At long, long last, my Velorex 562 sidecar arrived on the curb, in a Volpe Express truck driven by a kindly fellow named Bob. The box was intriguingly mysterious: seven feet long, six feet wide, brown cardboard covered in shrink wrap and weighing three hundred pounds. It sat on the curb in a maddeningly intriguing way: “TO: John Young. Hold at Philadelphia docks.” Kate suggested that we put a “DANGER: BENGAL TIGER” sign on it, which is the best idea I’d heard all year, but then Bob was able to give me a hand dragging it around to the garage pretty much right away, so the lives of the neighborhood kids will just have to wait to be enriched in that particular way.

Lydia is cutting four teeth simultaneously, and she’s got a rash from her MMR shot last week, poor girl, and is much crankier than usual. “Do you want to go up?” “No, no no!” “Do you want to get down?” “No, no, no!” In conjunction with her new Multi-Purpose Preemptive Attention-Getting Shriek (a technique developed recently, and undergoing extensive market testing), Kate’s job is… difficult, right now. I swear to god, Gloria Steinem was right — if it was considered a traditional men’s job to raise kids, it’d be a two hundred thousand dollar a year job, and would require fifteen years of specialized training. And there would be three shifts, plus dental, and awards would be given out, and there would be carbon-fiber strollers and golf trips to the Bahamas for top performers: “Yeah, I totally potty-trained that sucker. Boo-yah! The red jacket is for closers! …Juice box?”