Ladies and gentlemen, the Adorable Baby has entered the building. I am sorry I ever doubted the wisdom of the Babycenter e-mails or those gooey baby books. They were right, I was wrong. Almost 5 month old babies are magic. I don't think I'm exaggerating in saying that this has been BY FAR the most joyful spate of parenting yet. She has barely whimpered or cried, is capable of spending hours - HOURS - playing contentedly as I play too but I also get things done, which keeps me mentally sane. She likes to hold her own bottle and feed herself, a really great thing at 5:30 am. She is loving eating her solids at night and grunts happily for more peas and more sweet potatoes. My greatest fear was a baby that never slept - AH told a horrific story of a co-worker in a meeting yesterday admitting her 9 year old has never once slept through the night and still routinely gets up at 3 am every night and my question was "How is that woman alive??" - and she sleeps from 8 pm to 5:30 when she wakes for a bottle and then sleeps again until 8 am. Genius! And my other big fear was food, a picky eater, a spit-upper etc. but she has adapted very well. She babbbles, she laughs and smiles constantly and she has learned to flip over, backwards and forwards, rolling back and forth with this surprised look on her face. Honestly, it's a hell of a lot easier to love love love her when she is being so sweet. I know it won't last so I'm sopping up every minute. And the thing that I really like is now when I hold her, she holds me back. I have been waiting a long time for that baby monkey clinging to me feeling and it gives new meaning to the phrase "hug my neck".

Speaking of Southern sounding phrases like "hug my neck", when we were in Virginia I was in a thrift store with a woman and her 7-ish year old son. Like any good thrift store it was dusty and he sneezed. "Well bless your bones" the Mom exclaimed. He sneezed about a dozen more times and each time, she responded with a very sincere "Bless your bones". Needless to say, that phrase is on heavy rotation in our house now.

And speaking of thrift, I spent last evening helping my local "young progressive politics" group sort out donations for an upcoming tag sale. The bulk of donations were really the dumping of the (largely super-privileged) students leaving town for good or the summer, clearing out their dorm rooms. The sheer amount of waste was insane. Unopened medicines, cosmetics, bathroom products, food, furniture, clothes....I shudder to think how much of it just ended up in the dumpsters, how many didn't make the trip to drop off their old shower curtains and wastebaskets. And how in the Fall, a new crop of students will be cruising the aisles of Target, loading up on boxes of tea they will never drink and bathroom rugs they will toss out a few months later. If I was at a university, perhaps I would encourage people to donate their leftover goods when they left, store them over the summer and open it up to their own tag sale in the Fall. But go ahead, leave it to the local townfolk to deal with the falling apart Ikea furniture stuffed in dumpsters.

And speaking of Ikea, if you live 4 hours away from the nearest Ikea and think about ordering something like a highchair off their internet site because it is the only highchair you can find that isn't a) plastic and hideous and printed all over with fucking teddy bears - why American baby industry? why? - or b) a $250 European import, do not be fooled into thinking that just because the highchair tray is offered right next to said highchair that in fact it will fit the highchair and in fact there is not matching tray or sides to hold a baby in so said chair will not be useful until the kid is a toddler and you have to go out and buy a hideous highchair anyway because you assembled the whole chair before figuring out that the tray had nothing to do with the chair at all. A hideous used highchair, to clarify, which makes me feel queasy because while I am just fine with wearing other peoples discarded footwear, apparently the ghost of babyfood past is the tipping point.

And speaking of babies, because apparently this whole entry is baby-centric, can I draw your attention, Maven-style, to an extremely disturbing article that was in the NY Times this weekend? It made me stomp around my kitchen, swearing vigorously and throwing out empty threats about moving back to Canada tomorrow. Here is the link: Mothers are fucked in the USA If you don't want to click a link, here's the upshot: women who have had c-section births can be denied health insurance or pay much higher fees because insurers don't want to chance paying for another one. This makes me FURIOUS because the 33% rate of c-sections - 33%!!! - is driven by the doctors and the hospitals and fear of being sued and isn't the mothers choice as these people claim. Women held hostage by doctors - because what are you going to say if your OB says you need one, No? - and then in turn screwed over by insurance. I call bullshit people and am doubly triply grateful I had my Midwife-in-the-Hospital experience. Oh and midwives have varying legality from state to state. So hope you're as lucky as me. Gah.

(Can you believe I made it through a whole entry without gloating a little about Obama's victory? Whoops, there I go..Bless His Bones. But I was in a thrift store this afternoon and the local African-American soul radio station was playing and the DJ was so joyful about the win and played Sam Cooke's "A Change is Going to Come" and I got goosebumps. Dang, and I just shaved my legs.)