Hey thanks!

Most artforms have their own variation of this adage, but Chuck Jones put it pretty well: “Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.”

What Santayana failed to mention is that those of us who remember the past are *also* condemned to repeat it.

Folks sometimes treat networking like a ladder you climb, but it's really a garden you grow. It can keep you fed, but only if you put in the right care and have patience.

Blue Cheese Lives Far Away

The Little Sisyphus That Couldn't

The baby just stopped crying when I put down the accordion. Literally everyone’s a critic.

Oh, you're seeing a therapist? Do they take requests?

I have no explanation for this, but the baby loves beatboxing.

I think my snobbiness has hit hyperdrive as I settle into middle age. I went from "I don't drink coffee" to "I won't drink THAT coffee" in a matter of months.

To be clear: I absolutely love these sounds. Her giving us audible confirmation that she’s alive and breathing spares me wanting to check on her every ten seconds.

…eagle screeching, songbird chittering, dolphin clicking, sonar pinging, frog chirruping. All mixed in with her occasional farts.

The baby sleeps in a bassinet by our bed, so when she stirs in the night, we’re treated to a strange concert of unlikely baby noises. Like a drive-time radio DJ just mashing buttons on their soundboard. Haunted house door creaking, chicken clucking, velociraptor squealing, dove cooing, pig snorting…

I’m gonna tell her I could hear just fine before she was born.

Years of playing in bands has left me with significant hearing loss in my right ear, but after two weeks of caring for a newborn, it sure feels like I can hear more than enough on that side.

Thanks, David! I suspect this material is going to be easy to come by…

At least, it’s fraught for the parents. Last night, just as we thought we were making progress, the baby let us know how she felt about our efforts with one of her signature wet farts.

Breastfeeding has been a bit of a struggle—we could get the baby to latch, but she would only give a suckle or two before just kind of giving up. So every feed became a kind of fraught all-hands-on-deck to get her in position, latched, and stroking her cheek to stimulate suckling…

…when I tried “super baby” last night, she just kind of hung limp like a handful of spaghetti.

When I was nannying for me niece over a decade ago, we used to do a thing I called “super baby” — I’d hold her up in front of the bathroom mirror, face-side down so she’d have to work her little neck muscles to look at her reflection (which she loved). Turns out that’s not really a newborn game…

Aha! We weren’t *quite* telling folks yet when we saw you this summer, but we were definitely low-key asking you and Jess questions about parenting.

Thanks Shay! We’re doing our best!

Realizing I get rope-a-doped by the burping thing a lot. Sometimes they’re really quiet mixed in with sighs and grunts, so you have to listen with some sensitivity. But sometimes it’s not a burp but a maximum volume shrieking sneeze right in your ear.

Thanks Jim! Laughing or not, we’re enjoying the heck out of this time.

On a less potty-humor note: she’ll occasionally suckle an imaginary breast in her sleep, followed by the most cartoonishly dopey satisfied expression.

It doesn’t help that (like many newborns) she has very liquid-y poops and unfathomable volumes of gas (I blame the all-milk diet). If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear we’d given birth to a can of brown spray paint.

Our baby has a knack for pooping and peeing in the middle of diaper changes. It felt like a cute story the first time it happened, but she has done it at least five times since (including on the scale at the pediatrician’s), so diaper changes have gained the tension of defusing a time bomb.

While still at the hospital, I was gingerly burping our baby, listening carefully for the quiet parping sound I’d come to expect, only to get an adult belch the likes of which I hadn’t heard since college. She is truly her mother’s daughter.

So I’m going to record here the moments I thought were funny but couldn’t acknowledge in the moment. Be warned: I suspect these aren’t particularly funny to anyone who wasn’t in the room, and mostly revolve around belching and pooping. In my defense, I am very short on sleep, so cut me some slack.

…like lifting things, bending at the waist, or getting out of bed in her own. And it’s excruciating to cough, sneeze, or laugh. The latter is particularly tragic, in that we kind of have to stifle our joy as our baby keeps doing hilarious things…