(Does mentioning a substance that came out of my child officially make me a parent blogger, now?)

One of the more pleasant pictures of Piper while ill, immediately after an eye-scrubbing.

Anyhow, four days of rotten sleep left the entire Hirsch family clobbered and susceptible to a hacking summer cold, just in time to return to New York City and watch all the sidewalks melt down to slag as a giant heatwave rolls through town. It's around 11 p.m.; I worked from home today to avoid coughing on anyone at WNYC, and I feel like a horse ran over me today. I've had no appetite at all, though I forced myself to have a bowl of cereal and a handful of trail mix this afternoon. I'm about to go to bed, and it's still approximately two thousand Kelvin degrees outside. My environmentalist side has required me to put the window a/c units on "economy" mode, and the cats are still melted down to little furry piles of butter.

Piper's coughing herself awake in her room, which portends another rotten night's sleep for all of us: Kate's working overnight while Piper and I keep the home fires extinguished.

Here's what I've learned in the last 11 months:

• Having a kid did not magically change me in one instant. This notion that parenthood flips a switch inside one's head is bunk, as near as I can tell. We came home from the hospital and I was surprised by how little had changed. Dirty dishes: check. Meals to cook: check. Books to read, jobs to do, Kate to laugh with: check, check, check. There was just this small person who sleept a lot, in the next room. Was I a father then, or simply a caretaker? Dunno.



• I know I'm a father now, though. Eleven months of having this marvelous little person in my life has altered me as surely as wire shapes a bonsai tree. Slow, ever-changing circumstance and gradually altered habits have crept up on me.
• I watch her learn – to roll, to babble, to eat, to splash – and I am amazed.
• Cooking for the people I love is one of my greatest joys, and cooking for Piper one of the best of those joys. So many people seem to assume that babies should only eat bland, pureed, overcooked mush… and sure, Piper's eaten that sort of thing. But watching her happily scarf down the curried lentils and currants I'd just made, and then go back for seconds? Awesome.



• Just in the last week, she's crossed a threshold: to wit, the door from her room to the hall. I set her on the floor and turned my back while doing [SOMETHING DIAPER RELATED] and when I turned around, she had actually left the room to go out and investigate the fringe on the edge of the hallway rug. Friday she tossed herself into the frigid sprinkler at the park. Yesterday she chased the cat around the living room in slow-motion Lurch-O-Vision. This morning, she beat on the glass-fronted electronics cabinet with her remote control. She is going to break things, it's clear: She is going to fall down, cut herself, bang her head. There Will Be Blood. And I will put band-aids on her and cheer her on as this heady cocktail of pride, caution, adventure and foolhardy exuberance hits us both.
• I am her Abba, this year, even if Piper has not yet mastered the word.

Much like I'm considering throwing a wrench into my car.

On Wednesday, I drove the car to the VW dealer for two free (free!) recall repairs — you know, the ones where they mail you a sheet that says, "We're issuing a voluntary recall on part 3F01AQ, the interior light bulb off-current flow oscillator. Please drive your car very, very slowly to the dealer, never allowing your eyes to drift up to the dome light — WE SAID, DON'T LOOK AT IT — and then back away from the dealer, keeping your hands at your sides and speaking in hushed tones until you are at least one hundred feet from the vehicle. Why are we recalling this part? OH NO REASON. WE JUST MISSED YOU. KISSES, VW"

Anyhow, the recall said the repairs would be free, and since we're thinking about selling or trading the car in, I figured demonstrating that we'd done the maintenance would be a good thing. I also asked them to do the (non-free) 100K miles maintenance.

Thursday afternoon, the dealer calls me to tell me they checked the coolant lines and found oil in it. "Damn you, BP!", I shouted, waving my fist towards Tony Hayward, but then the mechanic corrected me. The Deepwater Horizon oil gusher had (probably) not put oil into the coolant: some crack or leak in the oil cooler had. Parts and labor to replace the oil cooler: $711. For a car we'd like to sell off.

The math is sadly simple: Value of car with repair: ~$5000. (or $6K, if you believe the Kelly Blue Book, which I do not.) Value of car without repair = much, much less. So we do it.

The bummer is psychological. I can see pictures of oil spreading over the sandy beaches on the Gulf coast. I have no way of knowing whether the dealer actually found oil in my car's lines. And it's way too easy to imagine their incentives to do more work on my car: $711 doesn't grow on trees. But if I can't trust the dealers to tell me honestly whether something's wrong or not, I suppose I shouldn't take my car to them. It just rankles that I can't easily do the "verify" part of "trust, but verify."

With the car locked up in the drunk tank through the weekend, hauling down to Pennsylvania on the train with a return trip less than twenty four hours later began to feel like a drag, so I helped maneuver Kate and Piper down to Penn Station and onto NJ Transit, and I stayed home on Saturday.

What did I do? Surprisingly, the exact same things that I did on my 'mental health days' when I was a teenager. (I got sick vanishingly rarely, so my mom would periodically encourage a day home from school for no reason at all.)

Ate pretzels dipped in peanut butter. Despite having shelves of things in my "to-read" pile, read chapters of books I've read a million times before, instead: "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," "Dune." Play video games. Talk with friends. Cook truly stupid combinations of too-old leftovers, feeling virtuous about reusing the congee, tofu sausages, beet greens and goat cheese, figuring the only person I'm endangering is myself.

Oh, and of course the awesome adult tasks that keep a household running: fighting other building residents for washing machines, balancing bank accounts, cleaning up cat barf, dressing the rolling dishwasher up as R2D2, staying up too late. Then Sunday, my work week began, as it does every Sunday.

When I'm in the midst of my regular life, picking hairballs off the floor and out of Piper's mouth, I have very few contiguous blocks of time to do any kind of serious project work, like writing or researching or freelancing radio pieces … and I frequently think that's what I would be doing if I had more time. Who knows? Maybe that's exactly what I'd do after several days of this hardcore goofing off.

But this past weekend was all about the goofing, and I feel simultaneously guilty and relieved about it. My personal to-do list is just as long as it was, but the car and my wife and daughter all come home tomorrow, and that's the best news of all.

This bodes very well for her sense of humor, I suspect.

Kate's chart of developmental milestones says that 90% of kids are rolling over by the time they're six months old. By the time Piper hit seven and then eight months, Kate was suggesting we call Early Intervention to find out what the deal was. Remembering family stories about my incredibly late speech development and having become somewhat resistant to worrying about medical developments in the last year, I shrugged and said I figured she was simply developing at her own pace. "She'll roll over eventually," I said.

Eventually, however, and at our pediatrician's recommendation, we did call Early Intervention. After two weeks of bureaucracy, they sent a physical therapist and a developmental specialist to evaluate Piper.

I had to go to work that day, but Kate called me once they'd left. "They say she's definitely lagging, and she's not showing any particular interest in rolling or moving around. They don't know why. Her tone in her arms and legs is low, too. They're going to refer her for physical therapy."

And right there, my utter conviction that Piper was simply figuring things out at her own pace shattered on the floor like a dropped teacup.

I had not expected this, to say the least. Hearing an expert third party say that there's something wrong with our kid, even something they think will be corrected with therapy, hit me far harder than hearing any diagnosis about *me* in the last year. Suddenly, I'm looking at Piper like her arms and legs might fall off at any moment. Kate and I are going over everything we've done as parents to see whether we've picked her up too much, put her toys too close, failed to drive the cats on carefully scheduled stampedes to induce her to pivot and watch them. (No, no, and probably, but whatever.)

Today we tried putting Piper's toys further out of reach and gave her some of her daily time on her belly, and tried to hear her frustrated crying as the grunting people make in the gym when they've finally got the right weight on the bench press. Frustration should lead to motivation, and motivation to action, and action to borrowing the hovercar keys and posting on Telepathic-Facebook and rolling her eyes at how Dumb. We. Are. All of which I'll accept, as long as this sick feeling that our happy kid has something wrong with her goes away.

The funny thing is, of course, is that Piper's still doing exactly what she was doing on Monday morning, when I was still sure she was just doing her own thing. Still moving all her limbs, still getting better at picking the O's and blueberries off her tray, still kicking me in the chest when she gets excited. She's changing every day, and the things she's doing are still changing. All that's changed is a PT's mild concern… but that's enough to set me off.

To make me feel even more frustrated with my own anxiety, I recall that a seeming majority of our friends' and family's babies have had way more involved problems: hospitalizations and special shoes and brain imaging and early births and names that could very well get them stuffed into lockers, someday. Piper hasn't had anything that severe, so why am I this worried? And what will I be like when she has a for-real crisis?

Instead, I made a huge pot of cassoulet-inspired vegetarian stew before Kate left, and something that alleged to be "tempeh confit" but really is nothing at all like confit, and we asked our babysitter to come an extra day this week, and we counted the frozen bags of breast milk in the freezer to make sure that we've got enough. (Yes, we have enough. Anyone need some frozen human milk?) Kate changed the cat litter. I'll balance the check book. I keep telling myself that if everyone does tasks of this size on a regular basis, we'll have a working economy and a functioning world.

I have writing I want to do, but as usual, when I let myself anticipate the writing I want to do (instead of just doing it) I freeze up and convince myself that I should just keep writing it in my head, where it'll be inviolate and perfect and mellifluous and above reproach. Works great, until my classic anxiety dream (on stage, forgetting lines) crops up again, and then I know it's time to actually put my fingers on the keyboard and say something, anything, even if it's dull, and has no coda. So that's my goal for these five days: write the thing, continue writing the other thing, and refine the thing.

This is what a napping child looks like:

This is what a "napping" child looks like:

This is just to say

I have licked
the clementines
that were in
your fingers

and which
you were probably
thinking
you were going to eat

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so not breast milk

Above, Addie and Piper sharing some chuckles at dinner last night.