Back to Morning Reflections and Good Coffee

We're home, adjusting well to being uninterrupted by random visits from hospital staff, and ready to start sporting around the City a bit with Maya. Sarah needs to keep from pushing it too hard too quickly - her standard overachieving mentality makes that downtick a bit hard to swallow on occasion. And we've got plenty of little doodads and whatchamacallits to find for the apartment to allow us proper Maya management. Like nightlights. Need a bunch of them. Ones to breastfeed with, ones to change diapers by, ones to help navigate a one-handed grab of the TiVo remote without dropping a fussy Maya. But otherwise we've rather easily gone from 2 to 3 roomies. Maya's a bit cranky as she comes down off the GI corrosiveness of her antibiotics. She loves to eat, though. And she fills diapers faster than an Bolivian nursing home.

Being back home also gives me the time to read the news more readily, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Stories such as the shooting of the just-released Italian journalist/hostage in Iraq by American soldiers - that story just reeks of tragic timing. What could have been yet another successful hostage negotiation and softening of one tiny group of crazed insurgents instead becomes a case of our soldiers looking trigger-happy and deadly. Europe will beat us like a rental car for that grunt-level mistake. As Giuliana Sgrena's editor says, "everything that's happening in Iraq is completely senseless and mad." Sgrena's tragic twist of fate came just after I read this piece in the Columbia Journaism Review about how even Arab media organizations are being forced to seriously cut back on reporting in Iraq. I can't help but find the timing ominous. Because we don't get much from the on-the-ground folks anymore, even as 4 more American soldiers were killed yesterday bringing the total of American dead well above 1500. I guess with Martha Stewart triumphantly homebound with a nice glass of lemonade and the Michael Jackson case each floating to the top of newscasts like corked turds, we don't need real news.

I'm a walking, blogging cliche when I say, "but when you look into your new baby's eyes the rest of the world melts away." Still, it's true. Maya may cry like a banshee when she's settled into a poopy diaper or when she needs a tasty session at the boob. She may squirm and struggle against her swaddling like a mini-Houdini looking to finally unhinge that last shoulder in hopes of escape. She may have timing worse than a Britney Spears marriage. But that's the point, I suppose. Having someone like Maya in our lives to re-focus the attention away from all the ugliness and covert treachery in the World as this century ripens - that's a gift. One that we hope keeps on giving, as it already has so completely, so far.