Five days after my last post, I had a baby. I knew I was going to have a baby, but having him come three weeks early was a surprise to all of us! After a somewhat challenging 24 hours of labor, I gave birth at home in a birth pool, as planned. My midwives were great, and my partner was wonderful through the whole experience (and after). Since then, we’ve been home caring for this new little person, who is marvelous. Okay, he cries when he’s on his back, pees through his clothes, and poops on us while we’re changing him. But still, he’s delightful, as I’m sure any new parent will tell you about any new baby. Still, it’s nice to have friends and family share excitement about his arrival; I know I’ve been excited about the arrival of the babies of my friends and family members, and having known many previous babies does nothing to diminish interest in each new one. There’s a way in which meeting a person who simply didn’t exist last year (or last month, or last week, or in the case of your own baby, just five minutes ago!) will always be a special kind of thing.

When I started this blog, I didn’t intend to write about anything so personal as a child. I didn’t have a child, and I wasn’t planning to have one down the line. As you can imagine, though, my daily life (which is what I try to write about here) is now oriented around child care and will be for the foreseeable future. It’s my hope that I’ll still cook (and I have plenty to tell you about the mountains of vegetables we’ve been working with around here) and garden and observe nature and go to plays and the like, but I imagine that the most interesting aspects of all of these things are going to become the challenge of accomplishing them with baby in tow. So we’ll see how things go. Right now, the sprout is tiny and life is all about eating and sleeping and bathing for all three of us. Plus the occasional videoconference with grandparents (his and mine) and the perennial question of what to do with seven butternut squashes and sixty pounds of apples.

So, while I am now a parent, this is still not a parenting blog and it’s unlikely to become one. I will, however, continue to tell you what we did with the squashes (tonight we’re having couscous, yesterday I made squash bars, and a few weeks ago we had orzo) and the apples (this year it’s likely to just be pies for the freezer, crisps for us, and fresh apples for eating; no one has the wherewithal to make sauce).