Apropos of nothing, here are two pictures documenting Julian’s facility with neatly stacking his toys:

It’s worth clarifying that the wooden post on the ring stacker only comes up to about the orange ring. He just grabbed discs from another set and kept on stacking.

The coverage has been a bit maddening. The NYT’s Motherlode breathlessly wonders:

Add frustration with the logistics of the recall to fears about finger amputation — not to mention the question of how on earth to get junior to the park or the supermarket if the stroller is now too dangerous to use — and you have some cranky parents.

Except, as I understand it, the strollers aren’t too dangerous to use. They’re just potentially dangerous to fold if your kid is sticking their fingers in there. We never fold up our stroller (it just lives on our porch) so there’s really no reason for us to freak out.

Motherlode also wonders if “too much damage to customer loyalty has already been done” by the fact that Maclaren’s website was overloaded by requests for hinge covers yesterday. Who in their right mind would stop using a stroller they already own and like because a company’s website crashed? I don’t think I understand people. Handling a recall is a very delicate operation, and customers are bound to get nervous and angry, but I don’t understand why the media is calling this a PR disaster just because the recall was successfully publicized.

Dr. Griffith, our fantastic pediatrician, was being shadowed by a medical student. We were talking about feeding, and he mentioned that he recommended we continue feeding them baby cereal for a bit longer rather than switch to regular oatmeal or some other cereal. He then turned to the med student and asked, “Why do you think I recommend the baby cereal?”

“Um,” she said, “Fiber?”

“Yes, fiber is important,” Dr. Griffith said, “but the other very important thing is…” He paused for maybe half a second. At this point, had you been looking at Rachel and me, you would have seen us literally sitting on the edge our chairs and bouncing up and down. We very nearly both had our hands in the air, waving, “Ooh! Ooh! Call on me!”

We couldn’t restrain ourselves. We blurted out, “Iron!” a split-second before Dr. Griffith said, “Iron.”

So, yeah. Big nerds. (I’m pretty sure that med student hates us now.)

That same night, the babies ate the chicken enchiladas I’d made for Rachel and me. Ever since I read Crouching Tiger, Hungry Monkey, I’ve somehow elevated enchiladas as the food that would, once the twins ate it, prove that we had gustatorially adventurous children. Well, mission freaking accomplished.

Whoa.

Yeah, that’s kind of hard to believe.

When my family sold our old house in St. Louis, I dug up an envelope full of cards that my parents received when I was born and on my first birthday. I thought it was a neat memento. Rachel and I started talking about what we’d like for our kids to have in this newfangled Internet age. Someday, Julian and Eloise will be old enough to check the email addresses I set up for them when they were born. Wouldn’t it be neat if their inboxes were full of birthday greetings (in addition to the inevitable penis-enlargement spam)?

If you have the inclination, we’d love it if you’d write a quick email to Julian and/or to Eloise wishing them a happy first birthday, maybe telling them who you are and how you know us, and sharing any memories you have of their first year. In four or five years (or however long) the kids will get a real kick out of it. It’s like a time capsule, only way less effort.

Each baby’s email address is his or her first name @ sparveys.com.

Thanks so much!

It’s a problem, right? So Rachel and I came up with a genius solution: parent cards. You make up some business cards with your names, your kids’ names and ages, and your phone number and email address, and keep a stack of them in your stroller or diaper bag, and when you run into another parent, you exchange them and then later you can call each other and have a playdate.

I’m sure it would be a little weird and awkward the first time you hand one out, but once it catches on, it would just become totally normal. Spread the word! Parent cards.

Of course, Rachel and I came up with this idea months ago, and never actually made parent cards, and then the latest issue of Babytalk showed up at our house, and of course it has this VERY SAME IDEA in it, but they call them “Mommy Cards.” Stupid sexist parenting-industrial complex. It’s still a good idea, though.

A book about parenting and feeding written by a stay-at-home foodie dad named Matthew? Why, yes, I might be interested in such a thing. Having read it, I can wholeheartedly recommend Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater if you are interested in at least two of the following three things:

• Parenting
• Food
• How awesome it is to live in Seattle

Parenting books that tell you what you should do kind of get on my nerves, especially when they’re written by non-experts, and especially when the five books on your shelf express five different strongly help opinions about THE ONE THING YOU MUST DO. Hungry Monkey is refreshing, because except for the recipes at the end of each chapter, Amster-Burton doesn’t give instructions or suggestions or even advice. He just tells you what he did, and how well it did or didn’t work. His goal was to raise a foodie like himself, an adventurous and eager eater, and to avoid “baby food” as much as possible. Since I love to cook, and since I badly want to raise children who love to eat and try new things and who will appreciate what I’m slaving over in the kitchen, this was a goal that I shared.

I do think that Iris Amster-Burton, the eponymous hungry monkey, was an unusually adventurous child, culinarily speaking, and mileage will vary widely. Our babies were much slower to take to “grown up” food, and we’ve had to be much more careful about milling or pureeing their food. (Julian, for instance, has a hair-trigger gag reflex, and if he gets too big a piece of food in his mouth, or if even a small piece of food ends up on the back of his tongue where he doesn’t expect it, BLEARGH.) I don’t think you should read the book as a road map and expect that your experience will be the same as the author’s, and it’s occasionally been a struggle for me not to be disappointed when the babies didn’t respond the way the baby in the book did, or when I don’t have time to get an elaborate home-cooked meal for the four of us on the table by 6:00.

Hungry Monkey’s most important function (apart from being a very funny and enjoyable book with some delicious-looking recipes in it) is as a corrective to all of the other baby-feeding advice out there. I was especially tickled to read his skewering of Ruth “Super Baby Food” Yaron, a best-selling author with no qualifications as a nutritionist or pediatrician whose “bland is best” diet would have parents milling their own goddamn grains. (I mean, is there anything more “Stuff White People Like” than milling their own cereal? For cripes sake.) The feeding philosophy of Hungry Monkey is, basically, “Dude, just feed your baby,” and having Amster-Burton’s sarcastic and carefree voice in the back of my head has been therapeutic.

Despite my plans to feed the babies only homemade, delicious, flavorful food from my own kitchen, we’ve ended up dividing their meals roughly into one-third homemade baby food, one-third grown-up food (either off of our plates or run through the food mill or food processor), and one-third store-bought. We’ve had the best luck with Plum brand baby food, which comes frozen and actually tastes pretty good when heated up. Their favorite flavor is their Vegetable Stew with Beef, but since we want to raise polite and respectful children, we’ve been referring to the beef stew by its full name, Beef Stewart. (Likewise, George Squashington and Yogertrude.)

Despite my initial scoffing (scoffery?), we’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of Annabel Karmel’s Top 100 Baby Purees. I’ll whip up a batch every week or so and store it in Baby Cubes in our downstairs freezer. I honestly thought I wouldn’t need to look at a recipe to figure out how to steam some vegetables and put them in the food processor, but Karmel’s suggestions for good combinations really are both creative and helpful. My one criticism is that her indications of how many servings a given recipe will produce seem wildly off. A recipe that claims to make 4 servings will generally work out to a tray and half or more of Baby Cubes. (I do play a little fast and loose with the quantities, but not by that much.)

As for “real food,” it’s been really exciting to see what they’ll eat and enjoy. Generally speaking, when we have leftovers nowadays, instead of putting them in the fridge for lunch the next day, I’ll run them through the food mill or the food processor and stick them in the freezer in cubes. Julian and Eloise have gobbled up mushroom risotto, smoked salmon chowder, three-bean chili, chana masala, pasta with tomato sauce, and probably more things that I can’t think of. They’ve happily and eagerly snacked on pieces of quesadillas from Whole Foods. They love pickles and plums (not necessarily together). There aren’t that many foods they don’t seem to like, to be honest. They’re not wild about summer squash or chicken, but I think our sample size is too small to draw any definitive conclusions.

As much as we try to broaden their palates and provide them with variety, the twins are babies, and I think they would happily eat Happy Baby Puffs and applesauce for every meal—at various times we’ve had to institute moratoria on both foods to try to convince them to eat ANYTHING ELSE. They have essentially the same breakfast every day (oatmeal and yogurt with some kind of fruit) and don’t seem to mind. But as they get more comfortable with chewing, and get a few more teeth, and as their hand-eye coordination improves, I think mealtimes are going to get more and more fun. I think I’m looking forward to a time when they can express an opinion about what they’d like to eat, even when we enter the inevitable “nothing but macaroni and cheese” phase.

Anyhow, Hungry Monkey is a great book and a quick read, and I’m very grateful to Kelly and Bellani for giving to me. You should all, like, go there and spend a lot of money, or something.

And now it’s over. I pumped for the last time on Saturday night, before we left for our vacation in New Hampshire. The babies got their last bottles of breast milk the following day. I imagined that feeding them those bottles would be emotional, and I hoped somewhat sweet. Unfortunately, they only drank half the bottles in their car seats before we hit the road, and they finished them at a pathetic little gas station just north of Concord where we’d pulled over to deal with a truly putrid diaper and inconsolable screaming. Not exactly the most meaningful end to one of the most difficult and amazing things I’ve ever done in my life, but I think that distraction and humor served me better at that point than reverent reflection, which almost certainly would have ended in tears.

A snapshot of the last 10 months:

• 60.23 total gallons pumped (this does not, of course, include whatever milk Eloise drank while nursing)

• 1,384 pumping sessions, totaling an estimated 346 hours (14.5 days) spent pumping

• Just 7 ounces lost in two spills (not counting regular quarter-ounce drips here and there)

• More Than You Wanted to Know Alert: 32 percent more produced by the right than the left side

• Roughly 2,500 fenugreek tablets swallowed

• Approximately 450 cups of Mother’s Milk tea drunk

• Nearly $1,000 spent on the above plus pump rental, lactation consultant, etc. (not including supplemental formula)

And the result of all that? Well, Eloise nursed nearly exclusively from birth to 5.5 months, when I returned to work. Julian, who couldn’t nurse because of his poor squished jaw, received bottles exclusively, and it was for him that I hooked myself up to the hated pump 5, 6, 7, even 8 times per day, waking up in the middle of the night to pump even long after both babies were sleeping through the night. For the first two months, both babies essentially got nothing but milk. From 2 to 8 months, they got between 2/3 and 3/4 milk (and the rest formula). Once Eloise self-weaned (a very difficult and sad turn of events for me) and there was no longer a live nursing baby to persuade my body to keep up milk production, my supply dwindled, but I was able to give them about 50 percent milk until 9 months, and then I ramped down completely over the three weeks after that.

I know that’s a lot of milk, and I know that, given the circumstances (two babies to feed, only one who could nurse), I did the very best that I could. I can’t help dwell a little on how much I would have liked the whole thing to go very differently, though. I liked nursing. I would have liked to do it for several months longer. I would have liked to have spent far less of early motherhood pumping. And while I’m making a wish list, of course I would have liked to have been able to nurse both babies. But of course all that wishing accomplishes nothing. So now I turn complete responsibility for nourishing my babies over to Whole Foods and PBM Products, makers of Target-brand formula, and I try to readjust to a life in which my body isn’t providing sustenance to any other humans. How mundane.

Circa one month old. Amazingly, given its omnipresence, I couldn’t find any pictures with the pump in the background.

Eventually we decided that the little noise machine wasn’t loud enough. When we moved them into the cribs in their own room, we needed something that made enough noise to blanket out the normal noises of the house so we didn’t have to tiptoe around starting at 6:30. Rachel found a CD of white noise at Amazon, so we bought an iPod speaker dock, popped in my ancient 40 GB iPod, and put the white noise on repeat.

Of course, each white noise track was only ten minutes long, and the short pause while the track restarted used to wake them up. Luckily, I was able to stretch out the track in GarageBand, and produced an extended remix version that was three hours long.

So now we had our system: when the babies went down for their naps, we’d turn on the speakers and when they woke up, we’d turn them off. It seemed too much hassle to actually stop the iPod playing; sure it kept looping forever even while the speakers were off, but the power draw seemed minimal.

What may be obvious to you, but was obvious to me only in retrospect, is that endlessly playing the same three-hour track on repeat for four months might not be the best way to prolong the life of your iPod hard drive. So, yeah. That died yesterday. We’re trying this cute sheep out for now, but it seems to only work on a timer, and we kind of want something that will go all night. Anyone want to sell me an old iPod cheap? This time we’ll probably push pause every now and then.