| A
Baby Takes Over a House |
| She's here. |
| Audrey Alice Moore entered this world under protest at 5:37
p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2002, weighing in at 6 pounds even.
|
| She was born small, but she's already taken over a townhouse
and a station wagon and has turned the lives of two grown
adults topsy-turvy. The first evidence of this is that this
column announcing her birth is a week late. |
| Katie and I are doing fine and after a few days at home
have overcome the first-baby jitters. Katie had her first
experience with projectile vomit last night and both of us
have been introduced to the amazing digestive talents of a
newborn. |
| But she's so cute. I've been saying that about 20 times
a day since Audrey arrived, but I can't think of anything
else to describe the overwhelming cuteness of this little
girl. It's as though we gave birth to a Smurf. |
| Katie's favorite pastime has become watching our baby stretch
her teeny hands above her head, straighten out her skinny
legs to their tippy-toes, and rub her arms across her eyes
several times a day. She looks as though she's cheering for
the Redskins, throwing her hands up with each big play and
covering her face with each bad one. |
| Lack of sleep has settled into our house quite comfortably.
Where we used to sleep seven or eight hours a night in a row,
now we are happy to get five or six in one- or two-hour chunks
between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. If we are lucky one of us is able
to catch a couple of hours of sleep during the day, so at
least one of us can be well rested for the nighttime. |
| And getting less sleep than I ever did in college is not
as easy as it was in college, because along with the huge
responsibility of parenthood comes one very rude awakening:
I'm old. |
| Katie will never be old, but men get old the instant they
become fathers. I can just see Audrey as a teenager asking
to borrow the car, or failing a class in college, or bonking
her best friend in the head with an Elmo doll at age 6. |
| Will I have the luxury of cracking open another beer and
laughing about the incident with an old buddy? Will I just
tell her to be quiet so I can watch a TV show? Will I be unreachable
out on some golf course? |
| Nope. |
| I'll be right there with Audrey, helping her solve her problems
from today, when her concerns are mostly about how to pass
gas through her system, to adulthood, when her concerns may
become much more complex. |
| I may not have gray hair and an authoritarian voice today,
but I certainly will tomorrow. My father could always keep
me and my sister in line with a loud whistle, a stern look,
or a few choice words in his booming voice. These are all
skills, he said, that people don't develop until they really
need them, as parents. |
| However, with Audrey just 12 days old we have already begun
to predict her schedule a little bit and we have seen her
start to rest a little easier, which means her parents can
rest a little easier as well. Predictability in babies is
fleeting, I'm sure, and it probably means the baby is training
us more than we are training her. |
| Speaking of training, I have started teaching Audrey what
little Spanish I know, in the hopes she will begin speaking
in the next few days or so. |
| I just can't wait to have a conversation with her. |
| Next week, we will begin her engineering education, the
piano lessons, solving problems in astrophysics, and reviewing
the written works of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates. We've
already got the music of Mozart, Bach and Beethoven playing
on a crazy-looking mobile hanging over the crib. |
| As every parent knows, our children are born to be geniuses,
gifted with talents like no other, problem-free, socialites,
intelligent and well-rounded. |
| But for now it might just be enough to know that she's cute. |
