(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.

Admittedly, her movement technique has a bit of the "harbor-seal-galumphing-on-dry-land" about it, but I'm sure that'll smooth out with time.

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?

This is what a napping child looks like:

This is what a "napping" child looks like:

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

We refer to this process as "hitting the snooze button."