Thin

The mothers in our parenting class are all scary thin. It's like they were wheeled straight into liposuction after delivery before the epidural wore off.

Murder

Jason Della Rocca's latest post reminded me: I accidentally exposed Sofi to her first murder yesterday. Watching *Hard-Boiled*, (the literal Chinese title is supposedly *Hot-handed God of Cops*, according to IMDB), and bottle feeding her at the same time. Trying to keep her head turned away from the screen, but there was an execution in a public library that kind of took me by surprise. Whoops.

Even at four months she likes TV; she twists and squirms aggressively to get a look at the screen.

Wish I'd Known

I wasn't able to figure out when we should switch to a faster nipple for bottle feeding. It's probably somewhere online, but for whatever reason, I was never able to find it.

Tonight we tried switching to a fast nipple just for the hell of it, really. Just to see what would happen.

And what used to take an hour and a half of fussing and complaining took about ten minutes. So that's why she didn't like the bottle. It was too slow!

If only we'd known sooner. With all the parenting classes and books, you'd think this would be part of the curriculum. But no. Had to figure it out for ourselves. Or maybe we were sick that day. Or skipped that chapter.

It almost makes me want to have a second kid, so we can use what we learn with the first...

Streak Over

Sofi cried last night, waking us up multiple times and crying for long enough (over 5 minutes) that Cathy got up and tended to her at 4 AM. Still, it was a 5-night run before that. A record.

Thanks, California

It was mildly bothersome that Sofi liked to sleep from 7:30 to 5. I didn't get to see much of her in the evenings when I got home from work, and then she woke us up early in the morning. Happily, last Sunday, the entire state of California agreed to set their clocks so Sofi's schedule would make a little more sense.

Honorable Mention

So Cathy, against my better judgment, sends my novel and the $100 entrance fee to the Writer's Digest Self-Published Fiction Contest.

The coolest thing about this is it means she believes in me: enough to pay the money (ok, it's our money, but still...), put the thing in an envelope, lick the stamps, walk to the post office. I can keep reminding myself about this whenever I need a boost.

The second coolest thing is I won an Honorable Mention. Which means they'll list me in their magazine and on their website. I'm not sure what their circulation is but I'm sure it's multiple orders of magnitude higher than my blog.

And they gave me a nice little certificate, and a "commentary sheet" that says things like: Plot: 5, Grammar: 4, Character Development: 5. (Grammar 4? What, you guys don't like sentence fragments and parataxis? That's a stylistic choice, man...) And then they say some nice things like "The writing style is quite sophisticated and ambitious...I found the voice to be controlled and confident. From the beginning of the novel, we are presented with a character with complex internal and external conflicts, a clear question/problem that needs to be solved, and a pace and plot structure that delivers a payoff at the end...Calvin and his friends are characters we understand and relate to, and the writing delves so deeply into their character developments that the reader is compelled to empathize with them."

And I get a gift certificate for $50 of Writer's Digest stuff. Hmm...$100 entrance fee, and I get $50 worth of stuff from their storeroom...

Hat Trick

Okay, she did wake up for three minutes last night. But since we didn't actually get out of bed, I'm going to count it as sleep. So that's three in a row. Rock.