Sleep. Must get sleep.

Young Master Reid is kicking the collective ass of his parents, and it isn't pretty, folks. I don't believe this is the full blown colic which so many parents speak of in hushed tones while shuddering. No, this is a baby whose got his days and night confused, who likes to sleep when the sun can wash over him and warm his home. This is a boy who is growing like a weed, and needs to eat gobs and gobs of breast milk, at least every twenty minutes, or so it feels.

It doesn't help that my job is kind of sucking right now. It's hard to say how much this is the aforementioned "how can I sit here typing while I've got a beautiful son at home?" syndrome, and how much is just the end of liking a job, or a certain kind of work. I hope, for our financial sake (as well as my boss's sanity) that it's mostly the former. But I'm getting my ass kicked here, too. K is having Reid kicking her ass 24-7, and I'm getting ass-kicked in two locations depending on the time of day, so we're a pair of ass-sore parents who wouldn't mind settling in for about 12 uninterrupted hours of sweet, blissful sleep.

Speaking of work, though, Reid's making a huge debut this evening, joining my office's going-away party for a quick premiere. We won't be able to put in the quality time, of course, on account of the boy's undying need to suckle breasts and sit awake while his bloodshot-eyed parents beg for some solace. But we'll pass the boy around, and smile while he sleeps in stranger's hands, experiencing that thorny combination of emotions we've wrestled with recently.

Perhaps its an extension of the feeling I have, when the boy is sleeping soundly during the day, that I must pick him up. I must seize this opportunity to hold his warm little body in my hands, and stare into his sleeping form as he breathes quiet sparrow-breaths. This is my son, you see. No second should pass with my hands empty and his body not being closely held, protected and loved.

This happens, too, when we have friends over and they hold him, smiling. He is like a smiling pill when he is held. The holders cannot resist feeling strangely uplifted when he is in their arms. He wields this power without discretion, and it seems almost that he is unaware of his great ability. But looking at the smiling holder, I want to snatch the boy back, and breathe in his cute smell and feel the surprising heft as he gains ounce after ounce, and set to smiling myself.

I'll try to contain myself tonight. K, who holds him a lot more, is excited about the prospect of having people hold the baby for a second, so that the two of us can stand next to each other, arms empty of baby for just a minute. I think this empty-arms sensation is probably overblown, but I'll try to give it a shot.

Little Reid's first major all hands on deck bath occurred yesterday. Previous baths were entirely of the sponge variety, owing to the fact that he still had a weird inverted chunk of tissue where his belly button would appear later. Well, appear it has, and that was cause for celebration in the house, because even a child of such wonder could every once in a while kind of freak you out with that thing. Sheesh.

Anyhow, it fell off, and K and I thought a bath for the baby would be in order. We registered for and received a splendid shot-from-a-gun plasticene baby bath, with all sorts of different functions that make it utile well into Reid's teens. We, for some reason, didn't bother with it, which shouldn't come as an affront to whomever bought it.

Instead, we filled our stainless steel kitchen sink, put down some washcloths so the boy didn't slide away for experience the unfortunate sensation of the drain plug in his arse, and got out the Johnson's and Johnson's baby wash.

The water was the perfect temperature as described during our humorous baby class when I inadvertently submerged a plastic baby in a foot of water from a hospital stationary tub. This bathing experience was far more serious, since this was an actual baby, and not a scary PVC doll baby.

It immediately became less serious when young master Reid voided in the water.

Fortunately, Reid's primary food source is breast milk, which largely translates into a remarkably clean version of human waste. Still, feces is feces. Immediately upon retrieving our son from the now hideous water, K and I launched into a full-scale reassessment of our entire bathing plan of action.

The sink was scrubbed, the non-skid towels probably flown directly to a superfund site, and new water drawn. We would try again. We're parents, with hundreds of baths ahead of us.

Reid didn't scream or cry the second time (this had occurred before he altered the chemical composition of the water last time). Instead, he seemed confused and then delighted.

Then he peed.

The firehose affect, as it is known, is normally observed on dry land. Herein, we saw our first example of the velocity of water travelling from the submerged position, arcing out over the kitchen, and onto us.

This is parenting in a nutshell.

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.

The relentless demand for Reid photography has once again led me to publish a pile of images from the first weeks of the young man's life. This collection of photos focuses on some totally made up bits of information about Reid.

In sleep-related news (and the bodily functions and activities are all news to us), Reid has made enormous progress on the sleeping-while-the-sun-is-down issue. We don't want to jinx it, but he has been generally decreasing the number of anxious wake-ups, allowing K and I, using our revolutionary two-shift system, to sleep sometimes five hours at a stretch. We believe that our overall night-sleep promotion campaign, which includes strategic positioning of the bassinet and other environmental factors (not to mention cute new sleep clothes), is partly to credit.

The crusty-eye has abated. Our doctors must think we're crazy, because we saw them just about daily during the jaundice-crisis of 2003. We received the bill from the hospital related to the introduction of this new young man into the world, and we were astounded. We were eye-poppingly, mind-numbingly knocked out. How, I ask, is this country's population soaring in such a way if every baby costs thousands of dollars to have safely and without complications? Even the blood tests, the little blood tests where they take a tiny droplet of blood from the boy's heel, ring in at a couple hundred bucks.

Make no mistake; I am not complaining about the costs. I would gladly remit everything I own, money, objects, all of it, to ensure my boy's safety and happiness. I'm piping up because we may not feel it every day, but we're very fortunate, well-insured, people. Our neighbor had a baby shower yesterday. As best we can tell, one large extended family lives in the house next door, a one-story affair the type of which you will see rolling down the highway on the pack of a pair of trailer trucks. A pair of grandparents, a pair of parents, a pair of children, and one or two other siblings/aunts/uncles all live in this house. The mother is pregnant with a third child to add to the three and five year-olds who live there now.

I don't know how they will absorb these costs. The reliable, safe care that we sought out, and took advantage of, may well be out of reach for our neighbor. The numbers I see on these hospital statements informing me how much our insurance company has been billed for are astounding. Receiving a bill for this total sum of money could knock a family living on the bubble right off the edge.

Whew. How'd we get there?

Anyhow, this little boy here, he's amazing. Eyes crust-free, and smelling of the sweet baby-scent that I hope clings for years. I hope this boy is a teenager heading to high school sporting a baby-from-the-hospital scent. They should bottle this smell. It's phenomenal. But the young man's eyes are clear, and now they are looking around wildly. He is focusing on sounds now, locking onto the source of something, trying to match in his new brain the sound and its maker. The eyes were blue when he first came to us. Now they are slowly transitioning to a liquid brown, flecked with hints of his now-fading blue. It makes his eyes sparkle, though I'm not certain it isn't me projecting a magical quality to this little, squiming boy.

For the most part, we only see his little eyes at night. His sleep schedule hasn't reverted to the one we use here in the Western World. He is bright-eyed and eager, though quick to cry, starting around ten pm. This has become my special time with Reid. I sit with him while he's staring all around, goggling the corners and the light cast on the wall. He looks right at you, and his expressions range from shock and what may be a grin (or gas) to befuddlement and the gently-shattered expression of a baby about to launch a wail.

People often say to me that there are certain cries that babies use (hungry, dirty diaper, etc). I don't know so much about that with our little unit. He's got a standard cry, which has two outcomes if left unchecked (accelerate by degrees, or abate). But a crying baby who makes one hand into a fist and uses the other hand to jam the first into his mouth is hungry, or possibly a performance artist. And a baby who just made audible bowel noises has a dirty diaper. I'm not reading faces so much as I'm just not a total idiot.

I'm going to try and capture these new faces tonight and let people see the wonder of this boy. Who knows, maybe I'll get lucky and see his eyes in the daylight this evening.

Reid's little eye is crusty. I don't know how this happened. Their little bodies are developing so fast, it's like an episode of Star Trek. Maladies appear incredibly quickly and develop over the course of an hour-long episode. Suddenly, from nothing, his right eye has a film of goop on it, and it hardens, disgustingly. It is a "clogged tear duct" by all reports, an apparently common baby malady. K and I are attempting to remain calm, but we both secrety harbor a belief that we should rush him to a prestigious university emergency center for care only at the hands of the most skilled neo-natologist available. Instead, we do agonizingly inconclusive internet research ("What are the long-term ramifications of clogged tear ducts?!?! This website sucks!!") and grimace at his crusty eye. One of the books we rashly purchased advised us to place a warm, moist cloth over the eye to dissolve the ooze. But this caused the eye (naturally) to swell slightly and get a little red, which led the boy to look like a bald-headed, limp-necked Rocky, sitting on a corner stool telling Burgess Meredith to cut his eye. We were bereft.

This morning, they eye looked better. Still a little crusty, but less boxer-like. We may still call the doctor. I suppose they have a button they can press which just tells you to calm down, and describes the proper care of the dozens of frequently-encountered, non-lethal baby maladies. They have to take special exception for the first-time parents who are as peripatetic as us. Because we're not getting any better.

Sorry for the long gap in posting. I've gone back to work, K is staying home with the baby, and staying up most nights. But here's a gently-flowing, confusing pile of thoughts and update:

First, pictures! You can check out a slat of pictures (a photoblog, if you will) featuring faces of Reid, mostly while he's asleep. Small Faces from Reid's 4th, 5th, and 6th days come with commentary, which genuinely demonstrates how insane I am. Then this batch of pix are basically the Reid-as-prop photoslat, where different people pick up and pose with the baby, or people place the baby in certain locations, and then I take the picture. No matter what happens, I take the picture.

Frankly, on the picture issue, can I say again how startling a thought it is for me to have had this baby before the dawn of the digital photography. I wrote to my cousin and his wife that I can only imagine the home filling up, like a bathtub, with photographs of the baby, doing whatever it is that he does. Now, my point is, the hard drive fills up with pictures, but at least we're not kicking through them like fallen leaves. They, with their two little ones, Nicholas and Jake, have taken tremendous quantities of pictures. But the organizational skills demonstrated by Nick and Jake's parents is astounding. Photo albums. Boxes of photos. Photos organized by baby outfits and phases of the moon. They're incredible.

My organization skills run more along the lines of "Pictures" and "Not Pictures." Maybe I'll work out something more complex and useful. But probably not.

Second, jaundice! The spent red blood cells coursing through the youngster's circulatory system have begun to abate. Friday's bilirubin levels were high, necessitating another trip to the doctor, and another heel prick Saturday morning. Those numbers stayed high, so we underwent the rarely-seen Sunday heel-prick. Projecting (because of my insanity) I see my young child's faith in his fellow man gently diminished, because a stranger with a clinical manner bleeds him, seemingly at random, every morning. But Sunday's bilirubin was lower! Huzzah! Monday's followup heel prick yielded even less bilirubin. The jaundice slowly receeded. The boy's warm hue (strangely masked, it turns out, by his slight olive complexion and by the outstandingly warm and inviting lighting and paint combination of our home) cooled slightly, and by his tenth day, today, he seems fully out of the woods on the jaundice tip.

Third, sleep! May I right now take the time to announce formally that my wife is simply the most incredible human being alive (she doesn't read this, so I'm not kissing up). In order to keep our house from being foreclosed upon and the like, I'm going to work. But my wife is doing the real work in our house, tending throughout the day and much of the night to the ebb and flow of little Reid's needs. We sit stunned because he sleeps when it is light outside and his blue-brown eyes pop open like night-lilies just as the final bed-side lamp is clicked off. He spirals his head, wrinkles his face into impossible contortions and fills his diaper again and again. But the only time he sleeps is daylight. We're seriously considering moving to East India just so the boy can sleep when it's dark out. (Of course, he spent some of his earliest time in the womb on India-time, and that may explain something.)

The boy's magic bilirubin number, reflecting the ebb and flow in his body of tiny expired red blood cells, has begun to recede. His skin tone is gradually shifting from the buttery bread crust golden to a scrubby clean pink. Hoorah!

This weekend, father yours truly gets to take over. Owing to my tragid lack of milk ducts, however, I will only be able to serve in an accessory capacity to my boy's dining experience. The sommelier, so to speak. But I'd do anything just to watch him smile and scrunch his face up.

I never before thought about the experience of parenting in this way. I imagined it would change everything, and that is surely so. But the sheer happiness of seeing this little creature partly of my own design is almost overwhelming. I said today to a friend who preceeded me in fatherhood by a half-decade: Seeing this boy, holding this child, feeling the warmth of his wee little bit of skin on my cheek or chest as he falls asleep is like swallowing a dose of sunshine. I'm fit to burst, and all this light and beauty is filling me to the brim.

I'm hoping to engineer another slide show of baby-images (what did we do before digital cameras?) for easy access this weekend. We'll just see if I can keep the number of pix below 100.

All the things that everyone talks about, the warm feelings and the sleepless nights, are all shades fo true. Each baby's life is tragic and touching, beautiful and scary as hell.

Our little baby is well on perfect. Of course, I'm something of a biased arbiter. Nonetheless, there are the little things. Last night was a rough one. K had it rougher, since she is the one who actually supplies the child his meals when and if he abides by having them. He has decided on an interesting plan of attack regarding nursing. Let's just say that he lives on a street with only two restaurants, and he refuses to patronize one of them. We're not sure the meaning behind his boycott, but his mom sets the table at the boycotted restaurant, and little good ever comes of it. In fact, if he finds himself seated at the wrong restaurant, he'll raise holy hell.

So this is a little, um, geographic problem. We've also got a small issue of tone. Skin tone, that is. Little R_____ is a tad jaundiced this afternoon. He's got a bilirubin number near 20, which is about 6 units above where we want it. We're trying to hydrate the youth with a mild glucose solution, but the reality is that he seems to like sleeping more than eating, and right now, he's got to eat, to process the blood and turn from yellow to pink, the official clinical term for baby-color.

Drink the solution, little man. Pink up!

July 7, 2003.

That's the day everything changed forever for K and me. At 1:35 in the afternoon that day, after 26 hours of laboring at our house and here at the hospital, Reid was born, healthy, screaming, beautiful.

He shocked critics who predicted he would be an overpowering brute by weighing in at a trim seven pounds and two ounces. His height came in at just under 20 inches -- call it 19 & 3/4. Hardy the mega-baby feared by my wife after irresponsibly projecting after learning that the person typing these words weighed nine and a quarter pounds at birth nearly 30 years ago.

What is unexpected about this? How could anything be unexpected in this day and age, you may wonder, with classes, books, binders and the useless advice of countless millions all contributing to our preparation?

Simply everything. It doesn't matter what you know, or what you expect, my friends, because nothing jumps the preparation line at your personal amusement park like a newborn baby bearing 50% of your genetic code. Indeed, this child has forced a massive reorganization of priorities not previously anticipated. I'm shaving my face to comfortably hold my chin close to his little head. I'm driving differently in anticipation of having this little man as a passenger.

But more importantly, I'm seeing everything differently. I don't just see this boy, and I don't just see this boy's future. I see a massive multigenerational scheme. I see the excesses of the present drifting away into the calamities of his future. I see the littlest child, sitting genteely in the lap of my wife, fighting these battles, struggling against the same nightmares, besting the same challengers.

He's the one for us. He, like his generation, are what will be the decisive factors. His future is the one we're both fighting for and fighting to ensure that the battle will be worth winning. He is the new center of my universe, and his totally unknowing grin is like the most amazing beam of light from a new sun. I swear to god, this kid is incredible.

If people care to see pictures from the first 72 hours of Reid's life, click here

We think we might be in labor. We planned a short trip to visit friends and relatives in Baltimore, thinking that some spicy Maryland crabs would trigger a visit from the stork. Of course, it turns out that this care-free act of pending baby-ignorance was the very thing that made the little guy start wriggling down the birth canal. "Crabs," he heard, "would be delicious this afternoon."

Boom.

It started after this morning's breakfast of bagels and cream cheese. [Crazy person notice: this statement in no way conveys our belief that bagels and cream cheese trigger labor. In fact, we've had ourselves a lot of bagels and cream cheese and no baby action until this morning.] K started having nausea and some diffuse pain, on no particular time schedule. Then the pain became sharper, moving from the back to the front.

We called my father, the physician pilot, and described the sensation. He immediately diagnosed it as labor, though we're both skeptical. Okay, K's skeptical. I'm convinced that ever wince is labor, that every sigh is water breaking.

Anyhow, they keep coming, but it could be hours and hours before we know anything meaningful. This could be it. Or nothing.

This is terrible. Since about a week ago, we've been thinking that the baby would come any time. Actually, it's been more than a week. I didn't write anything about it before, because I was certain I would jinx it. But it seems now that nothing in the universe affects this boy!

There was a significant biological event, a step towards labor, according to all publications and available sources of information. The member of parliament had left the building, so to speak. Following this event, things were to begin happening. We were excited. It was Thursday, the 26th of June. It occurred in the afternoon. And then, the amazing reality slammed into us like a ton of bricks.

"So this is going to happen, then?" I said in my mind's poorly-paraphrased reconstruction.

"Looks that way," said my wife in my mind's reconstruction, which is clearly inaccurate.

"How soon?" I asked, though clearly I was probably hysterical, and making assumptions about time, impact and everything else.

"Could be a couple hours, could be a week," said my wife in my now clearly debunked re-enactment.

"Skreeglekreegleteehee." This may be the only accurate portion of my mind's reconstruction, since I quickly got off the phone and spun three times in my desk chair and make a noise when I found out about the whereabouts of the member of parliament.

But since then, there's been nothing. This is agony. This is torture. The doctor, we say Tuesday, the 1st of July.

"Could be a couple hours, could be a week," she said in this particular re-enactment, sounding eerily like my wife discussing the same thing in my earlier re-enactment.

"Skreeglekreegleteehee."

But even since then, I have slowly lost the skreegle-ness of the moment. I can't possibly function as if this baby will come every second of the day. It would make a person insane. I told a co-worker how I'm nervous when I ride the elevator because I'm out of cell-contact with my wife. But that's clearly insane.

It turns out, though, that insanity is a thing of degrees. I've reviewed this bit of information, and I'm fairly certain that I didn't imagine it: My mom drives around all day to meetings, classes, rehearsals, camp sessions and whatnot, in service of the school for the performing arts she operates in Pennsylvania. In the car, throughout her travels, is a fully-packed bag, with toiletries, several changes of clothes, everything she would need. She has created a situation where she would not need to take a dangerous and time-consuming 15 minute trip home once we alerted her to a pending birth. She could get in her car and immediately drive away, like a person involved in an elaborate, multi-phase, high-stakes scam, who got word that things were going south and the only way out was to stop whatever they were doing and leave instantly. (I cannot think of movie where this occurs, but it seemed like a good example when I began.)

My wife's parents are more like the people that the police catch trying to look casual all the time, because they've got packed bags sitting inside the door to their bedroom, just waiting for the sign. I've made the joke several times that they are actually circling our city in an AWACs-equipped 747, constantly monitoring all sorts of back-lit green screens, waiting for a few key pieces of information to fall into place before they "take her down."

Of course, my father plans on personally piloting his aircraft here from his undisclosed location, landing it at a major airport and driving straight to the hospital in a rental car. He is a physician and a pilot, and he claims to have "worked" at the hospital we're planning on having the baby at. One of the worst possible baby-related outcomes we've allowed ourselves to entertain is having my father somehow having to get medically involved with the birth. My wife strenuously opposes anything like this. Strenuously.

In fact, I wish she were strenuously having this baby, instead of worrying the details. But no, we're re-arranging the guest room, we're cleaning the bathroom, we're emptying the fridge, we're seeing movies, we're doing everything but giving birth.

WHEN WILL YOU COME? Come soon.

Time for a little stream of consciousness. I've been so far underground this past week or so, waiting for the Supreme Court to drop their payload and sign off one of their own that I know I neglected the Liquid List, Hardly Born and much of the other duties a person has. I've spent much of the weekend putting in the time at home, making sure all the people there still recognize me without my face buried in this laptop or in the curse-worthy pages of the Washington Post.

In a total aside, can I tell you how excited I am about this baby. My wife and I are now literally in the "at any minute" stage of the pregnancy, and I was feeling excited and energized before, but now I'm truly on cloud nine. I've got to tell you all that something about the last week's worth of Supreme Court decisions have been very motivating for me and for this exercise. I was worried that the world I was bringing this little boy into was going to be the sort of place where gay people still don't have fair treatment, and the balancing act of America's racist past and present was permanently skewed. I was concerned that this baby would wake up in Nino Scalia's America.

But the dawn has come on a new day. Sandra Day O'Connor and the good Anthony Kennedy have stepped into the breach and delivered us from evil. For now.

This is the great conflict with which I still struggle. I cannot simply protect this kid from the evil in the world. It would require a full-on assault that I couldn't possible entertain while working full time and writing for the blogs, natch. But here's what I'm certain to protect the young lad against, to my dying breath:

(Part I of who knows how many.)

The vile, hate-filled wretchedness that is Nino Scalia. Throw Clarence Thomas' self-loathing crypto-arch conservatism in there as well. They can both plan now and forever to keep their nasty paws off my child.

The utter disdain for freedom, dissent and progress embodied by Attorney General John Ashcroft. As part of a large coalition, I fought Ashcroft's nomination as attorney general, and I never doubted the reasoning behind protecting America from the clutches of that evil, self-righteous nutjob. But even I couldn't have imagined -- and will never forget -- the words he uttered on December 6, 2001, as he attempted to shut up Americans who were already frightened that his draconian post-9/11 measures represented a war on our freedom as dangerous as any threat from the terrorists who attacked that day:

To those who pit Americans against immigrants, citizens against non-citizens, to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve," Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "They give ammunition to America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil."

Oilmen. 'Nuff said.