Emma and I came down to the city last night for the Pump Audio party at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square.

We haven’t had a proper night out together since Evie was born, so my sister Niki was good enough to come babysit at our nearby hotel room while Emma and I had a big night out (and by big, I mean we stayed out ’til the wee hours of nearly 10pm).

We left Evie and her cheeks propped up on the bed while we hit the town.

In the earlier part of the evening, my friend Larry (whose wife works at the Hard Rock) took us up a back staircase and along a few narrow back corridors. I thought we were going to check out Jim Morrison’s leather pants or something, but instead he brought us out onto the Hard Rock marquee, overlooking Times Square. By far the most frequent comment of the night was directed Emma’s way: “How is it possible that you just had a baby?!?”

We came inside to hear the band (whose name, sadly, escapes me now) and have our first cocktails in what seemed like years.

The night was still going strong, but Emma and I had burned through our reserves and were fading fast. Having just been hit with a cold, Emma’s vocal chords started to give out, leaving her with a very sexy Demi Moore voice (which unfortunately by the time we woke up this morning had down-shifted into Marge Simpson’s sister’s voice.)

We were amazed at how at ease we felt with Niki watching Evie. I didn’t stress for a minute, if you don’t count the 42 times I looked at my cellphone to make sure I hadn’t missed any emergency calls. We arrived back at the hotel to find that Niki had sung her little niece to sleep, the two of them perfectly happy.

We woke Evie to change her, and I broke Emma’s strict household rule: no eye contact after hours. It apparently revs her little brain up and makes it difficult to get her back to sleep. I always have a hard time resisting this, and last night might have been the worst case yet. Evie and I smiled at each other for a good fifteen minutes. As it turned out, we’d pay for this all night long: I’d be surprised if Evie slept for more than 30 minutes in a row. But you know what? Looking at the pictures now, and remembering how amazing it felt with her grinning her gummy little smile up at me, it was more than worth it.

(Emma may have a slightly different opinion on the matter.)

I’ve been a bad blogger this past week, but all is well on the homefront. I’ll post something original soon, but until then, please enjoy this brief intermission:

I took Baci out to the neighboring farm at dusk yesterday and saw a swarm of red-winged blackbirds swirling around the mowed wheat fields. At this diminished size, the video only begins to convey the magnitude of the bird-cloud, and the sheer number of individuals acting at times like a single organism.

Click through to play the video….

(more…)

Emma and I have this habit with our Netflix account that’s become a real problem. It usually goes like this: Emma spots a review of some amazing foreign indie political documentary or whatever in The New Yorker, and we decide to add it to our queue. But when the movie arrives, it sits on the counter for a week or so before we send it back, unwatched.

The thing is, it’ll be a Tuesday night, and we’re both dead tired and feeling like watching something mindless. And so we do this again and again, with all these movies that we’re supposed to watch. I wish I could blame it on the baby, but it’s been going on long before that. Years, maybe.

One of the movies this happened with recently was Once. It arrived from Netflix, and we sent it back ten sheepish days later without having seen it. It was about musicians, for god’s sake. How could I not love it? But for whatever reason we passed it up and continued our Netflix charade.

After the Oscar for Best Original Song went to “Falling Slowly” from Once, Emma went to our local video store the other night and rented the movie again. We sat with her parents, who were visiting from the UK, and popped it in. Within about 30 seconds, everyone but Emma was fast asleep. This was nothing to do with the film, I should add, but jet lag on her parents’ part, and a congenital couch+movie=sleep disorder on mine. I woke up about an hour into the film, with the most incredible song playing. I asked Emma what I’d missed, and she rolled her eyes at me. “You have to see this movie,” she told me. “It’s amazing.”

And so I watched the rest, which was brilliant, and then watched it from start to finish again the next day. The lead characters and story are so charming, the songs are fantastic, and it’s just a great little movie.

Here are the opening credits, featuring one of several live performances in the film by Glen Hansard (lead singer/guitarist of the Irish band The Frames and also the guitarist from the 1991 movie The Commitments). Hansard plays one of the two leads, a Dublin street busker.

A friend just sent me a great clip of Aussie cricket star Andrew Symonds flattening a streaker during a series final against India.

So our little Evie just turned 4 weeks old, and we took her to her one-month check-up at the pediatrician. We had a hunch she’d been gaining weight and growing fast, as we’ve had to abandon a few onesies that fit perfectly two weeks ago but now seemed ready to split at the seams.

It turns out that Evie’s put on about 1 pound per week, and grown an inch per week. The doc laughed and called her a “record-setting baby.” I did some quick calculations, and if she were to continue growing at the present rate, by her first birthday she’d be 5′9″ tall and weigh just over 60lbs. (Coincidentally, I’m pretty sure those were my exact stats when I tried out for the football team in 10th grade.)

In any case, I can’t say I remember a more enjoyable month. Emma and I have spent lots of time with Evie, and through the various stretches of sleep deprivation and its accompanying exhaustion, my favorite moments are undoubtedly those in the early morning. The stress of the night is over—wondering if she’ll sleep for a long stretch or not—and the three of us curl up in bed with the morning news playing on the laptop. Emma and I drift luxuriously in and out of sleep while Evie snoozes with her tiny, rapid, nasal puffs, lying atop a pillow set lengthwise between us.

It seems funny to me now, but there was a time near the end of Emma’s pregnancy when I sheepishly confided to her that I half-expected the very first part of fatherhood to be slightly lackluster. Babies, I told her (and I was right here), don’t actually do anything at first. Nothing interesting, anyway. You change them and feed them all the time, and they just pretty much sleep, fill their diapers, cry, and occasionally blink around aimlessly. My theory was that until you get that first real interaction from them—a smile, usually—that the first two months might just be incredibly tiring and trying while not yet altogether rewarding.

All I had to go on here was holding other people’s newborns. Like most guys, after politely accepting an unsolicited offer to hold someone’s baby, I’d hold him or her for about fifteen seconds before wishing like anything that they’d take their baby back. Part of this was feeling awkward and unsure of how to hold the baby properly—as well as a fear of dropping it—but it was also the slightly panicky thought, “What do I do if this thing starts crying?” I had a hunch that I’d be exposed as having absolutely zero paternal instincts.

Well, I was right about my having next to no paternal instincts—at the start, anyway. But the rewards so far have been in training and growing those instincts. It’s an incredible pleasure to calm Evie when she’s crying, and to learn the precise little motions that lull her back to sleep. And there’s no time in the past month where I’ve felt as useful as when I feed her with the bottle.

But more than anything, it’s the mornings lying next to her that I love, when she’s blinking away at nothing, making the briefest of eye contact with me before attempting eye contact with the laptop screen, then the curtains, followed by a befuddled frown while she fills her diaper noisily (which never fails to crack Emma and me up). It’s all more obvious to me now as a singular determination rather than aimlessness. She’s learning to focus her eyes, firing untested synapses, mapping our facial configurations. She now holds your gaze just that tiniest bit longer each time before trying to acquaint herself with the nearest inanimate object.

And then of course there’s this insane growth spurt, which is the most obvious progress of all. We’re hoping this particular progress tapers off slightly, as she’s on a trajectory to be taller than Emma by Christmas, which might make breastfeeding difficult.