We are practicing not Bogarting Max. Here is Perry getting a turn. Note the unprofessional technique: Max has folded himself in half. Later, Perry caught on, which is good because he is going to have one of these himself come August.

Here's Max with our cousin Sarah. He is now tolerating hats on occasion. Sarah brought us vegetarian chili. Often, I hate vegetarian chili, but Sarah does it up right. You are welcome to give it a shot, buy be forewarned.

This is just impossible: filing the nails of a squirming infant. He needs to be sedated by the sling if we are to have any chance.

After a bath, Max is furious. Furious. But once swaddled, he chills out and is at his alert-est for many hours. This is after his traditional 4th week alive washing. There are volumes written on how to properly wash a baby. There's even a bath show in the hospital on the 24/7 baby channel. We studied as well as we could and then basically threw him in some water and scrubbed what would stay still.

Here we are again, post-bath. I am able to comfort him because of my supernatural powers. Note the holy glow.

Max rarely sleeps in his bed. In fact, he only stayed like this for about 40 seconds, which is why we bothered to take a picture of him like this. Soon after, he began to cry and needed to be removed from the evil bed.

Odd, then, that he slept through the tv show that has the rest of the nation sobbing (we hope - maybe it's us): Extreme Makeover, Home Edition. If you are not a fan, it involves a bubbly guy with a soul patch and a team of contractors going to needy houses and rebuilding them. But you can't just be regular needy, like, "Oh, we can't afford a new house because my mom is a health care aide and my dad got laid off."

No sir, you need to triangulate neediness. Last week, the lucky winners were a cop who had lost half his friends on September 11 and his wife to cancer. Yow! They got a ginormous castle with a 1200 sq ft master suite and a funhouse for the kids, plus a fishing boat. This week, it was the siblings and parents of a Native American woman killed in Iraq. They had never lived in a house, ever, and so the show built them a, um, Native American-themed monstrosity with pictures of the heroic mom everywhere. They also threw up a Veterans Center on the rez and a prayer hut of some sort. All with granite counters and flat screen tvs, which are basically what most out-of-work Hopis have been asking for for decades. Or their real land back.

For me the big question is why war veterans can't afford a house on a goddamn Reservation. It's not like they wanted a 3-bed on the Upper West Side. Either way, a good lesson for the children: fight for your country, and someday, if you get killed, your heirs will, maybe, if the ratings are good, get a free house and shiny stainless appliances, plus free high speed internet access. Let's not talk about who pays the taxes and how exactly you'll maintain the hot tub. And still, Leah cries, blaming Max for the hormone cocktail behind it all.

Mid-May in Boston is the among the six weeks of the year (also on the list: two weeks in early fall before it gets really cold, the part of June before it gets hot, each day when it snows but has not yet gotten slushy, and the three days in February and early March when it hits 60 degrees) when you say to yourself, "Maybe I won't move." We have chosen to honor this magical season of general weather satisfaction by going for many walks. We have discovered a really nice park right near our house which is garbage-free, a significant accomplishment for our half of Watertown.



The park is about a five minute walk from our house, and the trip there requires pushing the stroller over a fair amount of broken pavement. The uneven terrain makes Max's head flop from side to side like a salmon heading upstream, but he seems unfazed by this experience and tends to fall asleep. In fact, when we hit the nice, smooth rubber walkways in the park, he gets annoyed. So we push the stroller through the grass, which gives him the same bouncing effect. This works every time. Do not be surprised if I report 3 a.m. walks in this very clean and nearby park sometime soon.



Despite this fancy neighborhood park, we are having the darndest time renting the apartment. It is not a good time to be a landlord in Boston, since the cheap money of the past few years has sent home prices higher than corresponding rents could follow. Simply put, you can't pay your mortgage with most 2- and 3-family homes anymore, and if you can, then you certainly can't make any money on the deal. People consistently ask if heat is included, which is basically like asking if they could please have access to our ATM card and pin number, only in the form of clean-burning natural gas. Then they show up, say they love the place and want to rent it, and vanish off the face of the earth. Or they make appointments and don't show up at all. Sort of like landlords were acting about five years ago. When we were renting. Damn you, housing bubble!

Our newest and best gadget is this jaunty maroon-and-orange sling. It enables one to stuff the baby in a sack. The sack has a cellphone pocket, for people who either leave the house (not us) or are too lazy to find the other phone (more likely). And babies like vibrations, if not loud ringing or Beethoven's Fifth, so it might be soothing. I am sure that there are people so desperate for sleep that they put the phone in there on vibrate and called themselves over and over.

For Max the sling makes a sort of cave, and as he is still essentially a wild animal, he likes it a lot. And I didn't make up the wild animal thing, either. We read it in section of a parenting book on biting, which said that since babies are just mammals learning how to be civilized, they might bite you if they get mad. We have not seen such ill behavior, but then, there are 17 years and 49 weeks to go until we can stop caring about his manners, so time will tell.

Max's 3rd week birthday came at the end of a long week for me in which I did not have to set an alarm to catch a 5:30 flight on Wednesday. Thanks, Max! Then, I began working at 4:30 on Friday. All in the service of children, I suppose. Upon returning home Friday night, I went immediately to sleep. Then, on Saturday, some friends brought us a celebratory lasagna. We are madly in love with casserole/freezable-microwaveable foods. Keep 'em coming.

Again, the black and white works its magic. This is why night is always in black and white. Mostly black.

This might be a week old. Who knows? It is hard to keep track of what happens when. Either way, we think that he looks like a grouchy old wizard in this picture, mostly owing to the pointy hat. Those things on the hat are not identifiable even from close up, but the writing says, "Breast is best." The hat was a gift to someone from their lactation consultant (if you don't know what that is, boy, are you out of the baby loop. Everybody's got 'em.) and it got passed on to us. And no, the pictures are not breasts. Max has more decorum than that.

Everyone sleeps better in black and white. Plus, I don't think Max sees colors yet - or is that dogs that don't see colors? - and so this is more respectful.

Here Max has simply had enough of being under the watchful eye of his pet giraffe. The giraffe plays music, which does not impress Max in the least. But we like the song, which is good, because it will be stuck in our heads forever.

Max continues to grow. I know that many of you reading this (that is, four out of the six of you at least, and possibly all six) are thinking, "Quit writing things. We want baby pictures." Yes. So do we. We've discovered, though, that having Max around adds a lot of new tasks to each day:

1. Removing all of his clothes, replacing with poop-free versions.
2. Being awake and semi-catatonic all the time.
3. Poking him (gently) while asking, "He's breathing, right?"
4. Staring at him for hour-long periods.
5. Putting him in his bed, listening at the doorway for 20 minutes, concluding that he's asleep, and then waking him up to feed him.

Note that fiddling with the computer is not one of those tasks. But it should be, at least while I am at work. The digital camera and flash drive are a little conspicuous here, though. So text it is until I get home.

As part of the normal course of obsessively protective behaviors surrounding having a new baby around, we decided, like many modern, not-all-that-religious Jews, to sign him up for that bit of elective cosmetic surgery known the world around as the bris. Leah's cousin Ephraim drove over from Albany with scalpel in hand. This is ok because he is a real doctor.

We were nervous and Max was calm as Dr. Ephraim advanced with the clamps and novocain and various other pokers and gougers. But then Max had to be strapped to a little plastic board and have his diaper removed. If someone was coming after your boys with novocain, you'd need to be strapped down, too. Good instinct, Max! Anyway, he didn't like that one bit and reacted as he had to the last great shock and injustice in his life -- being born -- by screaming his tiny head off. Great wailing was heard in the land. Finally, after much careful poking, he was carried out to his granddad and the ribbon-cutting, such as it was, commenced. Max did not much like it.

What follows a bris is a surgeon's nightmare: an open, undressed surgical incision constantly bathed in poop. To at least make a stab at dealing with the preposterous un-sanitariness of this situation, we had to wrap his business in gauze for a few days upon his frequent diaper changes. Now, he only weighs a hair under 7 pounds, so all things in perspective, but there just isn't much to wrap that gauze around at this point. Not that it's ineffective: he can pee on your clothing and his at 50 paces. But still, a challenge to my dexterity in the half-light of a 3 a.m. rediapering.

But those days are behind us now and he is healed up good. He even gained two ounces, which is a testament to Leah's ability to not sleep at all and still remain cheerful and maternal. He tends to eat up a storm all night - maybe every 90 minutes - and then drift off for a good 3-hour nap just as I give up on sleeping and head to work at 6. The good news is that I can leave a little early when I get in at 6:30. The bad news is, well, being at work at 6:30 is just really, really bad news.