You know what is difficult to get used to? Not to refer to myself or to the baby in the third person when talking to her. For instance, not to say “Mommy is going to feed Klara” but instead “I’m going to feed you.”

This is like a weird third-person mode that switches on completely out of nowhere. It’s very bizarre.

At the hospital, I was assigned a bracelet that says “father” and N was officially labeled “mother.” We are lucky nobody tried to pump him for milk.

We are being released from the hospital. This is fantastic because I’ve been growing desperate with people who want to poke me, talk to me, take my blood pressure, ask me questions, and palpate me literally every hour 24/7. I haven’t even looked at any election – related news in a whole day! I haven’t read a book in days! I forgot to play my farm game! I’m very ready to go home and feel like myself again.

This was a very medically observed pregnancy for obvious reasons, and I did so much research during the pregnancy / sabbatical, to a large extent, because I wanted to preserve my sense of self. My identity is that of a competent person who knows the answers, who’s in control.  I come into a classroom, and everybody falls silent and starts recording every word I say. I’m not used to being treated like just a body, and a problematic one at that, even when it’s done for the best of reasons.

This is not a complaint against doctors. Everybody has been amazing throughout the process. This is more about the difficulty that excessively cerebral people encounter when life reminds them that their bodies don’t consist just of an overworked brain.

Do let me know what interesting news and events I missed.

N’s company gives 2 weeks of paternity leave at half pay. My public university doesn’t recognize fathers at all. Apparently, they are considered immaterial to a baby’s life.

But I got a good maternity leave and a flower arrangement from work:

My bubeleh is incredibly smart, people. (I call her bubeleh which, with such a Russian – looking baby, does sound a bit bizarre.)

I had a lactation specialist visit me, and it turned out I wasn’t feeding bubeleh right. She was curling her tongue and using her gums, and that was making the whole thing more difficult. So the lactation specialist put her finger in bubeleh’s mouth to position her tongue correctly for the feeding. And it worked beautifully.

For the next feeding, the lactation specialist was not here, and I was struggling. So bubeleh grabbed my finger and sucked on it to position her tongue correctly for the feeding.

She’s 3 days old! And already she observed causality, replicated the experiment, and got the result she wanted. I’m 39 years old and a PhD, but I didn’t do any of these things.

Black scientists, he said, “come from lesser schools where they do not feel that they’re being pushed ahead in classes that are too fast for them,” he added. “I’m just not impressed by the fact that the University of Texas may have fewer [black students],” Scalia added. “Maybe it ought to have fewer. And maybe … when you take more, the number of blacks, really competent blacks admitted to lesser schools, turns out to be less. And I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible.”

Is that the fine legal mind we are all supposed to mourn? ‘Cause the kindest words I have for this case of verbal diarrhea are “rambling, incoherent, and inane.”

So the Pope and Putin’s goon Goondiayev issued a joint statement. Aside from the expected “marriage. . . one man and one woman” it contains an utterly Putinoid interpretation of Russia’s wars in Ukraine and Syria. It looks like the Pope was unable or unwilling to do anything but repeat verbatim what Goondiayev ordered him to repeat.

The previous Pope was nothing to write home about either but the current one is even worse.

Forgot to mention this yesterday. Stalin never said the following words:

Joseph Stalin said if you want to bring America down you have to undermine three things—our spiritual life, our patriotism, and our morality.

Whoever thinks he did, is a fool of incredible proportions. Stalin could not have possibly considered and referred to Americans as spiritual, patriotic, and moral. As for “bringing America down”, Marxist theory posits that all capitalist societies will collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. This is the language Stalin spoke. He never slipped into the prissy verbiage of Hallmark stationery used in the quote.

Moral of the story: don’t use Facebook memes in serious discussions.

Before I knew I was having a girl, I suddenly developed a great interest in radical feminist theory. In my whole life, I never had much use for radical feminism, and now, all of a sudden, I couldn’t get enough of it.

When I discovered that the baby I was carrying was a girl, it all became very clear to me.

I only take the baby into my bed to feed her. She’s a very cuddly baby and wants me to take her just to snuggle but I can’t because 1) I’m afraid I’ll fall asleep and drop her 2) the hospital doesn’t allow it for the same reason.

She is smart, though, so she came up with a way to trick me. She pretends she is hungry (sticks out her tongue, bites her fingers, makes hungry noises, etc), and once I get her into the bed and try to feed her, she hugs me tight, makes the cutest little face, and lets me know food is of no interest to her.

A little over two days old, and she already has a fine strategic mind.