Weather: A soft rain has been falling most of the day. This morning we woke up to a hot, stuffy house. Thanks to yesterday's heat it was still 77 deg. inside, but temperatures had dropped overnight so that it was only in the low 50s outside.

Watching: Homicide, though I'm not sure why. It's almost painful to watch this show now, so far has it sunk from its glory days. The heart of that show died when Andre Braugher left.

Millennial Baby

I heard on the news today that tonight is supposedly the optimum night to conceive what the media are calling "the first baby of the millennium." Supposedly, couples all over the country are planning to do the horizontal mambo tonight to try to have a baby born on January 1, 2000. Of course what all of us self-important, myopic Americans choose to forget is that the first baby of the year 2000 is going to be born somewhere near the international dateline, probably in China, which is especially ironic since the Chinese do not use the western calendar. And the first baby of the millennium is going to be born in China more than 20 months from now, just after midnight on January 1, 2001, but let's not rehash that argument.

I am dismayed to think of people trying so hard to schedule the birth of a child down to the last second. As anyone who has tried to conceive or who has been pregnant can tell you: babies arrive on their own schedule. Sure you can do some general planning; for instance, I always thought it would be nice to have a baby in the April, May, or June so we started trying to conceive our first child in July, which would give us a three month window. We hit the fertility jackpot and conceived Daniel almost immediately, but that doesn't always happen, as several of my friends who have battled infertility can tell you.

Conceiving the baby is just the first step, of course. Assuming a woman trying to have the millennial baby manages to conceive and carry it to term, how exactly does she plan to have her baby born seconds after midnight, short of a scheduled Caesarean? As I discovered with Daniel, an induced labor can take days to be accomplished. He was due on April 13, but because I had pregnancy-induced hypertension, my obstetrician wanted to induce me a few weeks early. The first day of the scheduled induction my labor did not advance much at all. The second day they started up the pitocin again, but Daniel wasn't born until the following morning, about 23 hours later. So much for scheduling!

It's hard to imagine an obstetrician in his or her right mind would agree to a C-section simply to advance someone's insane ambition, but I bet there are a few out there.

Bill the Duck

A Story by Daniel

[Written on a duck-shaped piece of yellow construction paper, and translated by me from Kindergarten Phonetic into Standard English.]

Bill was a duck. He went outside. He saw a rainbow in the sky. It was very pretty.

[Existential ending to the story as told to me by the author because it wouldn't fit on the duck-shaped paper.]

He wanted to fly to the rainbow, but he couldn't because it wasn't really there.

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