Four Months Baby Quotes

Advice to friends. Advice to fellow mothers in the same boat. "How do you do it all?" Crack a joke. Make it seem easy. Make everything seem easy. Make life seem easy and parenthood and marriage and freelancing for pennies, writing a novel and smiling after a rejection, keeping the faith after two, reminding oneself that four years of work counted for a lot, counted for everything. Make the bed. Make it nice. Make the people laugh when you sit down to write and if you can't make them laugh make them cry. Make them want to hug you or hold you or punch you in the face. Make them want to kill you or fuck you or be your friend. Make them change. Make them happy. Make the baby smile. Make him laugh. Make him dinner. Make him proud. Hold the phone, someone is on the other line. She says its important. People are dying. Children. Friends. Press mute because there is nothing you can say. Press off because you're running out of minutes. Running out of time. Soon he'll be grown up and you'll regret the time you spent pushing him away for one more paragraph in the manuscript no one will ever read. Put down the book, the computer, the ideas. Remember who you are now. Wait. Remember who you were. Wait. Remember what's important. Make a list. Ten things, no twenty. Twenty thousand things you want to do before you die but what if tomorrow never comes? No one will remember. No one will know. No one will laugh or cry or make the bed. No one will have a clue which songs to sing to the baby. No one will be there for the children. No one will finish the first draft of the novel. No one will publish the one that's been finished for months. No one will remember the thought you had last night, that great idea you forgot to write down.

Gail had a baby named Ned who was four months old, and a new look of baffled hurt, a left-behind sadness, like she saw that the great world kept spinning onward and away while she'd overnight become glued to her spot.

The Pill was introduced in the early 1960s and modern woman was born. Women were no longer going to be tied to the cycle of endless babies; they were going to be themselves. With the Pill came what we now call the sexual revolution. Women could, for the first time in history, be like men, and enjoy sex for its own sake. In the late 1950s we had eighty to a hundred deliveries a month on our books. In 1963 the number had dropped to four or five a month. Now that is some social change!

They blew up your homes and demolished the grocery / stores and blocked the Red Cross and took away doctors / to jail and they cluster-bombed girls and boys / whose bodies / swelled purple and black into twice the original size / and tore the buttocks from a four month old baby / and then / they said this was brilliant

I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty. My best friend Darcy and I came across a perpetual calendar in the back of the phone book, where you could look up any date in the future, and by using this little grid, determine what the day of the week would be. So we located our birthdays in the following year, mine in May and hers in September. I got Wednesday, a school night. She got a Friday. A small victory, but typical. Darcy was always the lucky one. Her skin tanned more quickly, her hair feathered more easily, and she didn't need braces. Her moonwalk was superior, as were her cart-wheels and her front handsprings (I couldn't handspring at all). She had a better sticker collection. More Michael Jackson pins. Forenze sweaters in turquoise, red, and peach (my mother allowed me none- said they were too trendy and expensive). And a pair of fifty-dollar Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles (ditto). Darcy had double-pierced ears and a sibling- even if it was just a brother, it was better than being an only child as I was. But at least I was a few months older and she would never quite catch up. That's when I decided to check out my thirtieth birthday- in a year so far away that it sounded like science fiction. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that my dashing husband and I would secure a responsible baby-sitter for our two (possibly three) children on that Saturday evening, dine at a fancy French restaurant with cloth napkins, and stay out past midnight, so technically we would be celebrating on my actual birthday. I would have just won a big case- somehow proven that an innocent man didn't do it. And my husband would toast me: "To Rachel, my beautiful wife, the mother of my chidren and the finest lawyer in Indy." I shared my fantasy with Darcy as we discovered that her thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday. Bummer for her. I watched her purse her lips as she processed this information. "You know, Rachel, who cares what day of the week we turn thirty?" she said, shrugging a smooth, olive shoulder. "We'll be old by then. Birthdays don't matter when you get that old." I thought of my parents, who were in their thirties, and their lackluster approach to their own birthdays. My dad had just given my mom a toaster for her birthday because ours broke the week before. The new one toasted four slices at a time instead of just two. It wasn't much of a gift. But my mom had seemed pleased enough with her new appliance; nowhere did I detect the disappointment that I felt when my Christmas stash didn't quite meet expectations. So Darcy was probably right. Fun stuff like birthdays wouldn't matter as much by the time we reached thirty. The next time I really thought about being thirty was our senior year in high school, when Darcy and I started watching ths show Thirty Something together. It wasn't our favorite- we preferred cheerful sit-coms like Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains- but we watched it anyway. My big problem with Thirty Something was the whiny characters and their depressing issues that they seemed to bring upon themselves. I remember thinking that they should grow up, suck it up. Stop pondering the meaning of life and start making grocery lists. That was back when I thought my teenage years were dragging and my twenties would surealy last forever. Then I reached my twenties. And the early twenties did seem to last forever. When I heard acquaintances a few years older lament the end of their youth, I felt smug, not yet in the danger zone myself. I had plenty of time..

I don’t want your babies, Felix. I can assure you I’m not sitting up here like some tragic fallen woman every night dreaming of having your babies.” She began tracing a figure of eight with her fingernail along his stomach. The movement looked idle but the nail pressed in hard. “You realize of course that if it were the other way round there would be a law, there would be an actual law: John versus Jen in the high court. And John would put it to Jen that she did wilfully fuck him for five years, before dumping him without warning in the twilight of his procreative window, and taking up with young Jack-the-lad, only twenty-four years old and with a cock as long as my arm. The court rules in favor of John. Every time. Jen must pay damages. Huge sums. Plus six months in jail. No—nine. Poetic justice.

How plants grow: Quickly. Most plants grow fast and die young. People get seventy years, a bean plant gets four months, maybe five. Once the itty-bitty baby plant peeks out of the ground, it sprouts leaves, so it can absorb more sun. Then it sleeps, eats, and sunbathes until it’s ready to flower—a teenage plant. This is a bad time to be a rose or a zinnia or a marigold, because people attack with scissors and cut off what’s pretty. But plants are cool. If the rose is picked, the plant grows another one. It needs to bloom to produce more seeds.

Both he and Tashi froze, pulled apart, and gazed open mouthed at their four-month-old baby. “He said, Dada. He said, Dada.” Adam picked up his

Alex and Ava, who glowed with pregnancy. She was four months along, and her baby bump had just started showing.

Can young babies inadvertently be turned into brats who demand constant holding and attention? Thankfully, the answer to that question is … No! During the first three months of life (the fourth trimester), it’s impossible to spoil your baby by letting her suck or stay in your arms for hours. Does that surprise you? It really shouldn’t when you remember that you were lavishing her with these sensations twenty-four hours a day—up until the moment of birth. Even if you hold your baby twelve hours a day now, it’s a giant reduction from her point of view. What

I had no brothers or sisters. So all through my boyhood, from the age of four months onward, there were just the two of us, my father and me. We lived in an old gipsy caravan behind a filling-station. My father owned the filling-station and the caravan and a small field behind, but that was about all he owned in the world. It was a very small filling-station on a small country road surrounded by fields and woody hills. While I was still a baby, my father washed me and fed me and changed my nappies and did all the millions of other things a mother normally does for her child. That is not an easy task for a man, especially when he has to earn his living at the

The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

You’re sure you want to do this? What if she eats him?” I smiled, lifting the baby into my arms and grabbing his sippy cup. “Evelyn’s trying. She deserves a chance.” I closed the door and turned to her. My wife eyed me. “She called you a rapscallion.” I laughed. “Yes—yes she did.” Kristen and I had good fun with that one. It was Kristen’s favorite nickname for me. I gave Oliver his sippy cup. “But in all fairness, you told her you were married and pregnant via Potatogram. She had a right to be upset. Give me this.” I took the diaper bag from her. “You shouldn’t be lifting more than you need to.” She scowled at me. “It’s been four months since my surgery. I can carry a five-pound diaper bag.” I kissed the side of her stubborn head.

Preacher tell nigger that God is man and baby. Then he say that God is baby in December but man only four month later. But then he say God is father and he is son and he is spirit. That sound like he breed himself to get himself, then kill himself. White man God perplexing like the white man.

First there are nine months before the baby is born. Then the baby is born. Then there are three or four months spent in feeding the baby. After the baby is fed there are certainly five years spent in playing with the baby. You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one.

The hospital is as busy as it was yesterday. We go in through the main entrance, and people walk in every direction. The people in scrubs and white coats all walk a little bit faster. There’s a guy sleeping on one of the waiting room sofas, and a hugely pregnant woman leaning against the wall by the elevator. She’s swirling a drink in a plastic cup. That baby is giving her T-shirt a run for its money. A toddler is throwing a tantrum somewhere down the hallway. The shrieking echoes. We move to the bank of elevators, too, and Melonhead isn’t one of those guys who insists on pressing a button that’s already lit. He smiles and says “Good afternoon” to the pregnant woman, but I can’t look away from her swollen belly. My mother is going to look like that. My mother is going to have a baby. My brain still can’t process this. Suddenly, the woman’s abdomen twitches and shifts. It’s startling, and my eyes flick up to find her face. She laughs at my expression. “He’s trying to get comfortable.” The elevator dings, and we all get on. Her stomach keeps moving. I realize I’m being a freak, but it’s the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t stop staring. She laughs again, softly, then comes closer. “Here. You can feel it.” “It’s okay,” I say quickly. Melonhead chuckles, and I scowl. “Not too many people get to touch a baby before it’s born,” she says, her voice still teasing. “You don’t want to be one of the chosen few?” “I’m not used to random women asking me to touch them,” I say. “This is number five,” she says. “I’m completely over random people touching me. Here.” She takes my wrist and puts my hand right over the twitching. Her belly is firmer than I expect, and we’re close enough that I can look right down her shirt. I’m torn between wanting to pull my hand back and not wanting to be rude. Then the baby moves under my hand, something firm pushing right against my fingers. I gasp without meaning to. “He says hi,” the woman says. I can’t stop thinking of my mother. I try to imagine her looking like this, and I fail. I try to imagine her encouraging me to touch the baby, and I fail. Four months. The elevator dings. “Come on, Murph,” says Melonhead. I look at the pregnant lady. I have no idea what to say. Thanks? “Be good,” she says, and takes a sip of her drink. The elevator closes and she’s gone

Even on the road, we continued our efforts to conceive. Part of our boy-baby effort was the need to try right at the time of ovulation. I packed an ovulation kit with me everywhere. When the strip turned blue, it meant we had a twenty-four- to forty-eight-hour window to get busy. At first I had Steve convinced that women ovulated twenty or thirty times a month. But I couldn’t trick him forever. At some point he realized that that was impossible.

She was the first close friend who I felt like I’d re­ally cho­sen. We weren’t in each other’s lives be­cause of any obli­ga­tion to the past or con­ve­nience of the present. We had no shared his­tory and we had no rea­son to spend all our time to­ gether. But we did. Our friend­ship in­ten­si­fied as all our friends had chil­dren – she, like me, was un­con­vinced about hav­ing kids. And she, like me, found her­self in a re­la­tion­ship in her early thir­ties where they weren’t specif­i­cally work­ing to­wards start­ing a fam­ily. By the time I was thirty-four, Sarah was my only good friend who hadn’t had a baby. Ev­ery time there was an­other preg­nancy an­nounce­ment from a friend, I’d just text the words ‘And an­other one!’ and she’d know what I meant. She be­came the per­son I spent most of my free time with other than Andy, be­cause she was the only friend who had any free time. She could meet me for a drink with­out plan­ning it a month in ad­vance. Our friend­ship made me feel lib­er­ated as well as safe. I looked at her life choices with no sym­pa­thy or con­cern for her. If I could ad­mire her de­ci­sion to re­main child-free, I felt en­cour­aged to ad­mire my own. She made me feel nor­mal. As long as I had our friend­ship, I wasn’t alone and I had rea­son to be­lieve I was on the right track. We ar­ranged to meet for din­ner in Soho af­ter work on a Fri­day. The waiter took our drinks or­der and I asked for our usual – two Dirty Vodka Mar­ti­nis. ‘Er, not for me,’ she said. ‘A sparkling wa­ter, thank you.’ I was ready to make a joke about her un­char­ac­ter­is­tic ab­sti­nence, which she sensed, so as soon as the waiter left she said: ‘I’m preg­nant.’ I didn’t know what to say. I can’t imag­ine the ex­pres­sion on my face was par­tic­u­larly en­thu­si­as­tic, but I couldn’t help it – I was shocked and felt an un­war­ranted but in­tense sense of be­trayal. In a de­layed re­ac­tion, I stood up and went to her side of the ta­ble to hug her, un­able to find words of con­grat­u­la­tions. I asked what had made her change her mind and she spoke in va­garies about it ‘just be­ing the right time’ and wouldn’t elab­o­rate any fur­ther and give me an an­swer. And I needed an an­swer. I needed an an­swer more than any­thing that night. I needed to know whether she’d had a re­al­iza­tion that I hadn’t and, if so, I wanted to know how to get it. When I woke up the next day, I re­al­ized the feel­ing I was ex­pe­ri­enc­ing was not anger or jeal­ousy or bit­ter­ness – it was grief. I had no one left. They’d all gone. Of course, they hadn’t re­ally gone, they were still my friends and I still loved them. But huge parts of them had dis­ap­peared and there was noth­ing they could do to change that. Un­less I joined them in their spa­ces, on their sched­ules, with their fam­i­lies, I would barely see them. And I started dream­ing of an­other life, one com­pletely re­moved from all of it. No more chil­dren’s birth­day par­ties, no more chris­ten­ings, no more bar­be­cues in the sub­urbs. A life I hadn’t ever se­ri­ously con­tem­plated be­fore. I started dream­ing of what it would be like to start all over again. Be­cause as long as I was here in the only Lon­don I knew – mid­dle-class Lon­don, cor­po­rate Lon­don, mid-thir­ties Lon­don, mar­ried Lon­don – I was in their world. And I knew there was a whole other world out there.

If we sold a business opportunity: * Most people hate their job. * Most people need more money. * Most people would like to be their own boss. * Most people want to be rich. * Most people would like to work three weeks out of the month but get paid for four. * Most people want more time with their children. * Most mothers hate warehousing their babies in daycare. * Most jobs don’t pay enough. * Most people start with this package. * Most people want to pay fewer taxes. * Most new distributors get their convention ticket right away.

The police will want particulars, since you are the divorced husband, but I’ll leave that to them. One more question, a hypothetical one. If Carol Mardus had a baby by Richard Valdon, conceived in April of last year and born last January, four months after Valdon’s death; and if X knew about it, helped her dispose of it, and later, moved by pique or jealousy or spite, took it and left it in Mrs. Valdon’s vestibule, who is X? Of the men in Carol Mardus’s orbit, which one fits the specifications? I don’t ask you to accuse, merely to suggest.

There are some Baby Step Three clarifications. Joe asked recently if he should stop his Snowball—Step Two—to get his emergency fund finished. Joe and his wife have twins due in six months. Brad’s plant is closing in four months, and he will lose his job. Mike got a huge severance check of $25,000 last week when his company downsized him. Should these people work on debt or finish the emergency fund? All three should temporarily stop Snowballing and concentrate on the emergency fund because we can see distant storm clouds that are real. Once the storm passes, they can resume the plan as before. Resuming the plan for Joe means that once the babies are born healthy, are home, and everyone is fine, Joe will take the emergency fund back down to $1,000 by using the rest of the savings to pay the Debt Snowball. Resuming for Brad would mean that once he finds his new job, he’ll do the same. Mike should hold his instant emergency fund of $25,000 until he is reemployed. The sooner he can get a job, the more that severance is going to look like a bonus and have a huge impact on the Debt Snowball.

Romanians, however, paid a terrible price for Ceauşescu’s privileged status. In 1966, to increase the population—a traditional ‘Romanianist’ obsession—he prohibited abortion for women under forty with fewer than four children (in 1986 the age barrier was raised to forty-five). In 1984 the minimum marriage age for women was reduced to fifteen. Compulsory monthly medical examinations for all women of childbearing age were introduced to prevent abortions, which were permitted, if at all, only in the presence of a Party representative. Doctors in districts with a declining birth rate had their salaries cut. The population did not increase, but the death rate from abortions far exceeded that of any other European country: as the only available form of birth control, illegal abortions were widely performed, often under the most appalling and dangerous conditions. Over the ensuing twenty-three years the 1966 law resulted in the death of at least ten thousand women. The real infant mortality rate was so high that after 1985 births were not officially recorded until a child had survived to its fourth week—the apotheosis of Communist control of knowledge. By the time Ceauşescu was overthrown the death rate of new-born babies was twenty-five per thousand and there were upward of 100,000 institutionalized children. The

I hadn’t seen him in quite a while and he’d grown at least four inches in the months between our visits. With his perfect teeth and constant huge smile I found myself looking at him in a whole new way. Gone was the skinny kid whose birthday was the day before my own and loved saying we were the same age for that twenty four hour period before I officially turned a year older than him. He wasn’t that twelve year old who’d yanked on my hair and put baby oil in the sunblock so I got a nasty burn when we visited a theme park together. Suddenly I saw Jim wasn’t a little kid anymore. He was a guy—a hot guy at that. A hot guy who spent the entire day glued to my side.

Diana can read power levels,” Astrid said. “Did she ever…” Sam nodded. “She said the baby is a three bar. As a fetus. Who knows what it will be when it’s born. Or as it grows. Diana’s only, like, four or five months along. I should know exactly, but I forget. When she would talk about it I would kind of, you know.” He made a shivering move, like it all gave him the creeps. Astrid shook her head in disbelief. “Really. That’s the part of all this that makes you squirm: pregnancy.” “She made me touch her, you know, stomach. And she talked about her, um, her things.” He pointed at his chest and whispered, “Nipples.” “Yeah,” Astrid said dryly. “I could see where that would be devastating.

Imagine the moment when you realise that the little girl you have known all her life is actually your own daughter. What do you say? There's nothing to prepare you for that. I'd known Aimee since she was four months old. She was always in my house. In fact, usually I was the only person with her. The clues were all there. But I never joined up the dots. I always came up with a justification for it. There was always some logical reason why I was in charge of a friend's little girl - even though I'd never actually met that friend. Looking back, it was obvious. Something, in my own mind was preventing me from making the link. The brain's a funny thing. It's also very clever and mine was protecting me. Because if I ever accepted that Aimee was my baby, then I had to accept other things - things you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy.

The last case that Higdon presents is that of Emile, who is from Louisiana and in 1983 was visiting his sick parents at the hospital. One evening while he was at the hospital, a nurse named Debra offered to perform oral sex on him, but only if he wore a condom. After the act was complete, Debra offered to get rid of the condom filled with Emile’s sperm and must have impregnated herself, because nine months later genetic testing showed that Emile was the father of her baby. “The two never had sexual intercourse, only the one instance of oral sex with a condom.”10 The commonality in these three cases was that a man or boy was forced into fatherhood against his will and was then forced by the court against his will to pay child support. Can you imagine the uproar if a fifteen-year-old girl had sex with a thirty-four-year-old man and she was obligated in any way to him by the courts? Or if a woman passed out at a party and a man had sex with her and she was then forced to have the baby? As Warren Farrell says about reproductive rights for men:

... [t]he air was thinning out, as if from too much wear, not when Scout was killed but two weeks later--even before Scout's body had been shipped--when they were informed that Easter was dead too. Babies. One nineteen, the other twenty-one. How proud she was when they enlisted. She had actively encouraged them to do so. Their father had served in the forties. Uncles too. Jeff Fleetwood was back from Vietnam and none the worse. And although he did seem a little shook up, Menus Jury got back alive. Like a fool, she believed her sons would be safe. Safer than anywhere in Oklahoma outside Ruby. Safer in the army than in Chicago, where Easter wanted to go. Safer than Birmingham, than Montgomery, Selma, than Watts. Safer than Money, Mississippi, in 1955 and Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963. Safer than Newark. She had thought war was safer than any city in the United States. Now she had four unopened letters mailed in 1968 and delivered to the Demby post office four days after she buried the last of her sons. She had never been able to open them. Both had been home on furlough that Thanksgiving, 1968. Seven months after King's murder, and Soane had sobbed like the redeemed to see her boys alive. Her sweet colored boys unshot, unlynched, unmolested, unimprisoned.

I was here. I was fine. It was a beautiful day, and I was around people who gave me more love and happiness in a month than I’d had for seventeen years. I would never have to see those jerks again. And today was going to be a good day, damn it. So I got it together and finally looked back down at my best friend to ask, “Did I tell you I stole a bottle of Visine once because I wanted to put a few drops into my dad’s coffee, but I always chickened out?” Lenny snickered. “No. Psycho. Did I tell you that one time I asked Santa to bring my mom back?” I made a face. “That’s sad, Lenny.” I blinked. “I pretty much did the same thing.” “Uh-huh.” I raised my eyebrows at her. “Did I ever tell you that I wanted to have like ten kids when I was younger?” The laugh that came out of her wasn’t as strong as it usually was, but I was glad she let it out anyway. It sounded just like her, loud and direct and so full of happiness it was literally infectious. “Ten? Jesus, why?” I wrinkled my nose at her. “It sounded like a good number.” The scoff that came out of her right then was a little louder. “You’re fucking nuts, Luna. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten-ten?” “That’s what ten means.” I grinned at her. “I said that was back when I was younger, not any time recently. I can’t afford ten kids.” “Still. How about… none?” I glanced down the table again when I heard Thea’s sharp laugh. “Okay, Only Child.” I laughed. “I think four’s a good number now.” My friend beside me groaned before reaching forward to grab a chip, dipping it into the tiny bowl of guacamole beside it. “Look, Grandpa Gus was basically my brother, my dad, my uncle, and my grandpa all rolled into one, and I had a bunch of kids to play with,” she claimed. “Whatever makes you happy, but I think I’m fine with zero kids in my future.” I reached over and grabbed one of the pieces of fajita from her plate and plopped it into my mouth. “Watch, you’ll end up with two,” I told her, covering my mouth while I chewed the meat. “You’ve already got that ‘mom’ vibe going on better than anyone I know.” That had her rolling her eyes, but she didn’t argue that she didn’t, because we both knew it was true. She was a twenty-seven-year-old who dealt with full-grown man babies daily. She had it down. I was friends with my coworkers. Lenny was a babysitter for the ones she was surrounded with regularly. “Like you’re one to talk, bish,” she threw out in a grumpy voice that said she knew she couldn’t deny it. She had a point there. She picked up a piece of fajita and tossed it into her mouth before mumbling, “For the record, you should probably get started on lucky number four soon. You aren’t getting any younger.” I rolled my eyes, still chewing. “Bish.” “Bish.

And she knew her defiance in escaping his grasp, even temporarily, had shown Jasu the depth of her strength. In the months afterward, though he behaved awkwardly, he had allowed her the time and space she needed. It was the first genuine show of respect he had made toward her in their four years of marriage. Jasu’s parents made no such concession, their latent disappointment growing into relentless criticism of her for failing to bear a son.Kavita walks outside and spreads her mat on the rough stone steps, where she sits facing the rising sun in the east She lights the small ghee-soaked diya and thin stick of incense, and then closes her eyes in prayer. The wisp of fragrant smoke slowly circles its way up into the air and around her. She breathes deeply and thinks, as always, of the baby girls she has lost. She rings the small silver bell and chants softly. She sees their faces and their small bodies, she hears their cries and feels their tiny fingers wrap around hers. And always, she hears the sound of Usha’s desperate cry echoing behind the closed doors of the orphanage. She allows herself to get lost in the depths of her grief. After she has chanted and sung and wept for some time, she tries to envision the babies at peace, wherever they are. She pictures Usha as a little girl, her hair wound in two braids, each tied with a white ribbon. The image of the girl in her mind is perfectly clear: smiling, running, and playing with children, eating her meals and sleeping alongside the others in the orphanage.Every morning, Kavita sits in the same place outside her home with her eyes closed until the stormy feelings peak and then, very gradually, subside. She waits until she can breathe evenly again. By the time she opens her eyes, her face is wet and the incense has burned down to a small pile of soft ash. The sun is a glowing orange ball on the horizon, and the villagers are beginning to stir around her. She always ends her puja by touching her lips to the one remaining silver bangle on her wrist, reconciling herself to the only thing she has left of her daughters. These daily rituals have brought her comfort and, over time, some healing. She can carry herself through the rest of the day with these peaceful images of Usha in her mind. Each day becomes more bearable. As days turn to weeks, and weeks to months, Kavita feels her bitterness toward Jasu soften. After several months, she allows him to touch her and then, to reach for her at night.

My cold-weather gear left a lot to be desired: black maternity leggings under boot-cut maternity jeans, and a couple of Marlboro Man’s white T-shirts under an extra-large ASU sweatshirt. I was so happy to have something warm to wear that I didn’t even care that I was wearing the letters of my Pac-10 rival. Add Marlboro Man’s old lumberjack cap and mud boots that were four sizes too big and I was on my way to being a complete beauty queen. I seriously didn’t know how Marlboro Man would be able to keep his hands off of me. If I caught a glimpse of myself in the reflection of the feed truck, I’d shiver violently. But really, when it came right down to it, I didn’t care. No matter what I looked like, it just didn’t feel right sending Marlboro Man into the cold, lonely world day after day. Even though I was new at marriage, I still sensed that somehow--whether because of biology or societal conditioning or religious mandate or the position of the moon--it was I who was to be the cushion between Marlboro Man and the cruel, hard world. That it was I who’d needed to dust off his shoulders every day. And though he didn’t say it, I could tell that he felt better when I was bouncing along, chubby and carrying his child, in his feed truck next to him. Occasionally I’d hop out of the pickup and open gates. Other times he’d hop out and open them. Sometimes I’d drive while he threw hay off the back of the vehicles. Sometimes I’d get stuck and he’d say shit. Sometimes we’d just sit in silence, shivering as the vehicle doors opened and closed. Other times we’d engage in serious conversation or stop and make out in the snow. All the while, our gestating baby rested in the warmth of my body, blissfully unaware of all the work that awaited him on this ranch where his dad had grown up. As I accompanied Marlboro Man on those long, frigid mornings of work, I wondered if our child would ever know the fun of sledding on a golf course hill…or any hill, for that matter. I’d lived on the ranch for five months and didn’t remember ever hearing about anyone sledding…or playing golf…or participating in any recreational activities at all. I was just beginning to wrap my mind around the way daily life unfolded here: wake up early, get your work done, eat, relax, and go to bed. Repeat daily. There wasn’t a calendar of events or dinner dates with friends in town or really much room for recreation--because that just meant double the work when you got back to work. It was hard for me not to wonder when any of these people ever went out and had a good time, or built a snowman. Or slept past 5:00 A.M.

Three-and-a-half-month-old infants already seem to exhibit the other-race effect. In a study at the University of Kentucky, white babies were very good at distinguishing faces with 100 percent Caucasian features from faces that had been graphically morphed to include features that were 70 percent white and 30 percent Asian. They couldn’t do the reverse: They could not tell 100 percent Asian faces from those that were morphed to include 30 percent white features. In other words, they could detect small differences between white and not-quite-white faces, but not the same kinds of differences between Asian and not-quite-Asian faces. Lawrence A. Hirschfeld of the University of Michigan did some of the pioneering work on how early in life children begin to understand race. He showed children of ages three, four, and seven, a picture of “Johnny:” a chubby black boy in a police uniform, complete with whistle and toy gun. He then showed them pictures of adults who shared two of Johnny’s three main traits of race, body build, and uniform. Prof. Hirschfeld prepared all combinations—policemen who were fat but were white, thin black policemen, etc.—and asked the children which was Johnny’s daddy or which was Johnny all grown up. Even the three-year-olds were significantly more likely to choose the black man rather than the fat man or the policeman. They knew that weight and occupation can change but race is permanent. In 1996, after 15 years of studying children and race, Prof. Hirschfeld concluded: “Our minds seem to be organized in a way that makes thinking racially—thinking that the human world can be segmented into discrete racial populations—an almost automatic part of our mental repertoire.” When white preschoolers are shown racially ambiguous faces that look angry, they tend to say they are faces of blacks, but categorize happy faces as white. “These filters through which people see the world are present very early,” explained Andrew Baron of Harvard. Phyllis Katz, then a professor at the University of Colorado, studied young children for their first six years. At age three, she showed them photographs of other children and asked them whom they would like to have as friends. Eighty-six percent of white children chose photographs of white children. At age five and six, she gave children pictures of people and told them to sort them into two piles by any criteria they liked. Sixty-eight percent sorted by race and only 16 by sex. Of her entire six-year study Prof. Katz said, “I think it is fair to say that at no point in the study did the children exhibit the Rousseau type of color-blindness that many adults expect.

Nevaeh- I believe I am never going to go around with little dreams anymore, I will not have a contained mind; I am always going to be positive if I can, and dream big. Knowing that it all can, and will be coming true if only I believe that it will. I know that I should never get stuck in a rut, for the reason that I do not know the whole plan that has been set for me. When you think like this, you can, and will break forth; this is when you will see an increase and praise. I hope that all our dreams come true, and we can all start anew. I hope that we can think, all our choices. Now I am hoping that I can let you know that, you have an angel too. I hope that everything is going to work out for you. The angels will save you and me, in times that we are on our knees. I hope the tower and its clans will forever let me be. I hope that everything will be understood so all of you can see. (About six months back) Nevaeh- The night that I was saved differently, I am only sixteen but the time is right. I could not stand living here another day or night, in ‘The Land of Many Steeples’ in the house of lost and lonely dreams, it was time for me to spread my wings and fly away from this land of misery. The day finally came and he saved me from the hell that is part of my existence. The boxy chariot with its small oblong taillights arrived near my doorstep. He greeted me with the presence of compassion. For I was looking down from the window, yes it was supposed to just be another date night. Yes, he arrived to sweep me off my feet once again and take me away. Hope was not very pleased with the onset of him being in my life… But there was nothing she could do. At last, I was content, and that is all that mattered. She would not let me go on my dates, so I waited around until it was night outside, and she was asleep! That is when I would sneak out, and get away for a while, with him. Yet I think I got pregnant on date number one, yet I am not sure. (Looking back) I remember all the dates; we would drive through the town at night, and do all kinds of wild things. Besides, look at the stars in the back of his ford bronco truck with a blanket at our spot, as the baby was asleep inside of me, this was about four months ago, or so. (The first days together as a couple.) Some of our dates started right after my school day, he would come and get me, and I would not come home until my curfew or not at all. We did not have much money, yet we always had fun just being together. Like this one time, we went kayaking in our swimsuits on the gently flowing river, and then afterward we had a picnic lunch, simple dates, but always fun. Yeah, that is right, we only had three normal dates before; I know I was indeed going to have a baby. Our craziness slowed down a lot after that fact, yet we still went out.

More than a third of deaths in children under five happen during the first month of life (about four million babies). Breastfeeding within the first hour would save 22% of these babies.23

Never let her sleep for more than one and a half to two hours during the day, which is the proper nap period for babies four months and younger.

probe indicates that Naxals don't want any development in their area. They don't want the children to be educated, they don't want roads to be built. They want tribals to remain in the dark. And to achieve this perverse end, they can go to any extent of violence, even if it means killing an infant. A four-month-old baby was killed in a Jan Adalat in front of her mother as her father was a suspected police informer. Naxals burn mark sheets and transfer certificates of 10th and 12th students, so that they cannot go for further education and migrate from their villages.

Kristen had dreamed of having children since she was herself a child and had always thought that she would love motherhood as much as she would love her babies. “I know that being a mom will be demanding,” she told me once. “But I don’t think it will change me much. I’ll still have my life, and our baby will be part of it.” She envisioned long walks through the neighborhood with Emily. She envisioned herself mastering the endlessly repeating three-hour cycle of playing, feeding, sleeping, and diaper changing. Most of all, she envisioned a full parenting partnership, in which I’d help whenever I was home—morning, nighttime, and weekends. Of course, I didn’t know any of this until she told me, which she did after Emily was born. At first, the newness of parenthood made it seem as though everything was going according to our expectations. We’ll be up all day and all night for a few weeks, but then we’ll hit our stride and our lives will go back to normal, plus one baby. Kristen took a few months off from work to focus all of her attention on Emily, knowing that it would be hard to juggle the contradicting demands of an infant and a career. She was determined to own motherhood. “We’re still in that tough transition,” Kristen would tell me, trying to console Emily at four A.M. “Pretty soon, we’ll find our routine. I hope.” But things didn’t go as we had planned. There were complications with breast-feeding. Emily wasn’t gaining weight; she wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep, wouldn’t play. She was born in December, when it was far too cold to go for walks outdoors. While I was at work, Kristen would sit on the floor with Emily in the dark—all the lights off, all the shades closed—and cry. She’d think about her friends, all of whom had made motherhood look so easy with their own babies. “Mary had no problem breast-feeding,” she’d tell me. “Jenny said that these first few months had been her favorite. Why can’t I get the hang of this?” I didn’t have any answers, but still I offered solutions, none of which she wanted to hear: “Talk to a lactation consultant about the feeding issues.” “Establish a routine and stick to it.” Eventually, she stopped talking altogether. While Kristen struggled, I watched from the sidelines, unaware that she needed help. I excused myself from the nighttime and morning responsibilities, as the interruptions to my daily schedule became too much for me to handle. We didn’t know this was because of a developmental disorder; I just looked incredibly selfish. I contributed, but not fully. I’d return from work, and Kristen would go upstairs to sleep for a few hours while I’d carry Emily from room to room, gently bouncing her as I walked, trying to keep her from crying. But eventually eleven o’clock would roll around and I’d go to bed, and Kristen would be awake the rest of the night with her. The next morning, I would wake up and leave for work, while Kristen stared down the barrel of another day alone. To my surprise, I grew increasingly disappointed in her: She wanted to have children. Why is she miserable all the time? What’s her problem? I also resented what I had come to recognize as our failing marriage. I’d expected our marriage to be happy, fulfilling, overflowing with constant affection. My wife was supposed to be able to handle things like motherhood with aplomb. Kristen loved me, and she loved Emily, but that wasn’t enough for me. In my version of a happy marriage, my wife would also love the difficulties of being my wife and being a mom. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d have to earn the happiness, the fulfillment, the affection. Nor had it occurred to me that she might have her own perspective on marriage and motherhood.

William and Dolly had still not come to terms with infant baptism. So baby Ann remained unbaptized. It was clear William was leaning toward the beliefs of the Baptists. And why not? Although the Anglican Scott was a major influence, most of William’s spiritual mentors were Baptists, like Skinner and Hall. And as William’s own reputation as a churchman spread, who most enthusiastically welcomed him? Baptists. The congregation of Baptists at Earls Barton, east of Northampton, even persuaded him to preach there every other week. It was a four-hour round trip on foot, so it was no small commitment for such a busy young married man. One day he told Dolly, “A group of Dissenters has asked me to lead their service once a month. And guess where? At Paulerspury!

(Until we get them onto schedules, babies are the ultimate “task-oriented” beings, which, along with sleep deprivation, may explain the otherworldliness of those first few months with a newborn: you’re dragged from clock time into deep time, whether you like it or not.)

The Four-Month Fussies Your baby’s growing awareness has its temporary downside. At an LLL meeting a while back, a mother arrived with a four-month-old, saying he had begun “nursing funny.” Another mother in the room said, “My baby’s four months old, too, and she’s started nursing funny.” And another mother spoke up with the same age baby and same concern. We dubbed it the “Four-Month Fussies” but didn’t have a perfect solution for them beyond nursing in a quiet room, minimizing distractions, time, and nursing in whatever position the baby seemed to need. The group concluded that by around four months, babies had gained enough intellectual ability to tune in to the room around them but didn’t yet have enough gray matter to tune in and nurse well.

Boyfriend #11 Clark Barnyard, Age Twenty-Three Still not over boyfriend #9 and humiliated by #10, Jane declared she would shed her victimhood and become the elusive predator--fierce, independent, solitary!...except there was this guy at work, Clark. He’d made her laugh during company meetings, he’d share his fries with her at lunch, declaring that she needed fattening up. He was in layout at the magazine, and she’d go to his cubicle and sit on the edge of his desk, chatting for longer than made her manager comfortable. He was a few years younger than her, so it seemed innocent somehow. When he asked her out at last, despite the dark stickiness of foreboding, she didn’t turn him down. He cooked her dinner at his place and was goofy and tender, nuzzling her neck and making puppy noises. They started to kiss on the couch, and it was nice or approximately sixty seconds until his hand started hunting for her bra hooks. In the front. It was so not Mr. Darcy. “Whoa, there, cowboy,” she said, but he was “in the groove” and had to be told to stop three or four times before he finally pried his fingers off her breasts and stood up, rubbing his eyes. “What’s the problem, honey?” he asked, his voice stumbling on that last word. She said he was moving too fast, and he said, then what in the hell had they been building up to over the past six months? Jane sized up the situation to her own satisfaction: “You are no gentleman.” Then Clark summed up in his own special way: “Hasta la vista, baby.”

Becoming aware of her presence in the doorway, the men looked up. Westcliff rose from his half-seated position on the desk. “My lord,” Daisy said, “if I might have a word with you?” Although she spoke calmly, something in her expression must have alerted him. He didn’t waste a second in coming to her. “Yes, Daisy?” “It’s about my sister,” she whispered. “It seems her labor has started.” She had never seen the earl look so utterly taken aback. “It’s too early,” he said. “Apparently the baby doesn’t think so.” “But…this is off-schedule.” The earl seemed genuinely baffled that his child would have failed to consult the calendar before arriving. “Not necessarily,” Daisy replied reasonably. “It’s possible the doctor misjudged the date of the baby’s birth. Ultimately it’s only a matter of guesswork.” Westcliff scowled. “I expected far more accuracy than this! It’s nearly a month before the projected…” A new thought occurred to him, and he turned skull-white. “Is the baby premature?” Although Daisy had entertained a few private concerns about that, she shook her head immediately. “Some women show more than others, some less. And my sister is very slender. I’m sure the baby is fine.” She gave him a reassuring smile. “Lillian has had pains for the past four or five hours, and now they’re coming every ten minutes or so, which Annabelle says—” “She’s been in labor for hours and no one told me?” Westcliff demanded in outrage. “Well, it’s not technically labor unless the intervals between the pains are regular, and she said she didn’t want to bother you until—” Westcliff let out a curse that startled Daisy. He turned to point a commanding but unsteady finger at Simon Hunt. “Doctor,” he barked, and took off at a dead run. Simon Hunt appeared unsurprised by Westcliff’s primitive behavior. “Poor fellow,” he said with a slight smile, reaching over the desk to slide a pen back into its holder.

I wanted to believe it, but it was hard. This was my third time getting pregnant, but I still didn’t have a baby. It was ironic that I was never able to carry a baby for longer than four months.

music label exists for four main reasons: talent scouring, financing to rent a studio (like startup capital for a business), distribution, and marketing. From Birdmonster’s angle, they could do all those things themselves, but better and cheaper. They already knew they were talented since they’d been getting gigs. Since they could edit the music on their own computers, they didn’t need financing to rent a studio. CD Baby provided distribution to all the top services like iTunes and Rhapsody, and weekly payouts instead of payout nine months later like traditional record distributors. The effect of their Myspace page (it was the early 2000’s) and a personal email to well known blogs was greater than anything record labels could provide in terms of marketing.

According to Cohen, it’s only until the baby is four months old. After that, bad sleep habits are formed.

were part of a baby-selling ring, Blue. No. I shake the thought out of my head. I was a prisoner, like Ark said. They locked me in a cage for four months when they first found out. That’s how they kept me in the months after it was determined I couldn’t conceive. Every night they came and took me to the lounge. And every night I had a flock member to please in any way they wanted. I was not one of them.

The average amount he consumes at a feeding will increase gradually from about 4 or 5 ounces (120 to 150 ml) during the second month, to 5 or 6 ounces (150 to 180 ml) by four months, but these amounts vary from baby to baby and from feeding to feeding. His daily intake should range from about 25 to 30 ounces (750 to 900 ml) by four months.

As for the evacuee children all over the county, their loving and starving parents, having had nearly four happy months of freedom, and seeing no reason why their children shouldn’t be lodged, fed, clothed, educated and amused at other people’s expense for ever, saw no reason to do anything more about them and hoped that the same fate would overtake the new baby whom most of them had had or were expecting. So all the hostesses buckled to afresh.

Melinda, what are you doing?” he asked, unzipping his jeans to take them off and take a shower of his own. “Nothing,” she said, averting her eyes. He frowned and stepped toward her. He lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. “Were you covering up? In front of me?” he asked, astonished. “Jack, I’m going to pot,” she said, cinching the towel tighter. “What?” he asked, laughter in his voice. “What are you talking about?” She took a deep breath. “My boobs are drooping, my butt fell into my thighs, I have a potbelly, and if that’s not bad enough, I’m so covered with stretch marks, I look like a deflated balloon.” She put a hand against his rock-hard chest. “You’re eight years older than I am and you’re in perfect shape.” He started to laugh. “I thought you were trying to cover a tattoo or something. Mel, I didn’t have two children, a year apart. Emma’s only a few months old. Give yourself a little time, huh?” “I can’t help it. I miss my old body.” “Oh-oh,” he said, putting his arms around her. “If you’re thinking like that, I’m not doing my job.” “But it’s true,” she said, laying her head against the soft mat of hair on his chest. “Mel, you are more beautiful every day. I love your body.” “It’s not what it was…” “Hmm. But it’s better,” he said. He tugged at the towel and she hung on. “Come on,” he said. She let go and he pulled it away. “Ah,” he said, smiling down at her. “This body is amazing to me—incredible. More lush and irresistible every day.” “You can’t mean that,” she said. “But I do.” He leaned down and touched her lips with his, one hand on her breast, the other moving smoothly down her back and over her bottom. “This body has given me so much—I worship this body.” He lifted her breast slightly. “Look,” he said. “I can’t bear it,” she complained. “Look, Mel. Look in the mirror. Sometimes when I see you like this, uncovered, I can’t breathe. Every small change just makes you better, more delicious to me. You can’t think I’d have anything but complete admiration for the body that gave me my children. You give me so much pleasure, sometimes I think I might be losing my mind. Baby, you’re perfect.” “I’m twenty pounds heavier than when you met me,” she said. He laughed at her. “What are you now? A size four?” “You don’t know anything. It’s much more than a four. We’re headed for double digits…” “God above,” he said. “Twenty more pounds for me to gobble up.” “What if I just keep getting fatter and fatter?” “Will you still be in there? Because it’s you I love. I love your body, Mel, because it’s you. You understand that, right?” “But…” “If I had an accident that blew my legs off, would you stop loving me, wanting me?” “Of course not! That’s not the same thing!” “We’re not our bodies. We’ve been lucky with our bodies, but we’re more than that.” “It was my butt in a pair of jeans that got your attention….” “My love for you is a lot deeper than that, and you know it. However—” he grinned “—you still knock me out in those jeans. If you’ve gained twenty pounds, it went to all the right places.” “I’m thinking—tummy tuck,” she said. “What nonsense,” he said, leaning down to cover her mouth in a bold and serious kiss.

Mel was just here. She’s complaining about the food.” “Huh?” Jack answered. “Mel?” “Yeah. She says my food is making her fat.” Jack chuckled. “Oh, that. Yeah, she’s making noises about that. Don’t worry about it.” “She didn’t make it sound like I shouldn’t worry about it. She was pretty much loaded for bear.” “She had two babies in fourteen months, plus a hysterectomy. And—she doesn’t like to be reminded about this—she’s getting older in spite of herself. Women get a little thicker. You know.” “How do you know that?” “Four sisters,” Jack said. “It’s all women ever worry about—the size of their butts and boobs. And thighs—thighs come up a lot.” “She yelled at me,” he said, still kind of startled. Paul laughed and Jack just shook his head. “Did you tell her that?” Preacher asked. “About women getting thicker with age?” “Do I look like I have a death wish? Besides, I don’t think she’s getting fat—but my opinion about that doesn’t count for much.” “She wants salads. And fresh fruit.” “How hard is that?” Jack asked. “Not hard,” Preacher said with a shrug. “But I don’t stuff that pie down her neck every day.” A sputter of laughter escaped Paul, and Jack said, “You’re gonna want to watch that, Preach.” “She wants me to use less butter and cream, take a few calories out of my food. Jack, it isn’t going to taste as good that way. You can’t make sauces and gravies without cream, butter, fat, flour. People love that stuff, salmon in dill sauce, fettuccine Alfredo, stuffed trout, brisket and garlic mash. Stews with thick gravy. People come a long way for my food.” “Yeah, I know, Preach. You don’t have to change everything—but make Mel a little something, huh? A salad, a broiled chicken breast, fish without the cream sauce, that kind of thing. You know what to do. Right?” “Of course. You don’t think she wants everyone in this town on a diet? Because she says it’s not healthy, the way I cook.” “Nah. This is a phase, I think. But if you don’t want to hear any more about it, just give her lettuce.” He grinned. “And an apple instead of the pie.” Preacher shook his head. “See, I think no matter what she says, that’s going to make her pissy.” “She said it’s what she wants, right?” “Right.” “May the force be with you,” Jack said with a grin.

I need some time for the rest. I just don’t take something like marriage lightly. If I do it, I’ll mean it, and I won’t change my mind. But I think you’d do it right now for all the wrong reasons.” “Does this have anything to do with the guy you didn’t let stay last night?” he asked. “My boyfriend?” she asked, smiling. She knew it was naughty to taunt him like that; she wasn’t thinking of T.J. as a boyfriend at the moment. “It would be nice of me to tell him if things change in my personal life. But until I have matters settled…” “No, Franci, tell him matters are settled. You won’t be dating him!” “And the woman who keeps calling you?” “What woman?” he asked. “Your phone keeps picking up text messages and voice mails. That has to be a woman.” He took a deep breath. This didn’t seem like a good time to lie, just as he was trying to close a deal. “I dated this girl a few times back at Beale and I told her I wasn’t getting into a steady thing. When I went on leave, I told her we had to cool it because it wasn’t working for me, but she’s deaf. I thought when I left town for a couple of months she’d let it go, but she’s hounding me. I’m going to call her, Franci, and tell her I’m off the market. That I’m getting married. She won’t call anymore. Now, come on.” “Poor thing,” Franci said. “She might be as sick in love with you as I was.” “As you were?” he asked, a little frightened of the answer. “And I said I’m not marrying you.” “Okay, let me get this right—I suggested marriage and you said no?” “How about that? What a shocker, huh?” “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do? I thought that’s what I should do!” “Okay, you still don’t get it. We don’t want to because you’re doing what you should. Listen carefully, Sean. I want you to be absolutely sure you want to commit to a life with me and Rosie, because you don’t have to marry me to have time with your daughter. She’s your daughter—I won’t get in the way of that. Though I have to admit, the way you suggested marriage really just knocked me off my feet.” He would never admit it to anyone, but her refusal gave him an instant feeling of relief. He wasn’t ready to take it all on. But it would sure make things tidier if they could just do it the way it probably should be done. He slid close to her and, before she could protest, pulled her right up against him. “You wanna get knocked off your feet, sweetheart? Because we both know we do that to each other.” He put a big hand around the back of her neck and ran his thumb from her earlobe to the hollow of her throat. Then he kissed that spot. “I want you with me, Franci. Tonight, and from now on.” “Sean,” she said gravely, “when you rejected me four years ago, there were times I wondered if I’d lost my mind and my heart. The things we said to each other—I don’t want to risk a marriage like that. After we split and I moved to Santa Rosa, sometimes I grieved so badly I worried that I was hurting the baby with endless crying, sleepless nights, loss of appetite. I just can’t face something like that again.” He ran a knuckle across her soft cheek. “Baby, I didn’t reject you. I wanted to be with you—I just had a hang-up with marriage.” “Well, now the shoe’s on the other foot. Suck it up.” Life

there to ground her. Eventually Maggie returned to Bonninghams, placing Pearl in Tim’s work creche the week after she turned five months old. She’d felt awful at first, as she shrugged on her slightly tight, slightly scratchy pre-baby suit and headed out the door. It felt good later though, at work, knowing that she had the next seven hours to do what she loved. But Maggie had felt terribly guilty admitting that even to herself. That had been almost four years ago, and Pearl had grown into a determined, spirited little girl. Maggie felt her heart twist with love and guilt every time she thought about her. She wanted to work and she wanted to spend more time with her daughter. So why couldn’t she have both? There was just no easy solution. Sometimes it seemed to Maggie that the balance between work and home was as delicate and finely wrought – and as prone to snapping under pressure – as the gold chain hanging around her neck. Maggie’s fingers brushed over Tim’s and

So I heard the big news.” “Oh. Yeah.” I blush but hide it by rubbing a wet washcloth over my face. “Are you excited?” “Yeah. I am. It’s a good thing. It’s just… unexpected.” “Eh, I’ve caught him staring at you a bunch of times. Think he was interested from the beginning.” If anything, my cheeks burn even hotter. “Really?” “Yes. That’s my take anyway. Plus things happen faster now than they used to. People don’t have time to play around and hem and haw and romanticize and waste months and years before they commit. And Jimmy’s been on his own a few years now. Ever since his wife died.” “He had a wife?” I lower my washcloth and turn around to face her. “Yeah, he did. She died like three or four years ago. They got married right out of high school, and I think they did pretty well together. They didn’t think she could get pregnant, but she finally did. But the baby came way too early, and then she and the baby both died.” “Oh.” My chest clenches. That must have been so hard for him. “That’s terrible.” “I’m sure it was. I wasn’t around here then, but that’s what I’ve heard about him. He seems like a decent guy. You could do a lot worse.” “I know. I’m glad about it. Kind of nervous since I’ve never done anything like it before, but still glad.

This wasn’t a lie. Cheng Xin really had been found. Her mother had never married, but one night, while on a date with her boyfriend at the time, she saw a three-month-old baby abandoned on a park bench, along with a bottle of milk, a thousand yuan, and a slip of paper with the baby girl’s birthday. Her mother and the boyfriend had intended to bring the baby to the police, who would have turned the baby over to the city’s civil affairs department, who would have sent her to an orphanage. Instead, her mother decided that she wanted to bring the baby home and go to the police in the morning. Perhaps it was the experience of being a mother for a night, or some other reason, but the next morning, she found that she couldn’t send the child away. Every time she thought of parting from the young life, her heart ached, and so she decided to become the child’s mother. The boyfriend left her because of this. During the following decade, she dated four or five other men, but all of them ended up leaving her because of Cheng Xin. Later, Cheng Xin found out that none of the men had explicitly objected to her mother’s decision to keep her, but if any of them ever showed a trace of impatience or lack of understanding, her mother broke up with him. She refused to let any harm come to Cheng Xin.

But he wasn’t procrastinating because he didn’t want to work on the friar’s painting. No. A masterpiece did not pop immediately to mind. He had to knead the problems like dough: how could the Virgin’s face fulfill classical expectations of beauty, yet surprise the viewer with the unexpected; how could each of the figures maintain their separate identities, yet intertwine into a single whole; how could he transform a few scratches of lines on paper into a living, breathing, complex organism? Creating new life took time. Now that his first year was almost up, Leonardo needed to convince the friars to let him stay. He had barely made any progress on human flight. Relocating now would interrupt his experiments. He had to prove that he was not only working on the altarpiece, but that a painting by him would be worth the wait. So, for the last two weeks, he had been displaying his design to the public, and now he had invited the friars up to witness the spectacle. As the song came to an end, Leonardo stepped onto a raised platform next to a large panel covered in a piece of black velvet. He raised his hand with a flourish, and Salaì yanked off the cloth. His cartoon, the life-sized preparatory drawing for the altarpiece, was displayed on a gilded pedestal. Candlelight illuminated the charcoal and chalk sketch on thin, tinted paper. The picture was of St. Anne, the Virgin Mary, John the Baptist, and baby Jesus, all interconnected in a surging, pyramidal composition. The four figures were vibrant, their faces the ideal of classical beauty. He’d spent months dreaming up that image before putting it down on paper, so when he’d finally started sketching, the lines seemed to appear in a flash. Like his performance that night, it was all part of his show. Let the people think the design had arrived complete and perfect, as if sent by God himself.

Good luck, girl, because I know we like these tall men, but it makes a difference carrying babies with their genetics!” Presley widened her eyes, and the ladies agreed with her, high-fiving. “Please do not tell me that.” I palmed my face with a laugh. “Right, like why are you five feet, four inches and you only two months old, boy?

Rate of myelination in different brain areas The various brain areas begin and end myelination at different ages. For example, visual areas finish myelinating by six months. At that age an infant can see an object moving through space as a homogeneous object; before that, it’s just a collection of disconnected colors and edges. Watch babies wave a toy back and forth in front of their eyes. This rehearsal wires up the visual areas so they can begin to recognize and track objects. Over and over, the same groups of neurons fire together, forming visual functional groups that eventually work together well enough to let the baby recognize familiar objects. Babies’ other senses work along with sight to help form a mental image of objects. Here’s one study that continues to astonish me every time I think about it: Newborns, still in the hospital, were given pacifiers to suck. There were several different shapes: square, round, pointed. Large models of all the different-shaped pacifiers were hung above their cribs. The babies stared longest at the pacifier that matched the one that had been in their mouth. These infants appeared able to relate the mental image created with touch — what was in their mouths — with the one created with vision — what was dangling above their heads. I remember the first time our oldest daughter saw a book. She was about three months old — barely able to sit up — and we put a cardboard book with very simple pictures of toys in front of her. Instantly she put her face right above the book, and she inspected every square inch of the page from about an inch away. Then she sat back up and slapped the pages all over. We could almost see her brain working: “What is this? It’s flat but it reminds me a lot of the things I see around me.” She combined the senses of touch and sight together to examine a new phenomenon in her world. Speech begins with babbling at around six months of age. I remember our youngest daughter beginning speech by mimicking the up and down flow of the sentence before she began to make individual sounds. The flow of speech is supported by language centers in the right hemisphere; the details of speech are supported by language centers in the left hemisphere. Our daughter was practicing how to talk, using the brain areas that were currently available. Her right hemisphere appeared to mature before her left hemisphere. As the speech areas develop and these groups become more extensively coordinated, the child’s speech becomes clearer and connected. The auditory areas finish myelinating by two years. The child now has the brain foundation for speech production. She can distinguish the individual sounds that make up words, and can begin to string words together into phrases and sentences. The motor system is myelinated by four years. Before that, children are very slow to respond. Have you ever played catch with a three-year-old? He holds out his arms, the ball hits his chest, it falls on the ground — and then he closes his arms. It takes so long for the message to move from his eyes to his brain, from his brain to the spinal cord, and finally from his spinal cord to his arms, that he misses the ball. You can practice with him all you like, but his reactions won’t speed up until his motor system myelinates.

Infants sort what they hear through the superior temporal sulcus (STS), located just above the ear. At four months all auditory information—whether their mother’s voice or a car horn—is attended to by the STS. But by seven months, babies start singling out human voices as the only sounds that trigger attention from the STS,6 and the STS shows especially heightened activity when that voice carries emotion. This little piece of our brain is dedicated to taking in language and reading tone and meaning. But get this: When we ourselves speak, the STS turns off. We don’t hear our own voice, at least not the same way we hear everyone else. This explains why we are so often surprised when we get feedback based on how we said something. (“Tone? I’m not using some kind of tone!”) It also helps explain why our voice sounds so unfamiliar when we hear ourselves on an audio recording. When transmitted from a speaker, our own voice gets routed through our STS, and we suddenly hear ourselves the way others do. (“I sound like that?!”) We’ve been hearing ourselves every day of our lives, and yet we haven’t.

One study offers particularly provocative evidence of the benefits of vestibular stimulation. These researchers exposed babies, who ranged in age from three to thirteen months, to sixteen sessions of chair spinning: Four times a week for four weeks, the infants were seated on a researcher’s lap and spun around ten times in a swivel chair, each spin followed by an abrupt stop. To maximize stimulation of each of the three semicircular canals, the spinning included one or two rotations in each direction with the babies held in each of three positions: sitting, with the head tilted forward about 30 degrees, and side-lying on both left and right sides. Not surprisingly, the babies loved this treatment. They usually babbled or laughed during the rotation and became fussy during the thirty-second rest period between spins. In addition to this “trained” group, there were two groups of control infants, one that received no treatment, and one that came in for the same sixteen sessions but only sat on the researcher’s lap in the swivel chair; they did not get to spin. The results were striking. Compared with both control groups, the babies who were spun showed more advanced development of both their reflexes and their motor skills. The difference was particularly marked for motor skills like sitting, crawling, standing, and walking. In fact, the study included a set of three-month-old fraternal twins, of whom one received the training and the other did not. By the end of the study, when they were four months old, the twin who had experienced the vestibular stimulation had mastered head control and could even sit independently, while the unstimulated twin had only just begun to hold his head up.

Ultimately, they found that for babies younger than six months, there’s a three-to-one ratio—they can differentiate between four and twelve; for six-month-olds there’s a two-to-one ratio (babies can differentiate between eight and sixteen or between sixteen and thirty-two); and with nine-montholds, it’s a smaller ratio—differences of eight and twelve. Spelke

Babies are introduced to grains before they are able to digest them properly. The first teeth that appear in a baby’s mouth are the four at the front top, and the four at the bottom front. These teeth are tearing  teeth, and thus are well designed to handle fruit and vegetables. Seven to ten months is the average age these teeth appear.  Next, the first four molars come through, this happens between fourteen and twenty-two months of age. These large four cusped teeth are for grinding;–grinding grain. As these teeth emerge the glands in the mouth begin to release ptylin, which is the enzyme that is essential for the effective digestion of starch.  When babies are given starch before these molars  are present, malabsorption syndrome in the gut can develop, which often manifests itself as gluten intolerance in later years.

It happened in the middle of the night, while the young family of four was fast asleep in their home in the West Bank village of Duma. Two Israeli settlers threw a firebomb into their house, setting it ablaze. Flames engulfed the home and baby Ali, just eighteen months old, was killed. His father, Sa’ad, was so badly burned that he died a week later. That left the mother, Reham Dawabsheh, and her four-year-old son, Ahmed, as the only surviving members of the family. Reham, who was a teacher in an elementary school, suffered third-degree burns on 90 percent of her body—and after nearly five weeks on life support, she also died. And so, four-year-old Ahmed became the sole surviving member of his immediate household. Second- and third-degree burns covered 60 percent of his body. And this little boy was now motherless, fatherless, and brotherless.

When we did she said, ‘Freud said that primitives are like Western children. I don’t believe that for a second, but most anthropologists don’t blink an eye at it, so we’ll let it stand for the sake of my argument, which is: Every child seeks meaning. When I was four I remember asking my quite pregnant mother: What’s the point of all this? Of all what? she asked. Of all this life. I remember how she looked at me and I felt like I’d said something very bad. She came and sat beside me at the table and told me I’d just asked a very big question, and that I wouldn’t be able to answer it until I was an old, old woman. But she was wrong. Because she had that baby, and when she brought her home I knew I’d found the point. Her name was Katie but everyone called her Nell’s Baby. She was my baby. I did everything for her: fed her, changed her, dressed her, put her to sleep. And then when she was nine months old, she got sick. I was sent to my aunt’s in New Jersey and when I came back she was gone. They didn’t even let me say goodbye. I couldn’t even touch her or hold her. She was gone like a rug or a chair. I feel like I got most of life’s lessons before I turned six. For me, other people are the point, but other people can disappear. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.

maybe he’s planning to stay for an extended period. I know that’s how Europeans do things. Their vacations are always a couple of months it seems.

Don’t wake up. Please don’t wake up.’ Begging my four-month-old baby to sleep — or stay asleep — has never worked before. God knows I’ve tried. So I don’t know why I think this time will be any different.

But then she thought of that lime squirming inside of Carli, and she wondered if she could really come back after four months. Could she drop her baby off at day care every morning, leave that baby for eight or nine hours at a stretch? If she stayed at home with the baby, she would miss that shot of adrenaline when she closed a deal, and she would miss the scrape and clatter of the shop, but what if she missed her baby’s first steps or first words?

for the rest of the night. Other than to refuel with holiday leftovers. “Would you still love me if I told you I didn’t know what tasted better, Christmas leftovers or you?” Jana cocked her eyebrow with a sexy smile on her face. Damn, she was beautiful. “No but I will be mad unless you do some very thorough research and come up with a satisfying answer…” I grinned. This Christmas was unlike any of the others Jana and I had spent together. This time we had two little boys, a bigger family and we’d faced our biggest threat yet and come out on top. “If it’s for the sake of research, consider me in babe.” And I spent the rest of the night doing science. Between the gorgeous legs of my beautiful wife. I was pretty sure in that moment, life for the Reckless Bastard’s couldn’t get any better. Merry friggin’ Christmas to us! * * * * If you think the Reckless Bastards are spicy bad boys, they’re nothing compared to the steam in my next series Reckless MC Opey, TX Chapter where Gunnar and Maisie move to Texas! There’s also a sneak peek on the next page.   Don’t wait — grab your copy today!  Copyright © 2019 KB Winters and BookBoyfriends Publishing Inc Published By: BookBoyfriends Publishing Inc Chapter One Gunnar “We’re gonna be cowboys!” Maisie had been singing that song since we got on the interstate and left Nevada and the only family we’d had in the world behind. For good. Cross was my oldest friend, and I’d miss him the most, even though I knew we’d never lose touch. I’d miss Jag too, even Golden Boy and Max. The prospects were cool, but I had no attachment to them. Though I gave him a lot of shit, I knew I’d even miss Stitch. A little. It didn’t matter that the last year had been filled with more shit than gold, or that I was leaving Vegas in the dust, we were all closer for the hell we’d been through. But still, I was leaving. Maisie and I’d been on the road for a couple of days. Traveling with a small child took a long damn time. Between bathroom breaks and snack times we’d be lucky to make it to Opey by the end of the month. Lucky for me, Maisie had her mind set on us becoming cowboys, complete with ten gallon hats, spurs and chaps, so she hadn’t shed one tear, yet. It wasn’t something I’d been hoping for but I was waiting patiently for reality to sink in and the uncontrollable sobs that had a way of breaking a grown man’s heart. “You’re not a boy,” I told her and smiled through the rear view mirror. “Hard to be a cowboy if you’re not even a boy.” Maisie grinned, a full row of bright white baby teeth shining back at me right along with sapphire blue eyes and hair so black it looked to be painted on with ink. “I’m gonna be a cowgirl then! A cowgirl!” She went on and on for what felt like forever, in only the way that a four year old could, about all the cool cowgirl stuff she’d have. “Boots and a pony too!” “A pony? You can’t even tie your shoes or clean up your toys and you want a pony?” She nodded in that exaggerated way little kids did. “I’ll learn,” she said with the certainty of a know it all teenager, a thought that terrified the hell out of me. “You’ll help me, Gunny!” Her words brought a smile to my face even though I hated that fucking nickname she’d picked up from a woman I refused to think about ever again. I’d help Maisie because that’s what family did. Hell, she was the reason I’d uprooted my entire fucking life and headed to the great unknown wilds of Texas. To give Maisie a normal life or as close to normal as I was capable of giving her. “I’ll always help you, Squirt.” “I know. Love you Gunny!” “Love you too, Cowgirl.” I winked in the mirror and her face lit up with happiness. It was the pure joy on her face, putting a bloom in her cheeks that convinced me this was the right thing to do. I didn’t want to move to Texas, and I didn’t want to live on a goddamn ranch, but that was my future. The property was already bought and paid for with my name

Crying It Out (Extinction) The optimal time to use this strategy is after three to four months of age (post–due date). Perhaps this is when both parents must return to work full-time or with postcolicky infants (colic usually starts to dissipate at three to four months) or after parents see partial success with graduated extinction. Extinction can successfully be used earlier, but most parents find it unacceptably harsh for younger babies. Extinction was used with some twins in my survey at five to six months of age after the due date, when the parents had suffered from becoming desperately sleep-deprived. At three to four months, many parents in my survey used extinction successfully. Extinction means open-ended crying at night. The process is pretty straightforward: if you know that it is time to sleep and not time to feed, you ignore the crying, without a time limit. Initially, the baby will fall asleep after wearing herself out crying, but very quickly this process teaches the baby how to fall asleep unassisted without protest or crying. And the baby then stays asleep for a longer time. A major fear here is that prolonged crying by one twin will disturb the sleeping of the other. Parents in my survey stated that the sleepy twin, surprisingly, almost always adapted to the crying after a few nights and slept through their sibling’s protests. Of course, another major fear is that you will harm your child by letting him cry. But as long as he is safely in his crib, letting him cry is only a means to an end of better sleeping. There is no published research showing that this procedure causes any harm to children. In contrast, there is no question that not sleeping well truly harms them. If your twins’ bedtime is early and naps are in place, the process of extinction usually takes three to five nights. In general, the parents in my survey describe the first night’s crying to be thirty to forty-five minutes, the second night’s ten to thirty minutes, and the third night’s zero to ten minutes. If their bedtime is too late or a twin is not napping well, the process may take much longer, or it may appear to work but the success is short-lived. Sometimes older children cry more on the second night than on the first, but the entire process still takes just a few days. “We started around three or four months as fatigue from care and unpredictable sleep schedules reached the breaking point. The first night, our babies cried for about twenty minutes; the second for about ten minutes. They’ve slept through the night ever since.

In developmental psychology we talk breezily about the big differences between nine-month-olds’ and twelve-month-olds’ conceptions of objects, or three-year-olds’ and four-year-olds’ understanding of minds. But what this means is that in just a few months, these children have completely changed their minds about what the world is like. Imagine that your world-view in September was totally different from what it was in June, and then completely changed again by Christmas. Or imagine that your most basic beliefs would be entirely transformed between 2009 and 2010, and then again by 2012. Really flexible and innovative adults might change their minds this way two or three times in a lifetime.

Contrary to Piaget’s theory, it turns out that babies come into this world with an innate, non-verbal “number sense” and the ability to “guesstimate” the relative number of things. Newborns just two days old are, in fact, even capable of doing a kind of numbers matching game. Researchers found that when they played a specific number of syllables to newborns, the babies were able to match it to the correct number of geometric shapes. For example, when the newborns were played “tuuuuu tuuuu tuuuu tuuu,” they would look longer at a picture with four squares; when twelve syllables were played, they looked longer at a picture with twelve squares. Even more impressive, the ability of infants to link the number of sounds to the number of objects at six months of age often predicted their eventual math ability.

There’s this new glitch messing everything up. He calls himself Pigrothbrine. He only showed up a couple days ago and already he is in control of everything!” Otis growled and stomped on the ground. “Where is he?” “You … you’ve heard of him?” Trevor gasped. “Look at me, kid,” said Otis. “How do you think I got to look like this?” Trevor looked at Otis and gasped. “But … weren’t you a zombie pigman when you rescued Baby Zeke a couple months ago?” Otis thumped his chest. “I still am. But I have to kill Pigrothbrine in order to get my skin back.” “If that works,” I said. I turned back to Trevor. “What’s Pigrothbrine doing?” Trevor took a deep breath and sighed. He shook his cube sadly. “You remember Cassius the husk, right? Well, after he stirred up all the anger and anxiety of the nether mobs against the surface dwellers, there have been mutterings about his ideology. Pigrothbrine found out about it and is exploiting the anger to mobilize another army. They’re calling themselves the Sons of Cassius.” I shook my head. “That’s terrible. Do you think they’ll actually carry out Cassius’ plans to conquer the Overworld?” “I don’t know. All I know is that anyone who disobeys Pigrothbrine or his generals ends up despawned.” Trevor paused, sniffed, and then began to cry. “Just … just like my parents.” I reached out and touched his cube to console him. “What happened?” “They tried to keep the promise they made to you not to do anything against Minecraft. But when they refused to let their people become members of the Sons of Cassius, they were struck down by bolts of lightning that came out nowhere.” “So, he can make lightning work even in the Nether?” said Heidi. “That’s amazing.” I nodded and then looked at Trevor. “What did you do after your parents were … despawned?” “I had to join the army. Pigrothbrine wouldn’t let me ascend to my rightful place on the throne. He appointed one of his magma cube generals to run the kingdom.” “How did you escape?” I asked. “Pigrothbrine and his generals have us building canals to channel lava rivers into big pools. No one knows why. Earlier today, when I was walking next to a lava stream, I jumped in. I drifted downstream for a while before jumping out and locating a nether portal to the surface. Then, I hopped here as quickly as I could.” Otis looked at me with fire in his eyes. I could tell that his attitude toward pursuing Pigrothbrine had changed from his reluctance just a few hours ago. “Let’s go. Pigrothbrine has only been in existence for a couple of days and it sounds like he’s already causing apocalyptic damage. Let’s go see what we can do about it.” “I don’t know. It seems dangerous.” Otis scowled at me. “Aren’t you the Warrior? We didn’t even know where Pigrothbrine was a few minutes ago, but now we do. We have to take the fight to him.” I looked at Trevor. “Is Pigrothbrine actually down there? I mean, have you seen him recently?” “Part pig, part enderman?” said Trevor. “Exactly.” Trevor nodded his head. “He’s living in the nether fortress inside the kingdom of the magma cubes in a nether wastes biome. If anyone needs to go talk to him that’s where they go. I’ve never been inside the fortress, but that’s where everyone says he is living.” Heidi reached into her inventory and pulled out her newly-acquired netherite sword. “Let’s go get him. With the three of us working together ….” She looked at Trevor and smiled. “With the four of us working together, maybe we can take him out.” “Maybe,” I said. “I guess we go and conduct reconnaissance at least. Maybe when we get back Zeb will have figured something out.” “Well, if we find Pigrothbrine, I’m going to kill him,” snarled Otis. “Reconnaissance is for wimps.” Trevor ignored Otis and said, “Thank you, Baby Zeke. Thank you, everybody.” “So how do we get to this nether portal you used?” “I could take you there, but it comes out inside the Nether near a worksite controlled by Pigrothbrine.

The children hadn't any Mamma. She had died when Phil was a baby, four years before my story began. Katy could remember her pretty well; to the rest she was but a sad, sweet name, spoken on Sunday, and at prayer-times, or when Papa was especially gentle and solemn. In place of this Mamma, whom they recollected so dimly, there was Aunt Izzie, Papa's sister, who came to take care of them when Mamma went away on that long journey, from which, for so many months, the little ones kept hoping she might return. Aunt Izzie was a small woman, sharp-faced and thin, rather old-looking, and very neat and particular about everything. She meant to be kind to the children, but they puzzled her much, because they were not a bit like herself when she was a child. Aunt Izzie had been a gentle, tidy little thing, who loved to sit as Curly Locks did, sewing long seams in the parlor, and to have her head patted by older people, and be told that she was a good girl; whereas Katy tore her dress every day, hated sewing, and didn't care a button about being called "good," while Clover and Elsie shied off like restless ponies when any one tried to pat their heads. It was very perplexing to Aunt Izzie, and she found it hard to quite forgive the children for being so "unaccountable," and so little like the good boys and girls in Sunday-school memoirs, who were the young people she liked best, and understood most about.

Hardly four months ago, after almost giving up hope that anyone would apply, Grace was grateful when Tim, a scrawny loner, single, who'd never been around babies before showed up with nothing but the clothes on his back and an old wide-brimmed Stetson.

The muscles that allow us to talk are strengthened when we chew and swallow. As baby progresses from rooting for a nipple at birth, to more robust sucking, to eating her first mushy solids at age four to six months, she is preparing to utter her first words. Certain speech milestones correlate directly to baby’s eating milestones, for example, taking single sips from an open cup (not a sippy cup or bottle) correlates with advanced lip-movement sounds such as “w,” and being able to move food around inside the mouth enables baby to properly enunciate her words.

Those six months of maternity leave were dense, elemental. Returning to work, I felt like Rip Van Winkle, like I’d woken after decades, except no one else had aged. Nothing at the office has changed, and I have to act like I haven’t either. If I seem distracted or tired, slower than before, my bosses might decide that someone without a baby, or at least not a single mother, would manage the job better. So I pretend to be well rested and focused, despite sleeping in four-hour increments at night, despite several times a day missing Finn so much it hurts to breathe. In

…After seventeen minutes of panicky crowds destroying everything in their path, Eric could distinguish, despite all the chaos and hellish noise, the slight buzz of a second plane. He started counting to himself, watching the blazing inferno at the North Tower: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… The second Boeing glided into the South Tower, WTC-2, and it seemed to Eric that this plane was flying slowly, that its impact was a soft one… Due to the pandemonium all around, the impact itself seemed not to be as loud as the first hit. Still, in a moment the second twin was also blazing. Both skyscrapers were on fire now. Novack looked up again at what had happened a minute before: the terror attack of the century. Then he started walking fast down Church Street, away from the huge buildings that were now on fire. He knew that in about an hour, the South Tower was to collapse completely, and half an hour after that, the same was to happen to the North Tower, which was also weakened by the impact. He knew there were tons of powerful Thermate in both buildings. Over the course of the previous two months, some fake repairmen had brought loads of it into the towers and put them in designated places around the trusswork. It was meant to make buildings collapse like card towers, which would only happen when the flames reached a certain point. The planes had started an unstoppable countdown as soon as they hit the buildings: these were the last minutes of their existence. Next in line was the third building: 7 WTC, which stood north of the Twin Towers. It counted forty-seven floors, and it too was stuffed with Thermate. Novack started getting concerned, however, that the third plane seemed to be late. Where’s the third plane? Why is it late? It’s already fifty minutes after the first impact, and they were supposed to hit the three targets with a time lag of about twenty minutes. Where are you, birdie number three? You are no less important than the first two, and you were also promised to my clients… People were still running in all directions, shouting and bumping into each other. Sirens wailed loudly, heartrendingly; ambulances were rushing around, giving way only to firefighters and emergency rescue teams. Suddenly hundreds of policemen appeared on the streets, but it seemed that they didn’t really know what they were supposed to do. They mostly ran around, yelling into their walkie-talkies. At Thomas Street, Eric walked into a parking lot: the gate arm was up and the security guy must have left, for the door of his booth stood wide open… …Two shots rang out simultaneously during the fifth and the longest second. They were executed synchronously, creating a single, stinging, deadly sound. The bullet from the sixth floor of the book depository went straight up into the sky, as planned. The second bullet shot out of a sniper rifle, held confidently in the arms of a woman behind the hedge, on the grassy knoll. It was her bullet that struck the head of the 35th US president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The woman walked quickly down the grassy knoll. Stepping only about five meters away, she put her rifle into a baby pram waiting there, with a real six-month-old baby boy whimpering inside it. She put on thick glasses and started walking away, exhibiting no haste. Only thirty seconds after the second shot, the woman was gone, nowhere to be seen… After the second or, rather, the third shot, the one from the knoll, President Kennedy’s head was tossed back. Jackie somehow managed to crawl onto the back hood of the car. A security agent from the escort car had already reached them. The motorcade picked up speed and disappeared under the overpass. Zapruder’s camera kept whirring for some seconds. He must have filmed the whole operation – that is, the assassination of an acting US president. But now he simply stood there without saying a word, completely dumbfounded...

Babies are born with three hundred bones—ninety-four more than adults. Those extra bones fuse together during development. They also don’t have kneecaps. The patella develops into hard bone between the age of three and five. They can’t taste salt (just sweet and sour) until four months. But they have three thousand taste buds compared to ten thousand in adults. Sixty-nine is not just a great sex position, it’s also the highest recorded number of children born to one mother. A Russian woman. Sixteen pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets.

and it can’t be deleted just like the mind can’t be deleted.  Every person comes programmed with the Ego, which becomes activated in a small child at around the age of 18 months.  Up to this point, the baby identifies itself with its primary caregiver as one.  Once the Ego kicks in, the child begins to perceive itself as separate from others and the world around it.  Whenever parents and child psychologists speak of developmental periods like the “terrible twos”, “terrible fours” or the challenging teenage years, what they really are unknowingly referring to are the Ego’s growth spurts during which the Ego wishes to assert itself over its human host, resulting in challenging-to-the-caregiver developmental changes in the child itself.

But she hadn’t done it for herself. Numb, she put a hand over her belly and felt the roundness there, four months along and a little bigger every day. If her baby was a boy, she would name him Adam, and pray that he took after his father. Sometimes, though … Sometimes she let herself consider the possibility that the thing growing inside her might not be a baby at all. And then she would scream, just for a moment or two until it became irritated and seized control from within, silencing her. It didn’t like her to scream like that. Bad for the baby, the demon would whisper inside her mind. And the baby needs to be strong. Meryam wondered how much it would hurt to give birth to something with horns.

Merle took off to hide his front end under a dining room chair, ass in the air like always, as I scooped up the shoe he’d been gnawing on like a damn rawhide bone. “Just a shoe?” I asked in a deadly-quiet voice. “Just a shoe? This is a goddamned Manolo Blahnik! It cost four hundred and seventeen dollars!” I stared down at the ravaged shoe in my hand and felt a whimper bubble up from my chest. I swear to God, I was this close to crying as I looked down at my poor, ruined baby. “Holy shit! You paid four hundred and seventeen dollars for a pair of friggin’ shoes?” Trevor asked in astonishment. “Are you insane!” “Nooo, I said this shoe cost four hundred and seventeen dollars. As a pair, they cost eight thirty-five!” I shouted like the math made the situation more understandable. “Fuck me, cher. It’s a shoe. You walk around with it on your foot; you don’t live in the damn thing! You’re telling me that ugly-ass thing cost more than I paid in rent for a month at my apartment?” I sucked in an audible gasp. How dare he call my precious ugly. “Take it back,” I whispered. “What?” Trevor looked at me like I was a crazy person. “Take it back. This shoe is not ugly. It’s stunning,” I said, holding it to my chest and giving it a loving stroke. He let out a sarcastic grunt and eyeballed the pump like it was garbage. “Not so stunning covered in dog slobber,” he laughed. And I was a second away from stabbing him with the chewed-up stiletto heel. Those shoes deserved to be praised. They deserved to be worn to the most expensive restaurants and balls and red carpet premiers! And they deserved to be buried with dignity in the backyard under my pretty oak tree. And I didn’t think I was being ridiculous at all!

As he or she grows, the amount of formula your baby consumes will gradually increase. In general, during the first month, expect six to 12 feedings in a 24-hour period — about every two to four hours. By six months, your baby will probably consume 6 to 8 ounces at each of four or five feedings a day.

He left only a small office for his personal business and several people who worked for him buying and selling stocks and paying taxes. In 1917, we were occupying the entire top floor and half of the floor below at 820 Fifth Avenue, which is where I was born. We—“the babes,” as Mother often referred to us in her diary—lived with Powelly in this Fifth Avenue apartment. A governess, Anna Otth, had been added after Bill was born. I can’t remember the years in New York, and since I was a baby, those very early years of separation and substitute parenting had the least effect on me of any of the children. Only psychiatrists can guess about their effect on my older siblings. Much later, my brother, when he was in the process of being analyzed to become a psychoanalyst himself, got very angry thinking about the separation and testily asked my mother how she could have left her children in New York for those early years. She said, “Well, you were all in school.” But the older children were two, four, and six, and I was a few months old, when our parents first left for Washington. WHEN SHE WENT to Washington, my mother’s life changed drastically—and for the better. She was part of a team for the first time, going into a strange city in which she and my father were both new. There seems to have been less anti-Semitic prejudice in Washington than in New York. And in Washington, unlike the many women who to this day find the city distasteful because they are regarded as appendages of their husbands, my mother found a wide canvas on which to paint. She continued to maintain her old interests, particularly in Chinese art, even admitting in her autobiography that “I was so engrossed in translating Chinese texts and in writing a book on the philosophy of Chinese art that it never occurred to me to make any active contribution toward the war effort. In plain truth I sat out the First World War.” At the same time, however, she threw herself into Washington’s social life in a determined way, partly because she enjoyed it but also because she saw immersion in social life as the way she could help further my father’s interests. Mother began another diary at the time they moved to Washington, which makes it clear how devoted she was to him. She often worried that his talents weren’t sufficiently recognized, and she constantly noted the progress of his career and her faith in his abilities: “He is so big that I want him to be of more help in this terrible situation of chaos produced by incompetence and politics mixed.” Although she never quite said so, and often claimed the contrary, she clearly thrived