tikaro.com

Genghis had his horde, Cyrus his millions.
Yesterday morning upon arriving in the city, Penn Station was filled with the Hessians of corporate marketing: packs of temporary event staff in yellow Sierra Mist T-shirts, holding six-packs of Sierra Mist soda, red Sierra Mist ID badges slung around their necks. “Sierra Mist?” “Sierra Mist?” “Regular or diet?” “Free sample?” “Sierra Mist?”

I’ve learned from working with event production companies, temporary event staff are recruited from three pools: college students, actors, and retirees. Yellow T-shirt, bed head, bleary expression? College student. Yellow T-shirt, carnivorous expression? Actor. Yellow T-shirt, over 25? Retiree. They tend to gather into slighty apologetic clumps (wouldn’t you, in Penn station on a Thursday morning?) so walking for the exit is like passing through a series of prairie dog colonies. “Sierra Mist?” “Sierra Mist?” “Regular or diet?” [pause.] “Sierra Mist?”

Imagine a field of crickets, their chirps all overlapping: “Sierra (sierra) Mis-(Mist?) Si(Mist) erra (Regular or) Mist? (Diet?)”

It’s hard not to think of the yellow T-shirt-ed staff as grunt troops in a military exercise. The real military troops in Penn Station seemed pretty nonplused, anyhow. Every day, there’s about ten or twelve troops in camo scattered around the station — talking to the pretty girls, talking on their cellphones, talking to each other on non-issue Motarola walkie-talkies clipped to their uniform, or just watching the crowd. This morning, they were all clumped around the information desk looking glum, a small pyramid of Sierra Mist (regular and diet) gathered on the counter. I’m not sure, thinking about it, why the army looked so unhappy. The Sierra Mist Army gets to go home in the afternoon to rumpled dorm rooms and efficiency apartments?

The clumps of college students and actors had petered out once I reached the Seventh avenue escalators, but there was one grizzled retiree holding the line by the stairs. This guy, clearly, was a veteran and a pro, a one-man army with his own ideas about how to move the product: “Si-erra-MIST! SI-erra-MIST! HOT! FRESH! DELICIOUS! REG-yoo-lar and DIET! C’mon and get your Si-erra MIST HERE!”

You can’t scare me, Seneca: I’m making good use of my time.

Kate and my first date was a true stay-up-all-night metropolitan extravaganza: the Rainbow Room for cosmopolitans and dancing on the revolving floor, then Pravda (this was before they had a sign on the street, mind you), then a hole-in-the sidewalk Chinatown hipster dive called Double Happiness, then watching the sun come up on the roof of my building.

So now we have a house, a baby, and a cat, and the all-night revels are continuing unabated. Lydia’s had, by a conservative estimate, about four hundred diaper changes; I’m now better at changing diapers than at playing the banjo or riding a motorcycle. Soon, I will be better at changing diapers than driving a car, and finally I will be better at changing diapers than at typing, or looking at things, or breathing.

There’s plenty of other stuff to do in the small hours, too: once or twice a year, there’s a frantic scrabbling noise from the kitchen that means Squeaky the cat has caught a mouse. Squeaky isn’t really a mouser, he’s more of a dilettante catch-and-chaser, so my job is to nab the mouse when Squeaky releases it, perform triage, and either (prognosis:good) release it into the wild, or (prognosis:bad) perform last rites and dispatch the victim. All this in my underwear, on my hands and knees in the hallway.

So I’m continuing to stay up late and learn new skills. Changer of the wet! Defender of the furry! Patroller of the midnight hours! Pantsless roamer of the hallways!

This link was on Slashdot this morning, and it’s REALLY COOL
George Mason University Speech Accent Archives

Kate has sent me links of some other bloggers’ really great birth stories:

• dooce.com
  
• Defective Yeti
  

Blog image retrospective, 2000 – 2004

This dynamically-generated page displays all the images I’ve posted to my Blog in chronological order. It’s the story of my recent life, told in small, grainy .gif images.

See if you can find:

• Alejandro Rubio in a T.J. O’Pootertoot’s pizza-time mustache
  
• The Pope being crushed by a meteorite
  
• Kate throwing the Double Deuce
  
• Kieran Downes finding buried treasure
  
• The back of Genevieve Futrelle’s head
  
• A psychopathic Newfoundland ferris-wheel operator
  
• Jeremy Fain in the bunny suit he uses to pick up women
  
• The most beautiful baby ever born.
  

Winners get a link to the most embarassing picture in my archive.

This is my first morning back since Lydia was born on February 19th (I took two weeks
of parental leave, plus an additional week of medical leave, and god bless [My employer] for
making it available.) Man, it’s hard to leave the rest of the family behind. My alarm
went off at 5:30 this morning for the first time in almost a month, and I tiptoed out
of the house listening to Lydia make her little gurgles and pterodactyl noises in her sleep.

It’s now full dawn at 6:35 AM when I catch my Amtrak train, which helps a lot. Clarence
the conductor didn’t even ask to see my expired February monthly ticket, and Maya the french
systems programmer welcomed me back with a simple “Ah, long time no zee!” There’s a new
execrable Arrive magazine in the back of every seat on the train, clear proof that
a long time has passed, but other than that things seem to be pretty smooth.

With a shaking hand, I synchronized my Outlook inbox last night, but only about 300 messages
were in there, and none were flagged “IMPORTANT: WE’RE ALL SCREWED.” In fact, I feel pretty
damn good right about now.

Part of that is because Kate took the last baby shift all by herself last night, letting
me get two hours and forty-five minutes of blissful, uninterrupted sleep. We’re down to a pretty
good system now:

• T plus zero minutes: Baby starts stirring in her tightly swaddled package. Volume
  of gurgly pterodactyl noises slowly increases. John picks up baby from bedroom bassinet, carries her to
  nursery, strips baby out of warm clothes, changes baby. Baby wakes up, plays the Tricky Diaper Game. John growing better at anticipating
  baby’s tricks, but baby inventing new tricks every day. Eventually, baby is clean, dry, awake, and
  wearing fresh diaper. Amount of dirty laundry generated by this activity varies.
  
• T plus ten minutes: John carries baby into bedroom, holds baby while Kate sits
  up in bed and straps on the ingenious velcro feeding pillow with the embarassing name. Baby repeatedly arches back and roots side to side.
  Gurgly dinosaur noises give way to impression of voracious young pink-gummed alligator. John hands baby to Kate, keeping fingers well clear. John moves laundry from washer to dryer, flops back into bed.
  
• T plus seventy minutes: Kate nudges sleeping John that feeding is finished; hands
  floppy, sated baby to John, rolls over and goes back to sleep. John plays lightning elimination round (ha ha)
  of the Tricky Diaper Game with the baby, snaps baby into onesie and then into sleeper.
  Performing origami learned in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, John swaddles the baby like
  a flannel burrito. Baby is now in Quiet Alert state. John sits in rocker, watches a TiVo-ed Simpsons,
  rocks baby to sleep, tries not to stimulate baby too much.
  
• T plus ninety minutes: Baby hopefully has passed through active sleep (eye movement, twitchy facial expressions, tendency to wake up explosively if put down) into quiet sleep. John carries baby like unexploded munition back to bassinet,
  places baby inside. If baby makes particular sleepy squeak when put down, all is well. John
  climbs into bed, goes back to sleep.
  
• T plus one hundred eighty minutes: Baby starts stirring in tightly swaddled package. Repeat.
  

…at least, I think it’s a pretty good system. Kate has to be awake longer, but
she never gets out of bed. I’m only up for half an hour at a stretch, tops, but I do all
the ferrying. The baby has been feeding every three hours, start to start, which is completely
manageable. Of course, I know all that’s subject to daily change; Tuesday night, the baby ate
for two hours straight. It’s worth it, though: the
giant unsorted pile of pictures
shows that she’s putting on weight by leaps and bounds. The first week, we packed ten ounces
on to her. Well, I shouldn’t say “we”. Kate’s in charge of input; I’ve been handling output.

And now that I’m going back to work today, Kate has thirteen hours of baby-wrangling, input and output all to herself — and that’s three weeks post-op. We’re both a little nervous about it. Wish us luck, and words of encouragement are welcome!

Hoo boy; the transition from non-parent to parent is one of those things that everyone talks about in whispers. “What are the first weeks like?” “Ha ha ha, you’ll find out!” [dramatic pause] “…you’ll find out.”

So, what’s it like? Not all that bad, yet, frankly. Lydia has been staying in the nursery, and the nurses have been changing her diaper, and we just show up to feed her every three hours. So for the past three days, it’s only been two hourlong midnight trips per night, and no diapers to change yet.

Yes, yes, I hear you saying it: “…you’ll find out.“

She’s a wiggly little package, and it’s been a joy to hold her. I’ve gotten past the holding-the-baby-like-porcelain phase, but not to the harlem-globetrotter phase like the nurses have yet. Though there’s plenty of time to get there, I know! Bath class is at 11AM, then I’m going to run to the cleaners, go breast pump shopping, etc. Lydia has three phases of consciousness:

• Out like a light.
  
• Feeding
  
• Out like a light.
  

Attention grandparents! Photos added!

More photos of Lydia!

Okay, just so my child will be Googled before she’s twelve hours old:

Lydia Baldwin Young
Born February 19th, 2004 2:52 AM
6 pounds, 3.6 ounces. 19.2 inches!

Lydia arrived five weeks early or two weeks early, depending on which figures you go by. She’s pink and healthy and basking under the warmer in the nursery: though technically a preemie, she’s been evaluated and put in the “regular, healthy ol’ baby” category. She was delivered last night by a C-section because Kate’s water broke and labor started while Lydia was in the breech position.

I’ve been kicked out of the maternity room because Kate has a roommate this morning, and visiting hours for dads don’t begin until 10AM. So I’m releasing my relief, excitement, and overjoyed-ness on this blog!

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!

So, the whole astronomy thing made me realize that I should make a master time traveler’s timeline first, which made me realize: the world is only human-habitable for about 1 billion of its 11-billion year existence! Before about 500 million years ago, there’s nothing to eat. About 500 million years from now, the sun will be too hot for human life (not just because of the greenhouse effect, but because it’ll be expanding and burning hotter.)

The image above is a kind of wireframe I’m putting together. Click on it to see a bigger version. I’m sure that I’ve made some errors, but I hope a geologist will straighten me out.