I’m trying out one of the daycares today. First, we stayed there together for about an hour, playing with the kids. Then, I left to see how it feels to leave Klara there (short answer: it stinks). In the meanwhile, I’m popping into the clickers meeting for half an hour.

I’m already anti-clickers but right now I’m in such a vile mood, clickers will be sorry they were ever invented.

N and I discovered that both of our fields have developed ridiculous amounts of hype over very similar and equally non-existent professions. N falls asleep of sheer boredom when he hears about “data scientists” and I do the same when I hear about “specialists in digital Humanities.” Both terms are heavily used by unemployable folks who are trying to make themselves sound relevant. 

François Hollande’s hairdresser is paid €9,895 per month for taking care of the politician’s thinning hair 24/7. 

There is this trend started by a very silly American expat to idealize the French in very bizarre ways. First, she published a strange (yet bestselling) book on how the French have collectively developed superior parenting skills that make American parents look like total idiots. This week, the expat published an article in The NY TIMES about how entirely indifferent the saintly French are to money and how they despise luxury and condemn inequality. 

In reality, of course, the French are as human as everybody else. Hollande’s hairdresser is not only a money-hungry fellow but also a bad father. He boasts that he missed his own child’s birth in order to stay close to Hollande and cater to his hair needs.

Moral of the story: exoticizing people is stupid. Everybody is human.

“What’s her name?” the daycare director asks.

“Klara.”

“Erm. . . Clai-rah? Clea. . .” the director struggles. “Does she have a nickname?” she finally asks hopefully. 

“Yes,” I say. “We call her Medvezhatka.”

The light goes out of the poor woman’s eyes.

“Clea-reh. . . Clay-reh. . .” she chants hopelessly. 

Trump absolutely could endear himself to me with his VP pick. There is one fellow he could put on the ticket to make me very happy.

Klara finally understood that the green stuff I’m stuffing into her mouth is food and started enthusiastically to lick my green dress, thinking that all green things will have the same effect.

How come British Tories are bringing yet another woman to prime-ministership while Labour can’t do any better than silly old Corbyn?

N is as attached to sleeping as I am to eating. Wake the fellow up a second before 7 am, and you’ll see a monster emerge. Throughout the pregnancy, he begged me to make sure the baby wouldn’t disturb his sleep. I had to listen to countless stories about the mangled bodies of drivers who fell asleep behind the wheel on the highway and crashed their cars.

After Klara was born, N discovered that his sleep was not in the least disturbed because I always get up for her long before she feels the need to scream. He was as profoundly grateful to me for doing all the night feedings as I would be to somebody who’d give me a charcuterie basket  for Christmas. I’m honest, so I tried telling him that the gratitude was misplaced and that I loved getting up at night to feed Klara even more than I like being in the presence of a balanced charcuterie board. He thought that I was simply being magnanimous and thanked me even more.

And then he did one early morning feeding and realized that I was telling the truth: getting up to feed and change the baby at night is literally extremely pleasant. She is so cuddly, sleepy, aromatic and silky that one is hard-pressed to think of a more enjoyable activity. So now Mr. Don’t Wake Me Up Before Seven or I Will Die a Horrible Death is jumping up before 6 am to feed and change Klara and is asking if he can do all the night-time feedings over the weekend (no, he can’t because I love doing them).

I find it disgusting when parents of mass murderers and terrorists start trawling the networks, fishing for pity and attention. The mother of the Dallas killer is slut-shaming the woman her son sexually assaulted instead of taking responsibility for inflicting this monster on the world. It is not surprising that she is being disgusting because only a total creep could have raised this horrible fellow. 

For generations, Canadian kids played hockey in the streets, in the yards, everywhere they found a patch of ice. Many great hockey players started their careers like that. But today street hockey is faced with the threat of extinction. Provincial authorities insist on banning it because it is supposedly unsafe for children to play hockey spontaneously and freely outside instead of being supervised and micromanaged by adults.

I think people should have more children. If you have four or five, you’ll be too occupied to hover over each poor child. Instead, you’ll be ecstatic if you manage to get at least a couple of kids go outside to play and leave you be.