Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Baby time, as many of you know, is different than regular time--it moves both too slowly and too fast all at once, days and nights blending into each other so thoroughly that before you know it, the baby's three weeks old and you feel a hundred years older and brand-new all at once.
Miss Libs is getting big, growing and changing already, but she's a good baby, mostly fussing only when she's hungry. She is hungry A LOT--we've had a couple of bouts of cluster feeding, when she eats every 30-45 min for 6-8 hours in a row, usually in the evening and after midnight. She does occasionally sleep for 4 hours at a stretch, though, which is awesome for such a young baby.
One of the fun side-effects, though, is that I've been getting a lot of reading done during our late nights together. In the past three weeks, I've finished The Last Madam by Christine Wiltz, Sin in the Second City by Karen Abbott (both research for my next book), and The Condition by Jennifer Haigh, along with a BIG stack of old New Yorkers with stories by EL Doctorow, Alice Munro, Rivka Galchen and Tessa Hadley, among others. Some of them have been interesting, but in total, I have to say I find the New Yorker stories a bit safer than I used to. I keep waiting for something to blow me away like Pastoralia or City of the Dead or Miracle, but none so far. I mean, a summer fiction issue with stories by Nabokov and Annie Proulx? Real edgy, guys.
Maybe I'll start reading them to her out loud. You think it's too early, or too damaging, to start a baby on The New Yorker?
