One month and one day

Alice was a month old yesterday, still feeding brilliantly and gaining weight which is about all she's supposed to achieve at the moment. She also spends more time awake, can focus on our faces for longer, and may have started awarding her first proper smiles (although wind is still a possibility).

I'm now beginning to understand why both celebrities and literary types have the urge to churn out baby books, but also why there are very few epic works about caring for newborns. One the one hand I do want to talk about her endlessly, and could no doubt fill pages about her biscuity baby smell, the changing shape of her eyes, the amount her hair has grown, the way she stretches her arms... but on the other hand there is pretty much nothing transcendent or miraculous or poetic about the daily tasks which fill up the majority of my hours. Maybe there's not some misogynist conspiracy of silence about motherhood after all; it's just that there isn't anything worth saying about the two fundamentals - feeding one end and wiping the other. However loving and amazed and transformed you feel towards the object of these attentions, it's still basically just feeding and wiping, feeding and wiping, feeding and wiping. And nobody needs to read about that.

(Having said that, my god, it's astonishing how many foodstuffs suddenly become anathema when you're exposed to a variegated menu of baby shit all day: peanut butter, hummous, mustard... all deeply unappetising until further notice.)