Life in the Slow Lane

I think I can tell you almost the precise hour when my Newbaby grew up. I knew it was coming based on a number of factors: his increased hunger, the famous "six week" spurt mentioned in all of the baby development calenders, and the inevitable truth that a Newbaby doesn't stay new for forever. His growth has actually been the topic of one of the pieces of advice most shared with me: Don't blink! The thinking, of course, is that if I blink I will completely miss him growing up because it really does happen that fast. And so it was that in the middle of the night Friday, my small baby got big. Why can I pinpoint this so accurately? When I put little T down for the night, he was happily ensconced in a diaper size "N". Three hours later when I needed to change him, the clean size "N" diaper wouldn't fit. And to think! I missed watching him grow because I was following one of the other most-frequently shared bits of advice: Sleep when baby sleep...

I am turning this blog into a food blog for just a bit to help out all of my readers who fell in love in Northeastern Brazil. That is... fell in love with tapiocas in Northeastern Brazil. For those of my readers who have not had the gastronomic pleasure of eating a hot tapioca on a crowded street corner, let me first inform you that a tapioca is not a pudding. Nor is a tapioca the pearls you find at the bottom of your boba tea. Imagine an omelet-type food only without eggs. To the uninitiated it may sound weird and not worth the effort of mustering up enough Portuguese to place your order, but you would be wrong. Please don't be offended by that. The other reason I am turning this blog into a food blog for a moment is because my husband, also known to readers as my S.O.S. (Significant Other, Sweetheart) is too excited by his culinary success to bother with sitting down to inform the world about this important breakthrough. S.O.S. has, since he first tasted tapioca goodness on th...

New babies draw people. This is an accepted fact of life. (To more accurately address this truth, we will be using the orthography newbaby, since this is the most widely employed term for this phenomenon.) Newbaby dissolves the city-stranger mentality: when it is impolite to make eye contact, creepy to greet, and unforgivable to initiate a conversation with a personal question.* In this altered reality, it is not unheard of for cashiers to squeal over newbaby, parking spot neighbors to gush through their open window before putting their car properly in park, and for condo neighbors to yell at the yappy dogs next door because "SHHHHH! You'll wake the newbaby!" I haven't yet gotten comfortable with the full range of comments and questions, but strangely enough, this is not the characteristic which unnerves me the most. Gaze at my newbaby long enough and I will confess to everything. I don't deny that the gazing is natural and understandable; I do it myself a good m...