Aftershock

52 hours of labor, two days in the hospital, and the first two days at home were the hardest days of my life. Will and I thought that this baby thing was pretty much the worst idea any two people could have. Still, everything in me wanted nothing more than for this baby to live and ultimately to thrive. Just as in labor, all I could do was try my absolute hardest, even as it so often seemed to fall far short of meeting our most basic needs. It was just bare survival. Luckily I could give everything to my biologically given task--feeding--and Will did everything else. He is amazing. I owe him my life, our lives. But, then again, I already knew that.

The past 24 hours have been wonderful and even afforded much pleasure. We have figured out a kind of triage system of care and there has been no hysteria on Emmett's part... for 24 whole hours. We had our first substantial outing today. We walked Emmie to the park in the carrier, sat at a picnic table and dog-watched, and had a lovely visitor this afternoon (thanks, C-dog). (I walked 40 minutes!!! My second time outside the house since going to the hospital on Monday at 5 a.m.)

Will's sister Carrie arrived at the beginning of said 24 hours, which is auspicious. She may have some magical baby soothing pheromones that we will be forced to extract from her and bottle.

Thanks are owed to the government of Quebec. Seriously. They sent a nurse to our house two days in a row to help me feed. Another will come Tuesday and spend the morning with me. I never thought I would want The State involved with my boobs, but it has been sanity preserving. Merci mille fois!

Random Thoughts

I am currently raising my fist at nature. So inefficient. The first days with a human infant--at least in our case--are extremely difficult. We find him very beautiful though... which is surely a help. Somehow this little Smiegel-like creature is perfection to us, even as he is so often inconsolable. I guess he is pissed off about how much more work non-womb existence can be. Or maybe he was equally distressed by the harsh exit involving 52 hours of labor. I know I won't be over it any time soon.

In other news, our cat Lyle is shocked that we brought another animal into the house and cries in harmony with Emmett. We can't tell whether the cries convey sympathy ("imitation of the affects," in Spinoza's terms), competitiveness ("I cry, too"), or a reaction to the unpleasantness of this other animal's cry ("make it stop").

See also some documentation of the copper hair and massive feet.

Emmett Emmanuel

Born at 7:07 on August 26, 2008. Weight: 4310 grams (9 lbs. 8 oz). Length: 59 cm (23.25 inches). Red hair and blue eyes. Gentle.

Past Due

Dear Burrito,

We regret to inform you that you are 4 days past due. You will be charged $2 a day for the first seven days, after which the fine will increase. Please emerge as soon as possible. Your parents have already gone out for their "last supper" at a nice tapas place and taken the 40 week belly photo. An even larger belly would be a great inconvenience at this point, since your mother struggles to walk any meaningful distance. Also, people are looking at her funny. Perfect strangers are laughing and saying "bon accouchement"! Finally, let me note that all debt will be absolved should you arrive for your birthday cake on Thursday.

Sincerely,
Baby Collection Services Canada

Descartes & Babies

Today is my due date. I cannot manage to be distracted by novels, moving pictures, or my own academic pursuits, so I have been reading about infant psychology. It turns out that babies are geniuses. Seriously. Some well-known evidence: newborns recognize their parents' voices from having heard them in the womb; they are comforted by the music they were exposed to in utero (Burrito enjoyed live performances by Neko Case somewhat early on and TV on the Radio quite recently--s/he grooved really hard to the latter); and can discriminate between their mother's and other mother's milk. What truly amazed me to learn, however, was that newborn babies have more than the power of recognition or memory; they can do more than preserve sense impressions... In fact, if Descartes is right, they already exhibit reason.

Descartes offers the famous wax example to demonstrate that reason organizes sense impressions. (Hopefully, I remember how this goes.) Consider how wax changes texture and appearance based on temperature, applied pressure, etc., such that it can exhibit various shapes and be hard, soft, or liquid, hot, cold, or warm. The wax can appear to the senses in radically different modalities, but nevertheless the human mind attributes an underlying unity to the substance. We recognize the various appearances of the malleable ball as permutations of the same thing. Descartes thinks that imagination/ sensory experience alone is insufficient to recognize the continuity belonging to the substance. Thus reason is required to endow a series of sense impressions with unity, allowing us to affirm that this mutable thing is a single object.

Well, René, newborn babies likewise attribute unity to objects. An experiment was performed where newborns were blindfolded and given one of two binkies to suck on. One was a typical nuk and the other had some protrusions. Once the blindfold was removed, the infants immediately identified visually which pacifier they were sucking on. Having only touched an object, they were able to identify it with an entirely different sense afterward, never having seen it before. On the Cartesian model, they must have retained some kind of mental schema, abstracted from the particular sensual qualities of the object that they were then able to map onto their visual experience. Of course, Gassendi may have been right, too, when he protested that reason seems entirely unnecessary for attributing unity to objects. Dogs have no trouble seeing that their human companion who sits, stands, sleeps, wears hats, and changes overcoats is one and the same "object." Perhaps corporeal imagination is far more self-organizing and active than Descartes could imagine? Perhaps the body doesn't need some universal translator overseeing its experiences? Of course, I tend toward Gassendi and think there is far from a vast chasm between human and canine mental life. Basically, dogs, like babies, are geniuses. Still, that binky thing is pretty cool. The psychologist Daniel Stern concludes that newborns have a far more active sense of self, even beginning in utero, than we have hitherto thought.