James Lileks has a 17-month-old. The developmental differences with Katherine are minimal enough to be highly, ah, amusing.
Gnat has begun to wake a little earlier than usual, by which I mean she is standing in crib wide staring awake calling out our names at FOUR O’CLOCK in the bloody morning. This simply cannot be encouraged, but there is no reasoning with a 17 month old; you can’t explain that it is the dead of the night, and we cannot go downstairs because there are no good cartoons on, and Mommy and Daddy must sleep because they are already convincing simulacra of the zombies from Night of the Living Dead, and nothing is more injurious your career than thrusting your arms through the door of the meeting room and moaning BRAINS, BRAINS. (It raises people’s expectations that you have some, and then there’s the unspoken expectation that you’ve brought enough for everyone to share.) So we let her go, and eventually she stops. This morning she tried a new tack: DADDY! DADDY! It was like being pierced in the heart for an hour straight, and it guaranteed fitful guilty sleep.
Yeah. Sing it, brother.