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Realizations,
* Unpleasant,
** Not as... as you'd think.

1. I now have a callus on my ring finger just above my wedding ring. Possibly from gardening with it on. I almost never take it off.

2. I miss time spent writing and recording songs, but not as much as I thought I would. The Music Room is now The Baby's Room, and the building of a Music Shed has been postponed because ...

2a. ...we still owe lots of money to various credit cards for going to China to pick up the baby. Thank goodness for the 0% introductory APR balance transfer. Long may your unsolicited offers enter our mail slot.

3. I now consider staying up until midnight a Very Late Night. This is incredibly skewed. Two years ago, I'd only get that eye-pounding, delirious feeling if the mockingbirds outside the window had started greeting the dawn. Now, there is a small human being inside the house who greets the dawn. And I don't mind, really. Even when I'm the one who trundles out of bed to get her to the toys, fast, before the screaming makes her head pop.

4. I have become one of those baby people, almost. (As much as I become anything, I suppose.) I take inordinate pride, not in the fact that Sophia has started walking without our help, but in the fact that her first task upon learning to stand on her own was figuring out how to dance on her own. It's true. This isn't the kind of wobbly trying-to-stand-but-teetering-over-instead thing that gushy parents videotape with a blown out, mouth-too-close-to-the-mike voice-over saying, "Look! She's dancing! She's dancing!" I mean, she hears that En Vogue track on Elmopalooza (have I let on too much here?) and simply has to get up and shake her little booty. She also, two nights ago, despite not being able to actually talk yet, attempted to sing along to the Moldy Peaches' "Who's Got the Crack?" Which on one level, is just wrong, wrong, wrong, but on another level, is totally right.