I hate coming to work. No offense to anything about the work, it's just this amazing child and his beautiful mother await me at home, so why would I bother going to work. Because I don't care about it that much. If we all have a universal care-scale, this new item muscled to the front of the line, pushing aside everything else as nothing but a waste of time. Therefore I can't muster the appropriate response necessary to really care about everything here.

My job really depends on that caring. It depends on my marshalling the outrage from certain behaviors by certain people, and finding a way to communicate that outrage to others, in the hopes that they will care about it and possibly write about it in their newspapers, or take action and let that first group of people know how awful their behavior was. It is about getting people who don't care about what you think to start caring, and this is a little like getting people to start growing. They either care, honestly, or they don't.

All of this is meaningless to my little son, whose radiant beauty takes your breath away even if you've seen him a hundred times.

This morning, I came to work, leaving behind my sleeping wife and our snoozing son, cuddled together in bed after a long night. The man hasn't been sleeping much lately, and K must have brought him to bed with us to get him to sleep some. He loves sleeping, just not while the sun is down. He could sleep on a murderous trek across the Kalahari desert. He could sleep on a treacherous adventure through the rainforest. But as soon as the sun set, bam, he's going to be awake and demanding breast milk.

At least that's what he does the last two days. K tells me he wants to eat all day. His marathon nursing sessions last an hour and a half, and then he wants to feed again a half-hour later. The two-hour window between feeding sessions is all appropriate according to the rules of baby feeding, except that the total time of a feeding is supposed to be more like 40 minutes, and then the baby and mother get about 1:20 of non-breastfeeding time in which the mother can do exciting non-breastfeeding activities such as wear a shirt.

Instead, K is constantly latched to our child, who approaches his feedings with the level of casualness normally reserved for eating meals in the developing world. He naps, stares up at his mom with vexing grace, he pushes back on the breast, has an agressive cycle of diaper-soiling, and sometimes eats.

Even at night, when I'm feeding him banked breast milk, he wants to eat and eat and eat and eat, never getting tired, never flagging, just satisfied only when he's actually experiencing the act of eating.

So K and I clash, because she does the research pointing to concerns about breasts v. bottle v. pacifier, and I think that quiet might be good, but feeding the boy all the time isn't that good. K believes that his distress clearly equals hunger, and feeding him is the answer. I wonder if there isn't something else.

Honestly, I don't think either of us know much of anything, having had a baby for all of 19 days.

We saw the doctor yesterday, and we didn't really talk about this ongoing issue much. When we mentioned to the doctor that he likes to feed for an hour or more, she said -- strongly -- that we should stop feeding at one point, that we should make him understand that we don't eat all day long. She was very strongly in favor of feeding every two hours, just not for two hours straight. This issue remains unresolved.

However, young master Reid's dimensions are expanding, which perhaps could give the attending physician pause. He has increased about 2 inches since he was born, which is unremarkable. But his weight gain is astounding, from my perspective. I know that his lack of aerobic exercise (or ability to walk, or lift his head very effectively) means that he devotes all of his intake to growth, but he's freaking me out a little bit. He's gaining two ounces a day.

That will make him, based on the rate for the past 8 days, about 365 pounds by the time he's eight years old.