Evie’s very first visitor was my sister, her Aunt Niki. Niki brought up a great little onesie that she’d had custom printed from a website. The front of the onesie says “I am the champion”

… and the back says “of nothing in particular.”

“Get it?” Niki said. “Like the Smiths song.”

The back sounded incredibly familiar, but the front had me confused.

“I love it,” I said, “but you know what? I think I’ve had that lyric wrong for about twenty years. I thought it was ‘I am the son and heir of nothing in particular.’”

Niki looked a little panicked. “I’m pretty sure it’s champion,” she said. “Almost positive.”

We did a quick Google search. It was “son and heir.”

“Oh no!” she said. “But ’son and heir’ doesn’t work for Evie, anyway, and ‘I am the champion of nothing in particular’ is a much better lyric, right?”

Whether it makes a better lyric or not, I don’t know, but I like it about 1000x better on the onesie. It cracks me up every time I see it.

As a side note, I once spent a good hour or so on KissThisGuy.com, the archive of misheard lyrics (named after the mishearing of “kiss the sky” in Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”) By far my favorite entry, which I’ve remembered for years, was from someone who once thought “I’ll never be your beast of burden” was “I’ll never be obese, Roberta.”

Design:related posted a great interview with Peter Mendelsund, a brilliant book cover designer for Knopf and Vertical Press. I love his candor and think he makes a fantastic interview subject, but most of all, I’m in awe of his design work. Here are a few of my favorite Mendelsund-designed book covers:

There’s more of his book cover, CD and poster design work on his portfolio site, which is more than a bit clunky, but well worth the effort.

So it turns out that Evie does actually sleep quite a bit—unfortunately almost all of it during the daylight hours. She’s almost impossible to wake during the day, but when I rock her in my arms at night, trying to get her to settle, she looks up at me, blinking, squirming and wide awake. Her biological clock seems to be running on a 12-hour lag from ours.

Her schedule makes sense, as in utero, she slept when Emma was awake and moving around, and started kicking just as Emma settled in for the night. Now we’re trying to help bring Evie into our time zone, while realizing that in these early days, she’s doing a far better job of introducing us to hers.

We went back to Poet’s Walk yesterday for the first time since Evie’s arrival, taking advantage of this short time I have off of work and trying to get at least a little bit of time outdoors before today’s snowstorm.

Evie came along in a sling zipped inside my jacket, snoozing peacefully for the entire ride. I’m almost certain I saw her eyes in REM action at one point yesterday, which surprised me, as a psychologist friend once told me that newborns lack the visual language to dream.

Not being sure of this, I looked it up online (where if it’s written, it has to be true), and found this article, that mentions a 1966 study finding that newborns, do in fact dream:

The startling discovery was, not only do newborns dream — even on the first day of life — they actually dream more than the college students in the original studies (Science, 1966; 152:604).

This study has been repeated several times, confirming and expanding our knowledge. We dream more in the first 2 weeks of life than at any other time. The visual part of the brain is more active during newborn REM sleep than during adult sleep. They seem to have more vivid visual dreams.

Emma and I have both had stress dreams in these first few days—dreams about leaving Evie somewhere accidentally, forgetting to feed her, or in some other way failing to meet our new parental responsibilities. But there’s little time for good or bad dreams in our 90-120 minute sleep segments. Upon waking to her cries, something clicks into place, and we drowsily remember what to do.

I was watching a clip on The Daily Show today, and heard a nice little slip from a Romney speech in which he accused the liberals of promoting “promiscrewity.” It has a nice ring to it.

In any case, Jason Jones’s short piece on Romney from that same episode is well worth watching:

We’ve been holing up here, swaddling, diaper-changing, fawning. There have been brief stretches of monsoon-like rain, and its accompanying white noise has made things even cozier. I spent an hour running quick errands: voting, making a supply run at the local supermarket and pharmacy, then home.

Other than that, we’ve been watching movies split into tens of separately-viewed installments, cooking simple meals, and most of all, sleeping when we can. It’s amazing how refreshed you can feel after two hours of sleep when it’s the longest solid stretch you’ve had in days.

Yesterday I brought the ukulele out. I’ve learned that Evie prefers fingerpicking to strumming, and though she can’t see much yet, her eyes move toward my fret hand, to the uke’s soundhole, to my face. It’s a tiny thing, this little triangle pattern of eye movement, but it’s more than enough.

This is what we spend most of our waking hours looking at:

Eve Rebecca Tourtelot was born in Rhinebeck, NY last night at 9:25pm EST: 6 lbs. 6 oz. / 18 inches.

Emma and Evie are both gorgeous, well and happy. I’m in awe of both my girls.

We’re sitting around and counting, and waiting. Emma is calm, as always. I am calm, for a change.

All the details are taken care of: I’ve packed the car, made the breakfast, dealt with all the last minute emails telling work folks I won’t be in for a while, fed Baci and called the dog sitter. There’s nothing now but to wait. I had no idea this part would be so relaxed and drawn out. If it weren’t for our little data chart here with its accompanying prescribed action plan, I would’ve driven Emma to the hospital right after her water broke, which was at 2am—5 hours ago. We’re not even at the point where we’re supposed to call the doc just yet.

So here we are, listening to NPR news on the laptop, counting and waiting. Calm and happy. Before long, we’ll be en route.