she has to secure blocks of her day for the sole purpose of using a machine that, despite droning like a Roto-Rooter pump at full throttle, packs much less punch than Baby A's lips.

The pump comes in a sleek black backpack and has new-fangled plastic tubing, but the 21st century design belies its reliance on 19th century engineering. It requires at least one hand to secure its balky cone-and-bottle recepticle, making it impossible to type or do any work more arduous than a phone call. Removed from the context of suckling and nurturance and human warmth, the pump reduces the magic of breast feeding to its mechanical process, while reducing its users to milk producers -- to feeling like, not to put too fine a point on it, cows on a factory farm.

And let's not even talk about the (needless but apparently unavoidable) guilt that many working moms feel about infant abandonment, of which the pump becomes a portable symbol, fully self-contained.

Compared to the operation that produces it, my job of storing and pouring shouldn't be a big deal. But knowing that every drop has extracted a physical and psychic toll on the woman who provided it tends to ratchet up the pressure. And for a man whose stubby fingers have never displayed anything like nimbleness, not to say grace, the process of transferring frozen milk into bottles for Baby A has had its frenzied moments.

Few of the following tasks would be troublesome under normal circumstances, even for an acknowledged klutz. But the proximity of a hungry, squawling infant changes the equation. I recall in detail only a couple of the incidents required to learn the lessons delineated below. But in broad outline, problem areas include:

-- Defrosting. Remember: baggies can develop holes. Best to defrost them in a bowl, where leaks can be contained.

-- Heating. I put the partially defrosted baggie in a large tea cup filled with steaming water from our tap. (At some point in Baby A's development we'll need to turn down the water heater.) While dunking or testing baggies for frozen milk chunks, scalded fingers are routine.

-- Untwisting and unrolling the baggie. Virtually impossible, repeated experiments have proven, with one arm. Possible results include milk dripping, splashing, or gushing onto countertops and into sinks, where desparate attempts to recapture the spreading droplets remain unavailing. (Sponge soaking and squeezing are, it turns out, ineffective as well as unhygenic.)

-- Pouring from the baggie into a bottle. Re one-armed pouring: See above. Even with arms empty of baby (cue screaming from the crib), it helps to place a bowl beneath the open bottle to catch random rivulets rushing from unexpected baggie sections.

-- Screwing on the bottle top. Nothing like dumping an ounce of milk onto the baby's chest to teach this lesson.

I suppose it would be possible to calculate the number of hard-pumped ounces that have dribbled into our drainage system or Baby A's onesies rather than her digestive tract.

But who's counting?

Learning To Crawl

7:11 a.m. -- 5 mos., 15 days

Golf courses aside, Baby A has always enjoyed sitting in her stroller, which we take around our neighborhood at least once and usually twice a day. So it was a surprise this week when, two days and three walks in a row, she fussed most of the trip.

There's nothing like walking past your neighbors with a squawling baby to raise your parental defenses. No, no, I protest as faces turn with a mix of pity and empathy or, more often, concern. She's not usually like this. She's a happy baby, honest. Our pediatrician says she's thriving. I'm a competent father, I swear.

Thus, after three walks filled not with the joy of budding spring but infant wails and paternal chagrin, I was willing to experiment.

Standard winter walk wear for Baby A has been a snow suit over her onesie and then to be swaddled in her favorite green blanket. But every day she's becoming more physically independent. I.e., she can sit for 15 minutes without toppling. When lying on her back she loves to thrash all four limbs for minutes on end. And, as she becomes aware of her ability to move and her sense of personal space expands, she's been doing full-body dolphin thrusts toward objects she wants, either from a lying or sitting position.

This last maneuver means she's no longer safe except in the precise middle of our bed. I came back from a toothbrushing break to discover her not sitting demurely where I'd left her but lying on her tummy next to a rattle, hands at bed's edge in push-up position, head raised, grinning at her new trick. Yikes.

The dolphin thrusts are clearly an evolutionary step toward crawling. On our bed yesterday morning, M put Baby A on her tummy and pressed her hands against her little feet. Sure enough, Baby A put her hands in push-up position, lifted her head, looked toward me, and generated enough leg force to move her hips forward, tumbling onto her face before peeking up with a smile. She did this about a half-dozen times and was delighted.

And she was furious later in the day when she tried the trick on her own. Without something to push off, her legs just slid on the carpet and she stayed in place. This was an outrage the likes of which she'd never experienced. The time has come. Baby A wants to move.

So on a blustery afternoon I decided to deviate from our stroller swaddling routine. We'd learned this from pediatrician Harvey Karp's five S technique to calm under-3-month-olds. Swaddling was part of the magic (plus putting her on her side, suckling, shushing, shaking) that could quiet her tantrums. And though we haven't much needed the full five S's since her last airplane ride, Baby A had always liked being securely tucked into her stroller.

This time, I tucked the blanket around her torso and legs while leaving her arms free. I was certain she'd knock out her pacifier and make herself more miserable. But I was desperate. Baby A's walks have been my saving grace, one of only two ways I can get her to nap. If our strolls became a torment, I'd be dancing around our house to rock music non-stop. My thighs ached just thinking about it.

We launched out, and immediately Baby A began to flail her arms so hard that one of her hands popped out of the snow suit, which has fold-over sleeves to keep her hands covered. But the kid was burbling, not screaming, so I was hardly going to break our momentum.

One block later, we passed a young Chinese woman carrying groceries. She stopped in her tracks, a look of horror her face. "Baby cold," she said. "Baby cold!"

"Yes," I said. "She certainly hates being cold."

The woman struggled for words. She moved her arms as if to bundle up. "Blanket," I think she said. "Poor baby. Baby cold."

"Yes," I said, striding past. "Have to keep walking. Can't have the baby getting cold."

I didn't glance back for another half-block, and the woman was gone. But she'd worried me enough to stop and refold the snow suit over Baby A's hand, which was indeed chilled. "You OK?" I asked.

There was no need. Baby A grinned, then squinted and turned her head sideways in the gesture that means the world is almost too delightful to bear. Sleeve adjusted, we marched on, with attentive head turns but barely a peep from the stroller. After a while the head turns slowed. We went the long way, and when we got home she stayed asleep for another 30 minutes.

Neighbors be damned: baby arms are meant to be free.

Babysitting

6:21 a.m. -- 5 mos., 12 days

M had a work retreat late last week, a two-day gathering of 25 of her peers (division leaders, mostly) and corporate brass at a conference center about an hour out of the city. We decided the best strategy was for Baby A and me to tag along, so M wouldn't have to shuttle back and forth or worry about pumping breast milk in the midst of meetings.

This worked just fine for M and Baby A.

We arrived the night before the retreat began. The large hotel, which includes a 9-hole golf course and tennis complex, was institutional and anodyne. Whatever leftover childhood excitement I have about hotel stays was, as usual, wiped away in the first 30 minutes, with the realization that the shower, mattress, and food were inferior to ours at home.

Not to mention Baby A's entertainment options. We'd brought a couple of favorite rattles and books, but the array -- as well as our ability to change environments when she got bored -- was limited.

But no worries. It was only for a couple of nights. Plus, meal times promised me some adult company for a change. M had checked with her bosses, and they'd assured her that Baby A and I would be most welcome at all of the non-business gatherings.

We awoke hungry on the retreat's first day and ordered room service. About an hour later the three of us went down to where the attendees were gathering for a pre-meeting breakfast. M carried Baby A, who as usual attracted admirers and adorers. I introduced myself to a couple of division leaders.

"So you're taking care of the baby for a couple of days?" one asked.

"That's my current job, actually," I said, explaining about the semester off.

"That's funny," the other said. "We were just talking about the definition of 'work.'"

"Well," I said, "what I do every day doesn't exactly engage higher-level brain function, but I'd certainly define it as work."

They smiled vaguely and didn't respond. I shifted. Then M needed me to take Baby A for a minute, and after some more infant admiring I retreated with her back to our room.

For some reason, Baby A hated the golf course. I'd thought it would be a perfect place to stroll, closed to golfers for the winter but with cart paths that accommodated our stroller. But she wailed for more than half of our 45-minute walk, undiverted by the ducks, geese, bridges, and manicured, marshy fairways, before falling into a fitful sleep. She was fussy again when she woke up. I was glad when lunch rolled around.

A long line awaited us at the impressively arrayed buffet table. I chatted with a guy who was running sound for the retreat. I should have known from his first comment that he wasn't connected to M's company, when he admired my Chuck Taylors. Nice guy.

By the time M and I got through the line, most of the tables were filled. I walked over to two vacant chairs and sat down.

Sorry, I was told, another vice president is sitting here.

I stood up. Plate in hand, I moved to the center of the room. A division leader, who's in my field and whom I'd met at a couple of professional conferences, walked past.

"So you're here babysitting?" he said.

"Umm, I guess you could say that."

"Well, good to see you."

The staffer organizing the retreat saw us standing awkwardly. (Someone else was dandling Baby A at one of the tables.) Here, she said, you guys can sit at this table.

I sat down.

Sorry, someone said, the CEO's sitting there.

I stood up.

The staffer apologized. We'll get someone to add a couple of chairs, she said. Just wait a minute.

Either sensing my discomfort or feeling uncomfortable herself, M said, "Forget it. We'll just go back to the room."

Which we did. M grabbed the baby, and I carried her plate. "That's the last time I'm doing that," I said. "That was humiliating."

"I'm sorry," M said, abashed. "She told me there'd be plenty of room."

"Yeah, whatever."

M had to return to the buffet to grab silverware. When she returned, she said the staffer had apologized to her again and told her they were bringing more chairs.

"Forget it," I said.

We ate in stony silence. Baby A played happily on the mattress.

The incident caused a bit of kerfluffle. Apparently the hotel had put us in a lunch space that failed to accommodate the size of the retreat; we weren't the only ones without seats. The retreat organizer told the CEO, who apologized to M personally and reiterated that her husband and baby were more than welcome at all future meals. The organizer told M repeatedly that I should certainly come to the evening reception and dinner. During our afternoon golf course stroll (we went the opposite way, from Hole 9 to Hole 1; Baby A cried about half the time), the hotel staff left a message on our phone apologizing for the mistake and ensuring us that we would have sufficient space at any future meal.

I passed.

"Imagine," I said to M as she changed for the reception. "You come to your husband's company retreat, caring for our baby. You're invited to the meals, but there's a similar fuck up. You get asked if you're the 'babysitter.' There's no other reason for you to be there. You feel conflicted enough about giving up your career. Would you want to swallow hard, smile, and hang out with my colleagues?"

M said she understood. She took Baby A to the reception. I swam laps and sat in the sauna, ate dinner by myself, then watched movies in the room and put Baby A to sleep. The next day, I ate room service while M took Baby A to breakfast. During our morning walk, Baby A cried for more than four holes. I requested that we leave after the last meeting and skip lunch, which M kindly did. We drove home.

Next time, I said, I'll let you bring the breast pump.

Decrepitude

6:42 a.m. -- 4 mos., 30 days

When M was pregnant, a friend asked if I realized that, when our baby graduated from high school, I'd be in my early 60s.

Yeah, I said, I was aware of that.

He asked, Don't you feel old to be having a first child?

Not really, I said. Lots of people -- Westerners, anyway -- have babies in their 40s. It's not such a big deal. It's not like I was ready to have a baby two decades ago. And it's not like I'm Tony Randall, who left behind 8- and 6-year-old children when he died at the sprightly age of 84.

Then Baby A was born.

One sleep deprived morning a few weeks later, when we were still being awakened every two hours, I asked my mother-in-law how she had managed her household, which at one point featured four children under the age of 7.

She never thought much about it at the time, she said. It was the 1960s, and lots of families were of similar size.

"Besides," she said, "I was in my 20s. I had a lot of energy."

I am 44. My energy flags. I feel old.

Much of it is the five-month experiment in sleep deprivation. As the chief diaper changer, I'm the one hopping in and out of bed throughout the night. Still, I suffer no delusion that I am more taxed than M, who breast feeds Baby A at all hours and, far more attuned to her nighttime rhythms, awakens when the kid so much as coughs.

At this point, Baby A regularly sleeps four to six hours when she's put down. But she goes to bed around 8 o'clock, meaning her first wake-up time comes around 1 a.m., just when we've settled into our first sleep cycle. Then she wakes about every three hours. And she likes to rise early.

On the good nights, her cries rouse me gently from a light dream state, to which a few stress-free moments later I happily return.

Last night was more typical. After a cranky evening she'd finally gone down around 8 p.m. We retired at 11. I was traveling deep in my subconscious -- a submarine? a steel mill? -- when Baby A roused me in her full-voiced thrash mode: limbs flailing, back arching, cries piercing. The clock read 1:14 a.m.

I tottered up, lifted her, and stumbled to the changing station, where I was annoyed to note that the diaper was practically dry. My mumbling of the Diaper Change song failed to soften her wails; increasing my volume only urged her to do likewise. I blew on her -- sometimes this makes her pee, which can relieve me from another change in an hour's time -- to no avail. I wiped, grabbed a diaper, and spent 20 seconds trying to find the velcro straps, only to realize that I'd put the thing on upside down.

Now Baby A was really howling. "What's wrong?" M asked.

"Nothing." I reversed the diaper, picked Baby A up, stumbled to M's side of the bed, and rolled her onto M's breast. She immediately settled down, but my brain was by now awake enough to spend a good 30 minutes wandering through a store of anxieties before drifting back to sleep. Baby A slept all the way until 5, but after that change she was wide awake, and I got to babysit for 90 minutes before returning her to M and turning to my computer.

By now I believe I'm accustomed to my perpetual state of mildly disturbed consciousness. And I count myself lucky -- I'm not working, and I don't have to use high-level brain functions routinely. (Not that I wouldn't mind being called to do so more often.) Plus, every couple of days I take the chance to lie on the kitchen floor next to Baby A's downstairs crib, put the boppie pillow under my head, throw her traveling blanket over my torso, and catch a few winks while she takes her afternoon nap.

Now the problem is less with my brain than with my bones -- specifically, a bone in my left wrist. As Baby A has gained weight (at last measure, almost 17 pounds), she's taking more of a toll on my carrying arm. Plus she's stronger and more likely to wriggle free, meaning one-armed carrying has to involve a firm wrist wrap so the left hand can secure her butt.

After several weeks of near-constant tweaking, my left wrist has given out. Even just turning my empty arm in front of my torso at a 90-degree angle shoots pain through the wrist.

M felt the bone a couple of nights ago and thought it felt "frayed" compared to my right wrist bone; she thinks I've fractured it somehow. This strikes me as hyperbolic; it seems more like some carpal tunnel variant.

Then again, she's right that I see doctors only when she's complained so often that I fear her wrath.

Holding her in my right arm isn't a long-term solution. I'm primarily right-handed, and it's awkward to lose my dominant hand. And she doesn't tuck comfortably into that arm; within seconds she slides down my torso, and I'm constantly rehoisting and readjusting. I've been doing a lot of two-armed carrying, but that prevents any other activity when she's in my arms, which renders too much of my day unproductive.

So every morning the wrist feels a bit worse. Every morning I commit to not carrying her in my left arm. And every morning by 10 I'm carrying her in my left arm. I feel like a ballplayer grinding through a six-month season, knowing a couple of rest days might help him heal but determined not to skip a game. I need a sub, a back-up, a designated carrier.

Yesterday, in the homestretch of our morning walk, we passed a trim, 50-something man jogging in the opposite direction. "How's it going?" I asked. "Feeling old," he said, though he was neither sweating nor panting.

I haven't jogged since Baby A's birth; our twice daily walks are nice, but they do little for either my cardiovascular health or my waistline. This guy, at least 10 years my senior, could run me into the ground. I was pushing the stroller with one arm, my left dangling to give it a breather. I felt vaguely pathetic.

"I hear you," I said. "Feeling a little old myself."

The man laughed politely. He didn't know the half of it.

Paper

6:54 a.m. -- 4 mos., 23 days

If personality is indicated, at least in part, by a person's preferences, every day we witness further developments in Baby A's. To wit:

Baby A loves paper.

Yesterday, opening a letter with her in my arms, I made the mistake of handing her the empty envelope. Eyes widening, she grabbed it like a ravenous animal tearing into carrion. Within seconds, it was shredded and crumpled, with bits of it stuffed in her mouth and sodden pieces sticking to her hand. Life had offered her nothing so enrapturing in weeks.

Then I made mistake number two: I took the envelope away, every last soggy clump of it. Again Baby A's widened, this time in horror. Was I really to be the agent who deprived her of this Nirvana? I was. Her grief passed quickly through denial and landed on anger, where it lingered for at least 20 minutes, longer than I've ever seen her in any obvious "mood."

Expressed in a series of outraged shrieks, her high dudgeon was unbudgeable. She allowed me to hold her, but when I tried to further intrude into her rage she spurned me, turning her face from my coos and kisses.

In a transference little commented on by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, her grief stages were then assumed by her father.

Bargaining had no effect. After depositing the envelope detritus in the trash, we hustled upstairs to her favorite current toy, a colored set of plastic keys: No solace there. We stepped into her favorite current device, a doorway jumper, where, lightly supervised, she often happily bounces for a quarter-hour: Not this time. The shrieks continued.

I moved into depression, and we moved over to our bed, laden with other toys: Useless. I lay on my back and swung her in the "weeza-beeza flying" game, usually sure-fire: No dice.

Not until I'd landed at acceptance ("The baby will cry continually for the next six hours, until M returns and can replace my hapless ass") did we arrive at a solution. To console myself, I turned on Springsteen's new album at a louder than wonted volume. Baby A immediately quieted, intrigued, and we danced for a while until the savage breast was soothed.

Remnants of her rage lingered. She was fussy for a few hours, and the next time we passed the table where we throw the mail, she twisted in my arms to search for the Paradise Lost of her soggy envelope. But the storm had passed.

Later in the day, in a tummy-time session lull, as a reward for some vigorous push-ups I handed her a ripped-out page from a magazine. Mistake number three. She tore into it happily enough, and I was reconciled that she would add processed paper pulp to her all-breast-milk diet.

But the inevitable point had to arrive. I thought I was prepared; when I began to extract the damp clumps from her fists, I had a fresh magazine page at the ready. But the first cut is the deepest, as Rod Stewart noted, and the second page is apparently akin to a rebound relationship -- nice in its way, but a pale echo of the lost love and no true consolation. Fortunately, this incident occurred on our tummy-time carpet, and vigorous rolling proved sufficient distraction.

The upshot: my parental lesson is learned. Perhaps this is preparation for her adolescence, when she considers attaching to other unsuitable partners. At any rate, for now I will create a barrier between her and her objects of desire, and her relationship with the nation's paper products will, for the time being, remain a long-distance one. Love the toy you're with, babe.

Pathos of the Lamb

6:04 a.m. -- 4 mos., 21 days

My father knows how to make animal noises. No "bow-wows" or "moos" or "oink-oinks" for him; his are more like barnyard impressions. As kids we thought of him as the Rich Little of animal sounds.

When he barks his signature bark -- that of a midsized pooch, starting with a hint of a growl and ending with a high-pitched plaintiveness -- neighborhood dogs have been known to turn to see the new mutt on the block. We weren't around enough cows to see if they could be fooled, but I always thought Dad's bellow particularly impressive. Cats, goats, roosters -- all sound truly animalistic. He also does a mean Woody Woodpecker.

So the bar is set high when I read Baby A's animal books, of which there seem to be quite a few in our library. This is good, since at this stage Baby A is more in love with sounds than images. The most successful of our daily reading sessions center on books with large pictures and one-word captions, with a soundtrack provided by a father desperately trying to imitate his own father.

Her current favorite is a flip-a-face book. Half its pages are set with generic cartoon eyes, nose, and mouth, while the other half feature semi-crude but recognizable cutouts of animal faces. Baby A's favorite is Cat; when I meow, she twists in my lap to gaze up at the sound. Her second favorite is Chicken, with its combination of high pitch and explosive "clucks." I've read that infants enjoy sounds at a high pitch, which is presumably why adults -- myself certainly included -- so often lapse into girly idiocy in their presence.

Continuing the face flipping, Baby A also approves of Dog (not at Dad's level, but in the ballpark), Pig (snorting is fun, with a couple of "oinks" thrown in to help her recognize the term down the road), Fox (not in Dad's repertoire, so I've improvised a "yip, yip, yip!"), Raccoon (dogged if I know, so I say "Shhhh -- raccoons are very quiet"), Panda (ditto).

Toward the end of the book are facing pages of Lion and Lamb. The first couple of times through, I tried to keep my lionine roar at a mellow level. I need not have worried. Baby A's favorite stuffed toy, along with Pat The Bunny, is Roar The Lion. Mostly she likes to suck at Roar's fuzz (which on a couple of occasions has shown up in her poop), but by now she's inured to the sound that greets her each time Roar is plopped into her lap. So even my loudest "roars" elicit, at worst, a startled widening of her eyes.

Lamb is a different story. As a class, Dad's ruminant impressions have always been among his best, with goaty little bleats or "baaas" emanating from somewhere in his sternum with particular lamb-like resonance. These sounds have long seemed to me vaguely sad, with a forlorn quality made peculiar by the animal's general cuteness and absence of expression.

But I'd never given it much thought until Baby A. Every time she hears my lamb sound -- a pale imitation of Dad's -- her face crumples, she puffs her lower lip out, and she starts to cry. To stop full-blown, tear-filled squawls, I have to hurriedly flip forward to Fox and start yipping. The first time through I thought it was a coincidence, but there's no doubting the effect -- my lame lamb impression strikes her as the most pathos-filled barbaric yawp in the history of the universe.

This new power, like many unanticipated effects of parenthood, must be handled with care. Not wanting poor Baby A to burst into tears every time she approaches a farm or petting zoo, I've been trying to get her accustomed to my bleating sound. So when we're cooking or having tummy time or when she's feeling particularly chipper, I occasionally will break into a quiet, gentle "baaaa." Outside of the reading environment -- sitting in our favorite chair, pawing at the pages, gradually building up from Pig to Panda to Chicken to Lion to Lamb -- the sound seems only to make Baby A look confused.

I count this as progress. M, for some reason, accuses me of cruelty to babies.

Travel

6:26 a.m. -- 4 mos., 15 days

Back home after a quick West Coast trip to see family. A good visit, but the travel seems to have thrown Baby A's parents off kilter, and we're both struggling with some kind of virus that has us hacking and achy but so far our infant has managed to avoid.

This was Baby A's third coast-to-coast roundtrip, and she's proven herself a good traveler. We really only have one meltdown over Kansas (on our Christmas trip) to complain about, where she was furious for no clear reason and it took all four of her parent's hands and about 20 minutes of shushing to calm her down.

This time, our West Coast leg provided us with our first real confrontation with a stranger over a parenting decision.

(I ignore the woman on the Long Island Railroad platform when Baby A was 6 days old and accompanying M and me on a business trip M was making to Washington, D.C. When she found out the child's age, and noticed that Baby A wasn't yet wearing a hat in the October chill, the woman walked away muttering to herself. All I could make out was, "It's none of your business. It's none of your business.")

Our airline of choice typically leaves its front row open to the disabled and, if no disabled folks show up, to parents with infants. Thus we can usually get aisle seats steps from the front bathroom -- ideal for quick diaper changes and providing the least discomfort to us and fellow passengers.

So we got our boarding passes switched to the front row and happily tucked into our accustomed seats. Only trouble was, the fore lavatory had a malfunctioning smoke alarm, rendering it inaccessible to anyone but the crew. Could we use it simply for diaper changes? We won't even need to flush the toilet, we pleaded. No dice, came the answer. So we faced several long trudges to the rear bathrooms.

This wasn't such a big deal. But almost as soon as we began taxiing toward takeoff, with the "fasten seat belt" lights prominently lit, Baby A either peed or decided she could no longer tolerate a previously wet diaper for another second. And, as always when she makes such a determination, she began to notify the universe of her discomfort, loudly, clearly, and continuously, demanding that remedial action be taken.

This left us with three bad options: 1). Stay seated until we hit cruising altitude and allow Baby A to cry for 20 or so minutes. 2). Stand up, ignore the seat belt light, grab the diaper bag from the overhead compartment, grab the baby, and head to the "aft lavs," as the pilot insisted on calling them in his announcements; or 3). Stand up, grab the diaper bag, and change the baby on M's lap.

Haste, safety, and the interests of our fellow passengers seemed to dictate 3). as the obvious choice. So I stood up, grabbed the changing pad out of the diaper bag, spread it on M's lap, and M plopped Baby A down, unsnapped the lower portion of her onesie, and ripped open her diaper. I stood, empty plastic bag at the ready, to take the wet (not poopy) diaper and pass a clean one.

At which point a flight attendant bustling forward stopped at our seats in horror. "You can't do that there," she snapped.

M noted that we couldn't use the front bathroom and that the fasten seat belt light was on.

"Well, you have to wait," was the peremptory response. "You can't do that in your seats. It's unsanitary." She paused, her nose crinkling with disgust. "It's gross."

I stayed standing, shocked into silence. M may have muttered something. But there was nowhere to go but onward. I put the wet diaper in the plastic bag, and we finished the change, chagrined.

As I replaced the diaper bag into the compartment, a middle-aged man in the 2nd-row aisle seat leaned forward and said, "That was out of line. Clearly, that woman has never had children."

I was about to tell him that she could take her childless ass straight to hell, but I bit my tongue. M turned. "Thank you for saying that," she said. "You're very kind."

While no passengers seemed discomfited by the incident, the flight crew was frosty to us for the whole 6 hours.

First, as had never happened on any flight, I wasn't allowed to walk Baby A in the foreward flight attendant area. And later, when the pilots opened the cabin door to use the "fore lav," and the crew had to bar the front area with a drink cart, M was standing in the aisle to calm Baby A down. The pilot commented on Baby A's cuteness.

The witchy flight attendant was having none of it. "You can't stand in the front three rows while the cockpit door is open," she told M.

"Oh, don't worry about it," the pilot said. "I'll take responsibility for this one."

"No," the attendant said. "We have to follow the rules."

M sat down, and Baby A recommenced fussing. When I returned from the aft lav and heard M's tale, I picked up the baby, walked back to the fourth row, and glared directly at the attendant barricaded behind her cart. She caught my eye briefly, then glanced away. I stared daggers until the pilots relocked the cabin door.

When we got off at the Oakland airport, we were greeted with a broken child seat. We'd checked it at the JFK gate, and one of the two crews had slung it so hard that its plastic carrying handle had snapped from its mooring anchor. It could still function as a stationary car seat, but as a portable item it was useless. If I didn't know better, I'd have sworn the flight attendant had radioed down to the ground crew to do its worst.

Fortunately, Baby A had about outgrown the seat, and we were ready to get another. We didn't tell this to the luggage supervisor, who couldn't have been more polite and gave us a $100 discount on our next flight.

I didn't ask, but he probably had a kid or two.

Tummy Time

6:23 a.m. -- 4 mos., 7 days

For 30,000 or so years, human beings allowed their infants to sleep in any position they pleased. Many of those infants slept on their stomachs. Somehow, the race survived.

For the last couple of decades, pediatricians have concluded that a few babies who sleep on their stomachs die. Much remains mysterious about the condition known as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. But studies indicated that the main difference between the United States, where SIDS plagued a small number of families, and the rest of the world was that U.S. babies continued to sleep on their stomachs and sides.

So for the past couple of decades, thousands of U.S. pediatricians have warned parents that, unless their infants sleep on their backs at all times, they risk the horror of a child dying for no reason beyond their own grievous inability to monitor helpless offspring.

And so for the past couple of decades, millions of U.S. parents have spent countless hours sprinting into their nurseries to ensure that their babies have not somehow maneuvered their tiny kidneys away from their tiny mattresses and rolled to a SIDSian fate.

This pediatrician propaganda works, I can attest. When Baby A was less than a month old and spending a restless night, I spent a couple of sleepless hours with her sleeping on my chest. Because she was sleeping on her stomach, for two hours I counted her breaths, certain that each could be her last.

As my mind raced, I pondered whether any SIDS deaths had taken place when infants were sleeping atop an unstoned parent. But this mattered little to my implanted paranoia, which raged until I decided she was sleeping deeply enough to be moved. Having ensured that her back was plastered against the sheets, I, like most normal human sleepers, rolled onto my stomach and soon dropped off.

Beyond raging paranoia, all this back sleeping has begot another parental bane: Tummy Time.

Now that kids are no longer spending time waking on their tummies and learning to use their arms and backs to lift their heads, pediatricians have mandated that new parents become Personal Baby Trainers. So millions of parents now spend countless hours rolling their infants onto their stomachs and encouraging them to push up, bend, lift and strengthen muscles that are atrophying in the cause of SIDS prevention.

The main thing to know about mandated Tummy Time is that, like most rational humans faced with unwanted workouts, babies hate it.

The early days were particularly unbearable. Baby A couldn't turn her neck, and her tiny face would routinely mush against the blanket, carpet, or whatever fabric that makes up the Tummy Time Toys (play mats, cloth surfboard, etcetera) we were given. Once we turned her head to the side, she'd lie there, breathing uncomfortably, while we encouraged her to lift her head. This farce usually lasted about 60 seconds before we took pity on her and rolled her back.

As Baby A's neck has strengthened and she's learned to roll, Tummy Time has become less painful. Slightly. Unless or until she's tired, Baby A can use her back muscles to lift her head and look straight ahead, left, or right. That's positive.

But her arms are a different story. If we place them, elbows bent, on either side of her face, she'll use them once or twice to push herself up. Otherwise they tend to flail or flop far in front of her, or stay pinned below her torso, rendered useless. Occasionally she pulls all four limbs up and lifts her head, leaving only her torso grounded in an airplane posture. This is cute as all get-out, but it does nothing to build arm strength.

As her primary trainer, I have spent long sessions worrying how to counteract this flabbiness in my 4-month-old's biceps and triceps. I've kneeled astride her back, calling encouragement from above her head. I've lain with my face inches from hers on our bed and on the floor, pushing up my own head and torso while she smiles at my foolishness.

One shining day last week, I thought we'd solved the problem. "Up!" I said while doing a mini-push-up, and Baby A pushed up. "Down!" I said, my face falling to the bed, and Baby A put her head down, grinning hugely. "Up!" She followed. "Down!" She followed, the smile still plastered on her face. This continued for 30 exhilerating seconds and five repetitions as I decided that a). I had the smartest 4-month-old on the planet, and b). that Tummy Time woes were solved. Then Baby A tired of the game and turned her head in search of new stimuli. Despite enormous efforts, the commands have since sparked only amused or bewildered smiles.

How does one gauge whether Tummy Time even works? Mostly our training sessions succeed in inducing her to spit up, and I spend most of them wiping vomited milk from our Tummy Time Toys. Usually, despite lots of rolling and endless, giddy encouragement, after about 4 minutes Baby A ends up whiny and frustrated, with me following about 2 minutes behind.

Our kid's plateaued, with zero apparent interest in using her arms to push her head up or roll from her stomach to her back. Her adorably doughy limbs continue to demonstrate their worrisome paucity of tone. Can we buy tiny baby weights with which she can practice curls? If these came with suckable toys, Baby A would never stop pulling them to her mouth. (Maybe there's a business idea in there somewhere.)

As it stands, Baby A has not yet started to flail or scream at the very sight of her Tummy Time surfboard. Her father, on the other hand, has come to view its pink-and-white stripes and lime green pillow only through a lens composed of anxiety, fear, and dread.

Milestones

6:56 a.m. -- 4 mos.

In honor of Baby A's 4-month birthday, and purely in the interests of scientific inquiry, with no hint whatsoever of parental pride, let's review her development by comparing her achievements with those of one of the Net's ubiquitous milestone charts.

First, a brief word. As with so much of the Information Age, the instant accessibility of such data is both an anxiety-alleviating blessing ("My child is OK") and an anxiety-creating curse ("My child is substandard"). In either event, it can create in the obsessive a cause to search 27 further sites for details and explanation -- and, poof, there goes a morning.

In addition, this charting phenomenon -- indeed the whole parenting phenomenon -- has sparked internal conflict. Imbued in me is a deep distrust of cheap praise -- well, let's face it, praise of any kind. Given my extended family's general comportment, I'll go out on a limb and conclude that it's an Irish cultural trait. Perhaps we feel that a hint of braggadocio will call down upon our tribe the wrath of the faeries, or of Satan. Perhaps it's simply an inclination to distrust. But I have an instinct to assume that kind words are inherently bogus. And I'm inclined to dole them out myself only upon extreme provocation.

Family story that proves the rule: When my mother was marrying in 1957, at what was considered the ancient age of 26, her mother heard incessantly from the neighbors about what a fine catch she'd made, what an upstanding young man her fiance was, what good prospects he had, what a good Catholic family he came from, etcetera. Finally, upon hearing this for the upteenth time, my grandmother pronounced, "Well, he's not exactly putting his foot into a bog himself."

In my family, that counts as effusive.

And thus my internal conflict. On the one hand, I want to shower my daughter with praise, to show her that I'm proud of her in every respect, to shout her inherent greatness from the rooftops. On the other, I want to avoid (and I know this sounds ridiculous for the father of a 4-month-old) giving her a big head, pressuring her to do things only to please her parents, or becoming the kind who attaches bumper stickers like "My daughter is Student of the Month at Grendell Grammar School Pre-Kindergarten."

So, I repeat, the following is presented only in the interests of historical research and of scientific rigor.

Mastered Skills (most 4-month-olds can do):

Smiles, laughs -- Check (the latter since about 2 months).

Can bear weight on legs -- Check (for more than a month now).

Coos when you talk to her -- Check (since at least 2 months).

Emerging Skills (half of 4-month-olds can do):

Can grasp a toy -- Check (for about a month now).

Rolls over from tummy to back -- Nope. She has several times rolled from back to tummy (by lifting her knees to her chest and tucking), but I've never seen the reverse. I blame myself for providing inadequate "tummy time" (which is a royal pain which most infants apparently despise, worthy of its own blog entry).

Advanced Skills (a few 4-month-olds can do):

Imitates sounds -- Check. She's not doing repeated sounds that require plosive consonants (like "dada" or "baby"). But she's been attempting to imitate us since around 1 month, when I began howling to her like a wolf. (Don't ask.) She's given up howling, but she currently enjoys saying fricative sounds like "fffff" and "vvvvvv," probably because of their proximity to blowing bubbles, a favorite recent activity.

Cuts first tooh -- Nope (though the pediatrician notedlast visit that she's begun teething).

May be ready for solid foods -- She'll be purely on breast milk probably until 6 months, or she shows interest in our food.

Moving up the chart, Baby A has also done the following things more typical of 5- or 6-month-olds: play with hands and feet; recognize own name; turn toward new sounds; sit momentarily without support; mouth objects; and pass objects from hand to hand (just last weekend!).

In short, Baby A, you're fabulous in every respect. Oh, and let me hasten to add: No pressure, kid.

Role Model

5:30 a.m. -- 3 mos., 27 days old

Baby A woke up at about 11 last night, just as we were about to turn off the lights. I changed her diaper, but she peed before I could attach the new one so I had to change her onesie, too. By the time I snapped the last snap, she was wide awake and ready to roll.

M put the kid on her productive breast. (We call that one "ice cream boobie" and the one that produces less "trainer boobie," so when I'm handing her off I'll say, "Ice cream or trainer?") Baby A had no interest in feeding and began to play a favorite game: raise her head, turn 90 degrees to face down, do a face plant on the boob, raise head, turn 90 degrees to face M's feet, do an ear plant on the boob, then burble with pleasure.

We're at least partially responsible for such shenanigans. When Baby A learned to roll last month, one night we gave her a delightful lesson just before bedtime. When she went for her pre-sleep feeding, she wanted simultaneously to nurse and roll -- a natural desire to combine two of life's greatest pleasures. When M repeatedly discouraged her from rotating while keeping a nipple firmly locked between her lips, Baby A was more outraged than she'd been in her life, emitting a series of wails and gut-shaking sobs. I calmed her a little by walking her while discussing life's limitations, mentioning gravity and the hard fact that eating too much unagi or lasagna or dulce de leche ice cream makes your mouth happy but your tummy sick. But philosophy's consolations pale in the face of existential grief. The sobs ceased only when she exhausted herself, about 20 minutes later.

Last night, with Baby A turning -- nipple-less -- and burbling, M began to shake with silent laughter.

"Don't encourage her," I said.

Baby A probably needed no encouragement to stay jacked up this time; it was nearly half an hour and a couple of Beatles songs ineptly rendered a capella ("Michelle" and, incongruously, "Here Comes The Sun") before she settled in.

Such incidents make me realize that we've arrived at a place I've been dreading: Baby A is not just learning from the world around her but absorbing almost everything she senses. Which means she watches and listens to everything we say and do. Which means it's time to start monitoring everything we say and do.

Yikes.

We've already joked about creating a curse jar, in which we'd be forced to put quarters or dollar bills every time one of us swears. M is more guilty of this than I, she'll acknowledge. Perhaps it's her father's military background. But she has moments when she drops all pretense of professionalism or decorousness and swears like a drill sergeant. Similar imprecations have been known to drop from my lips as well. So it's probably only a matter of time before Baby A begins strewing random "shits" and "fucks" into her conversation.

Then there's our bodily habits. I'm not worried about burping or farting. M and I have long practiced a routine in which the instigator of the bodily expulsion will say "Excuse me" while the spectator enthuses "Good one!" That seems a reasonable practice for a toddler, too. In fact, neither of us will be surprised if Baby A's first words come after a particularly juicy explosion; whether they'll be "Cuze me" or "Good one!" will depend on its perpetrator.

I'm more worried about those moments when I look into a full-length mirror and worry, not quite to the point of obsession, about my burgeoning middle-aged spread. This has been burgeoning for some 25 years, and I certainly don't worry about it when I'm having a second bowl of dulce de leche ice cream. But I do worry about it when I have to, say, shop for new pants, and this seems an unhealthy practice for Baby A to absorb. It may be inevitable, but do I have to be the role model for self-hatred?

Ditto for my acne-pocked skin. Had someone told me when I was a pimple-encrusted teen that I would still be suffering from this blight three decades later, I'd have scoffed, or committed suicide. Fortunately, long ago I more or less called a truce with my epidermis, which I try to spend as little time looking at or thinking about as is humanly necessary. (I shave in the shower partly because I like long showers and partly so I don't have to face the daily bathroom mirror.) But I still have occasional dark moments of poring over my pores, and I'd as soon Baby A be spared knowledge of such events.

Of course, larger questions are also at stake. My sister says she never took advantage of the fact that her son looked younger than his years to, for example, get free airline tickets. "How can I tell him to behave ethically if I won't do the same?" she asked.

I applaud such reasoning and believe I have the ability to emulate it. Mostly. It's no doubt good that I waited to have Baby A until I reached middle age, since in my early 20s I was known to occasionally shoplift (meat was my item of choice for a year or so), and I didn't stop sneaking into movies at multiplexes, seeing two or (once) even three movies at a stretch, until about the age of 35. M, whom I've always believed to be a better person than I in most every respect, struggles less with such personal ethics. At least I think so -- I'll have to ask her which of her habits she fears Baby A will imitate.

My biggest fear of the moment remains small caliber: nose picking. Already Baby A has caught me with a digit busy exploring one nostril or another, her startlingly large blue eyes unblinking. It's too late to break out the handkerchief or run for a tissue -- she has the evidence burned into her irises and, no doubt, memory bank.

Granted, she has never seen me suck my toes; she has learned to enjoy that practice on her own. But how much more eagerly will she indulge in nasal spelunking knowing that one of the people she emulates most -- or at least sees the most -- practices it semi-routinely?

Worse by far will be the moment when she realizes that my parental admonitions to "Stop picking your nose" (or insert other distasteful or socially irresponsible habit here) are worth less than the air they're uttered with. I'll bet Atticus Finch never picked his nose. I fear the day that Scout Finch never faced, the day Baby A awakes and says: Hypocrisy, thy name is Daddy.

Baby In A Hurry, Parents In A Fog

6:35 a.m. -- 3 mos., 24 days old

Just awoke from a dream in which I was being chastisted by my cousins for allowing my baby (Baby A, but older) to play unsupervised in a backyard with a pool. Started the dream certain my cousins were paranoid, ended it knowing I was consigning my child to a watery grave. Hmmm. Could I be the tiniest bit anxious?

Another trip to the pediatrician yesterday. (Last night, actually. Our good doc sees patients until 9 p.m.) Baby A has in the past week been peeing more frequently, it seems, and over the past couple of days she's had a diaper rash -- her first. (Her thrush wasn't a rash.) M looked up the symptoms and concluded it could be a urinary tract infection, likely caused by poop in her urethra. My first thought had been diabetes -- my nephew's first sign, at the age of about 8, had been frequent urination. Bring her in, the doctor said.

Baby A didn't freak out at the doc's this time; she was anxious, but we soothed her continuously and she stayed calm. Plus we had a lot to do before the doctor even showed up.

First she was weighed (16 lbs. 2 ozs. -- an ounce a day since our visit 12 days ago) and temperature-checked (normal). Then another nurse came and asked us to remove her diaper, then rewiped her (had I done a poor job?) and attached a plastic collection bag, larger than a baggie, over her vulva with some adherent that stuck but didn't hurt when removed -- Post-Its for infants.

The nurse reattached her diaper. Move to another room, she told us. We did. We laid Baby A down on an exam table and waited for her to pee. I tried the trick that works on M: prattling about Niagra Falls and the Russian River and waters coursing over Hoover Dam. Between sentences I hissed, imitating a broken pipe. In seconds, Baby A was filling her plastic bag.

We fetched the nurse, who unstuck the bag ("Wow! That was fast!") and told us to move to another room. We did. She came back in minutes with a piece of paper listing the results. "Glucose normal" was all I could understand -- no diabetes! The doc shortly followed and said the urine was 100 percent normal.

Let's start at the beginning, he said. How often are you feeding her? About every two hours, we said. How much are you feeding her each time? About two ounces, we said. You're working too hard, he said; her stomach should be able to accommodate four ounces about every four hours. She's probably peeing so much because she's got so much coming in so often. Wow. Why didn't we think of that?

A quick examination showed all was normal. Hey, the doc said, she's interested in her feet. Oh yeah, we said, she's discovered them since our last visit to you. Now she thinks sucking on her toes is the greatest thing in world history. Put her on her back, and within seconds the feeties of her onesies are sodden.

That's 5-month-old behavior, the doc said. Very unusual for a 3-month-old. As we saw last time, you've got a baby in a hurry here. Who might she be taking after? M said, Both of us. I pointed a thumb at M. (These days, I only hurry trying to finish crossword puzzles.) Yeah, M said. I guess mostly me.

Hey, we remembered -- what about the diaper rash? That's probably from teething, he said. Come again, we said. Has she been drooling more lately? Oh yeah, tons more. Plus, M said, she's been chomping her gums on my nipples when she nurses. (The explanation for the occasional yowls and yelps with which M interrupts otherwise peacful feedings.) Well, the doc said, she's swallowing a lot of her own spit, which is acidic. Teething babies often get rashes around the anus. She's a little early for that, but as we've noted, she's a baby in a hurry.

He instructed us to apply zinc oxide as a protective barrier, then clean it each time with Cetaphil. We thanked him profusely.

M said, A lot of what you do must be relieving the anxiety of clueless parents. Well, the doctor said, that is a big part of the job. But I like that part of my job. Pediatricians get looked down on by other doctors because we're not performing cardiac catheterizations and the like. But if you come to me with a fear, and I can relieve that fear, and everybody goes home happy, that's not a small thing, right?

No sir, doc. Not small at all.

Mommies and Nannies

4:58 a.m. -- 3 mos., 23 days old

Reporting on the unseasonably warm January weather, WNYC recently sent a reporter to talk with folks on the streets in Greenwich Village. A young-sounding woman noted the large number of people in Washington Square Park and said, "Today's a great day for mommies and nannies."

Huh, I thought. No doubt she's right: not a daddy in sight. I felt overlooked, invisible -- not a typical sentiment in this culture for an upper-middle-class white man.

Pushing Baby A's stroller around my neighborhood every weekday for the past three weeks, I've seen plenty of mothers, plenty of nannies, and a couple of grandparents. No dads. Amusingly, M encountered a father of twins on a recent weekend stroll. Like M, he was giving his spouse a Saturday child-care break. M said he was a nice guy. I doubt I'll see him any time soon.

I'm hardly unique, I realize. Many people I talked to about my Daddy Day Care semester seemed at least to know some father or other who'd pulled a similar stint. But stay-at-home dads remain aberrational enough to engender pause in most folks I encounter.

When M was pregnant, we decided that her mom would stay with us for the first 10 weeks, and then I'd take the spring semester off; that would take us almost to Baby A's first birthday, and we'd cross that child-care bridge when we approached it. The plan made imminent sense: M's job doesn't allow for extended time off, whereas my school schedule is amenable to a break. Plus she makes about three times my salary. We were lucky to have these options. It wasn't a tough call.

The first time I felt I was tugging against the current was when I discussed M's pregnancy with my program head, my departmental chair, and my divisional dean. When I told them of our plan, I watched them all -- two men and a woman -- experience the same reaction: a second's hesitation, an internal double-take, as the news registered: You're going to take time off? And then, hardly missing a beat, they smiled and said it sounded like a great idea, how lucky I would be to spend time with a growing infant, and we'd make a plan to cover my classes.

The unanimity of this reaction sparked in me unease. The logical side of my brain insisted we were being sensible. But emotionally, I was bugged. I reconsidered my adulthood, my repeated decisions to uproot and move in with sweethearts. I only started teaching when, after ending a perfectly satisfying job to move 500 miles and live with M, I was unable to find a similar job in my field. I don't regret the decision; it led to our marriage and Baby A, the two best things in my life. Yet here I was again, watching people wonder about my decisions to put career second and relationships first. What was it with me? Did I lack drive? Was I somehow -- emasculated?

Since then I've dismissed the feeling, scoffed at it, scorned it. I count myself an extremely lucky man. I treasure my ability to spend several months with Baby A, to track her daily evolution. No one (save Alec Baldwin's character in "30 Rock") ever approached death wishing he'd spent more time at the office. But the nagging is something I've never quite managed to vanquish.

I simply don't know of enough men who've shelved career ambitions to partner and parent. I get long looks from neighbors who must wonder about the unshaven guy pushing a pram past them at 2:15 on a Tuesday. My mother, who postponed her own career for a decade to raise four children, jokes that I'm "lolling about."

Maybe by August, as the fall semester approaches and my time with Baby A dwindles, I'll be more sanguine about kicking it with the mommies and the nannies.

Boy!

6:06 a.m. -- 3 mos., 20 days old

As far as I can determine, infants wearing diapers display no indication of gender. This has not failed to stop innumerable people, vast numbers of people, virtually everyone we meet, from assuming that Baby A is a boy.

M and I, who have seen Baby A diaperless, know her to be a girl.

Like most babies, Baby A has short hair. Unlike most baby girls, Baby A is not routinely decked out with accoutrements (pinks and pastels, bows, ribbons, baby jewelry) that tell the world she lacks a penis. Therefore -- the logic here is irrefutable, vacuum sealed -- Baby A is a boy.

To the extent we can determine -- and we live in New York City, so this is a more rigorous experiment than could be conducted in much of the world -- this assumption appears to cross cultures, classes, and genders. Waiters in Chinese restaurants, shop keepers in sari stalls, Wall Street execs, dowagers at the Met, professors, reporters, construction workers, secretaries, random Joses and Laticias on any street in any neighborhood: "Oh, what a darling boy!" "Your boy is so cute." "Good-looking son you've got there." "What's his name?"

Since Baby A's name offers no clear gender signal to most ears, the answer to this last question does nothing to disprove the assumption.

For Baby A's first few weeks, the most common sentence we uttered in public was, "She's a girl, actually." With supreme will I resisted my desire to respond, at least once, "Actually, she's a lesbian." Now, partly from fatigue and partly in the interests of anthropological inquiry, we have stopped trying to disabuse the world of its sexist notion.

"Why don't they just say 'baby'?" my mother asks, sensibly.

It's remarkable the degree to which American society in the early 21st century wants to classify its children as gendered. Most parents now want to learn while the kid lies in utero, a trend whose appeal I have yet to determine. In either event, we were neither going to abort the child nor repaint the nursery nor begin accumulating a trousseau. We found out when I moved the umbilical cord from between Baby A's legs.

But the penis or vagina question matters to most. Tell the world you have a baby girl and the world beats a pink path to your door. Nurses at our hospital labelled their portable bassinets with pink or blue cards (and, misconstruing Baby A's name, mislabeled hers with a blue card before we informed them of their error); we were given as a parting gift a bag of pink items. Blankets, bibs, bath towels, burp cloths, plastic rattles, frozen teething rings, sockies, shoesies, onesies, sets, overlays, layettes, overalls, caps, PJs, diaper covers -- all come in more shades of pink than I knew existed. No one has yet bought us pink camouflage, but it's out there. Other pastels are acceptable but remain in the minority. Sex clues such as ribbons or ruffles are encouraged.

Most of this stuff we instantly put in the "re-gift" pile, or wore once to please the giver before re-gifting. To my knowledge we have not purchased one article of clothing for Baby A, accepting hand-me-downs from M's sister and a couple of work colleagues. (Some of this stuff is at least third-hand; "Cho" is written on many of Baby A's labels, and we know no Chos.) All of these major donors shared our disinclination to mark their infants, so Baby A wears lots of perfectly cute clothes that tell the world she is male.

Two of these friends, the parents of Baby N, who's about 9 months older than Baby A, have made further field notes. When folks assume Baby N is male, they'll comment on her size and strength: "What a big boy!" When they know she's female, they'll comment on her looks: "Oh, she's so beautiful!" When Baby N's father tosses her in the air or roughhouses with her, he often gets disapproving looks -- but only from observers who know Baby N is female.

None of this much surprises M, who's dedicated her life to feminist causes and has felt society's sexist lash (if lightly, compared to the majority of the world's females). But it has all rather stunned clueless me. I've been forced to rethink the depths to which humans, even those of us most desirous of overlooking distinctions of color, religion, class, and physical ability, cling to and nurture notions of "female-ness" and "male-ness."

I'd like to imagine it will be different by the time Baby A considers having children. But, boy, I doubt it.

The Beach Boys, Sly Stone, The Clash, Etcetera

6:03 a.m. -- 3 mos., 17 days old

I'm in a household of sick people. Baby A's had snot in her head for the past three mornings, and yesterday M awoke saying, "I know why Baby A's been fussy. My throat's killing me." I thought I'd noticed once, giving Baby A a bottle, that she'd struggled to swallow. Now we know her little throat must have been inflamed. Boy, will we be glad when she's got language. M stayed home yesterday, which she never does. So far I've managed to stay out of the morass. Spent the better part of yesterday fetching tea and toast and trying to entertain Baby A when she wasn't dozing at her mother's breast.

One sure-fire way to keep Baby A engaged is to play music. (We have no TV, so we do this a lot.) Yesterday, having sung her a Beach Boys tune for about the hundredth time -- she squirms frequently, and "squirmer" fits so neatly into all those surfer songs ("Squirmin Safari," "Little Squirmer," "Squirming USA") -- I decided to bust out the "Endless Summer" LP and play her the originals. Her reaction reminded me of when I played the Beach Boys for a cockatiel I once bird-sat for a few months, and Beethovenova (don't ask) instantly began to chirp and trill and scuttle across her cage in excitement. Something about the vocal harmonies, I gather. Upon the needle touching down on "Surfin Safari," Baby A evinced similar reactions: all four limbs wriggling, body bobbing, non-stop vocalizing. (When she gets excited these days she sounds like an adolescent talking through a burp.) She didn't begin to settle until "Warmth of the Sun," and when I sat her down and sang along to "I Get Around," she cracked up, then got riled up all over again.

No lullabies for Baby A. From early on we've played a variety of music, mostly in attempts to soothe her savage breast. Dancing with her in our arms is often the only way to keep her calm. The stuff that works best has strong beats -- Mozart symphonies over flute quartets, Lionel Hampton over Joshua Redman, Janis Joplin over Janis Ian. (OK, that last is an extrapolation -- we own no Janis Ian. But one night in an inconsolable state, "Try (Just A Little Bit Harder)" and "Cry Baby" settled her right down.)

When in doubt, we turn on the blues. From Robert Johnson and Howlin' Wolf to John Hammond singing Tom Waits, Baby A seems to enjoy it all. Conceivably, this stems from the 22 hours of her birthing, when M -- who'd picked out CDs for her labor -- listened to a steady diet of "Blonde on Blonde," Nick Drake, downbeat Beck, and other more or less mournful songs that kept M grounded amidst the pain. Finally, about 20 hours in, when Leonard Cohen began to drone some of his Greatest Hits, our midwife had heard enough and popped in one of her own airy, earth-mother, New Age CDs, which welcomed Baby A into the world.

Nothing New Age-y now. At a party last week, a live Habib Koite album was the only thing that stopped her screaming. When I walked toward my office, where the speakers thumped, she hushed; when I turned and walked back toward the party, she started right up again. A couple of nights ago she was kicking up a fuss, and we had to take off the cool Orchestra Baobab and put on a 1970s soul mix; it took long minutes of The Staples Singers, Bill Withers, and Sly And The Family Stone before she mellowed. Baby dance workouts are the only thing keeping our thighs from total flab-dom.

It's hard to describe how much pleasure I derive from Baby A's enjoyment of my music. And I use the personal pronoun with intention. For the first time in years, I can play in my own house artists that M has proscribed, whether through explicit requests or implicit but unsubtle actions (like leaving the room when the disc comes on.) The Clash. Elvis Costello. The Rolling Stones. One night, having put her to sleep with some early XTC, I came to M with tears in my eyes and said, "She must be my daughter. She likes all my music, especially the stuff you hate."

So, since they form the only path to put our infant to sleep, many long unplayed, much mourned parts of my CD collection have leapt back into rotation. Bless you, Baby A. For "The Name of This Band is Talking Heads." For "Meaty Beaty Big and Bouncy." For "Get Happy." For "Tim." Remember all those nights when I got up five, six times to change your diaper? We'll call it even.