As is customary with new babies, dear sweet Margot has her nights and days mixed up. She would sleep all day without awaking to eat if I'd let her. At night she sleeps in short spurts, and grunts and fusses between time. I find myself reaching my arm out and rocking her cradle during much of the night. My girlfriend says she'll become too dependent on the rocking motion in order to sleep. What do you all think? Do you have any good advice for training a baby to be a good sleeper?
After a bit of a scary delivery which involved a lot of blood loss and a c-section, little Margot has arrived! Thank you for all your well wishes. I will be on maternity leave from the blog for a time time enjoying this sweet little baby...
(photo by the talented Monika Elena)
Hey! Guess what? Melissa had a lovely baby GIRL (although the Dr. mistakenly yelled out "boy" first - turning a surprise into a really extra-dramatic surprise) on Sunday afternoon. 8 pounds, 5 ounces. Mother and baby are doing great.
I am over the moon and of course dying to see my new niece...
Maybe it's an attempt to slow down a bit, in a world where much is hastily done, often sloppily and without thought. A sort of anti-blog--even though we love blogs!--where the average attention span lasts for one minute, then alley-oop: new link, new image, new thought, new blog. We miss the pleasure of slowly performing an activity and doing it well: making a perfect batch of bread from a slow-rising starter that rests and rises for a whole day; knitting a sweater patiently, bit by bit over the course of a winter; reading a long Russian novel; looking up unknown words in the dictionary, pondering the book in off-reading hours... We thought an old-fashioned-ish sort of quarterly, with thoughtful articles, simple ink sketches, interspersed with pretty photographs, sewing ideas and patterns, sans annoying advertisements, might bring a bit more contemplative calm to our harried lives. Instead of bending over a computer with an achy neck to read from an articifically lit screen, we can hold the pages of the quarterly in our hands, snuggle up on a cozy sofa and read and think, uninterrupted and peacefully. Within the next few weeks the first issue will be published. The theme: the magic of story books. 
