Monday morning, 4:15

Emma woke me up and then went back to sleep, but it was too close to the alarm time for me to. I have a lot on my mind to write about. One thing is to report happy news from my friend Jeni. She and her husband welcomed their baby boy on Wednesday or Thursday, just a little early, and on pretext of delivering the manual for the car seat I gave them, I got to go meet the little cutie on Saturday. He weighs 7 lbs something and is 21 inches long. I had forgotten how little and light that is. Emma seemed like a solid giant when I got home! Jeni's parents and some friends were visiting too, and the proud grandma generously offered to let me hold the baby. I couldn't focus on his face at chest level, like I used to hold E, so I lowered him to my lap. Time to make that post-40 optometrist appointment. I was nostalgic about that special time in the hospital (which is pretty much a blur now), about the sweet little squeaks a newborn makes, about the feelings of being stunned with happiness and pride, etc. I had a pang of serious envy when Jeni mentioned holding the baby after he was born, before he was cleaned or weighed or anything. But that was just the way things had to be for me (I had a c-section before the hospital put in a deliberate mom-and-baby post-op recovery room).

David came home from Fayetteville on Friday, where he was painting bricks and spray painting them with graffitti for the show "Fame". He said he had to paint so much graffitti, layer upon layer of it, for it to show up to the audience, that he started to run out of things to say. One thing was "I missed my baby crawling because I was here, dammit" and then he started painting whatever he heard people say around him, like, "Karen, you have a call on line 7."

We've been renting episodes of the tv show "24" on dvd and we're hooked. I stay up late too often because I want to watch one more 40 minute episode to see what happens, but as you know if you've ever seen the show, you're never satisfied - even if one thing is resolved, there will be 10 new suspenseful developments. I didn't get enough sleep over the weekend, because of this addiction.

Well, time to move on here and start getting things ready for a Monday. Oh, wait, you say, you haven't given me any Emma News! Or pictures! That's what I come to your blog for. Okay, here's one picture. News is that we had to break out the Baby Orajel this weekend, and that she's eating baby food twice a day (more or less). She eats with gusto now, no longer preferring to grab at the spoon. She leans so far forward with her mouth open that she's almost face down - you have to push her head back up a little in order to keep the spoon horizontal.

Thanks for reading, and have a good day!