On Saturday evening we headed to nearby Rhinecliff to celebrate the arrival of something called the Sinterklaas (Dutch for Santa Claus). Rhinecliff used to have a celebration every year, but stopped at some point. This was the first Sinterklaas celebration in nearly 20 years.

It began with a bunch of dancers banging drums and percussion instruments. The audiovisual theme was sort of East Village-meets-Mardi Gras-meets-Mad Max.

Next we headed over to the dock, where the Sinterklaas was to arrive by boat. Evie was pretty much done with the whole experience at that point. Luckily my mom was there to help thwart Evie’s efforts to fling her mittens off at every opportunity.

The Sinterklaas boat approached. (See the Sinterklaas riding up top?)

The suspense was killing us.

Some folks posted themselves on the railroad trestle for a better view.

The boat finally arrived at the dock carrying… a puppet. It actually looked a little like a holiday version of King Friday. A few folks held this Sinterklaas aloft, and we proceeded to walk a circuit of the town.

At some point we were inexplicably joined by a full-sized, human Sinterklaas riding a white horse. Despite the white beard, I’m 99% sure this Sinterklass was a woman (which may or may not be part of the original Dutch tradition). I didn’t notice a sack of presents slung across the Sinterklaas’ shoulder, but she led our procession to the local bar, where all was forgiven.

We had my nephew Shane and his fiancée Vicky out for a visit to the Hudson Valley. They spent some with us up in the Hudson Valley, meeting Evie for the first time.

Our Upstate week was followed by a quick trip down to the city to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, with the requisite stop at the halfway point.

We headed out for a quick cruise on the Staten Island Ferry, which has a new, beautifully designed terminal, and is the best (and free) way to check out the Statue of Liberty. (I took about 30 pics of the Statue of Liberty, forgetting how ridiculously boring and unnecessary they would be when I downloaded them from my camera. That’s how awesome the Statue of Liberty is: it makes you think that your picture, the twenty-seven millionth picture of it ever taken, will be interesting.)

We ended our NYC day overlooking the city lights with a bottle of champagne to celebrate our visitors’ big news: Shane’s ultra-suave proposal at the top of Rockefeller Center, followed by Vicky’s YES!

A big congrats to you both—we miss having you here with us!

I’ve been so focused on the smaller details these past few weeks: diapers, naps, drool (only some of it mine). As a result, I’ve barely taken note of the fact that we’ve reached a few milestones here:

Today is the one-year anniversary of Getty Images’ acquisition of Pump Audio. Seems impossible that was an entire year ago. I’m incredibly proud of what we built: a business that plugs thousands of independent artists into a global marketplace of production professionals in television, advertising and film—people who want to use their music and pay them for it.

Surprisingly, our deal with Getty Images went through, despite the fact that I had a wardrobe malfunction at a critical juncture. During our final meeting with Getty’s CEO and assorted top brass, I inadvertently exposed my bellybutton to the room for a good quarter of an hour before realizing it. In my post-red-eye flight/whirlwind preparation haze, I’d missed a button on my dress shirt, so that when I leaned back in my chair while I was talking, my shirt puckered wide open just above the belt. So I suppose it’s the one-year anniversary of my presenting my navel in the Getty conference room, too.

I’m also now voluntarily unemployed. That’s my former desk above, in the Pump church. I still need to clear it out, actually. We’ve been in England for what seems like forever now, so my last day as a Pump/Getty Images employee—technically two weeks ago—was incredibly anti-climactic. It was kind of like going on a long trip and getting quietly divorced from a seven-plus-year marriage over email.

But this was a happy, friendly divorce, mind you. I still love everyone there at Pump—I just needed to take some time with Evie and Emma and figure out what I want to do next.

Which brings me to the next big milestone: Emma’s and my second wedding anniversary.

We spent our first anniversary down in Cape May, where we got married on June 2nd, 2006. Emma was pregnant for the third time that year, both of the first two pregnancies having ended in miscarriage. Here was our third chance, though with her cramping badly (as was the case just before the first two miscarriages) we assumed the worst.

Luckily, every once in a while self-diagnosis on Google actually deflates panic rather than stoking it. I quickly googled “cramping and pregnancy” on my Blackberry, and found that cramping can often be a good sign, meaning that the body is stretching the uterus in preparation for a growing fetus. We agreed to a moratorium on further googling, and clung to this potentially positive factoid during our 5-hour drive home. We listened to music and talk radio, held hands a bit, and in general didn’t say much.

Our 2008 trip down to Cape May was different in two major ways. The first was that we brought along 4-month old Evie. Everything was okay, just as Google promised. She is a very sweet and fun little baby, although not yet much of a beachgoer. In light of the latter fact, the second major difference in this trip was that I never got to go to the beach. Not once. We spent an entire week on a beach holiday, renting a house a six-minute walk from the ocean, and I barely touched the sand.

The one exception to this was when Emma and I brought Evie out to the spot on the Cape May Point where we said our vows two years ago.

There’s been some considerable erosion at the beach, exposing some large rocks that weren’t there on our wedding day. I don’t believe in omens even slightly, and don’t mean this as a metaphor or anything, so I’m just making a completely unscientific meteorological/geological observation here. It’s super windy (technical term) at Cape May Point, so one might assume that with each passing year that beach is going to be progressively carried elsewhere on the breeze.

All I know is, I hope to see a day, years and years hence, when Emma and I drag a teenage Evie down to the point, stand on the bare rocks where the beach used to be, and gush over our long-ago nuptials while she rolls her eyes at us.

The bad news is, Em & Lo’s show is not airing tonight on the UK’s Channel 5 as planned. It’s been delayed for a few weeks—most likely until late June. The good news is, the filming of the studio portion has begun, and our girls are doing brilliantly.

Sadly, the poor image above (marred with a scrolling black bar due to the digital camera and television not getting along) is all I was able to capture from the monitor in Emma’s dressing room, where I watched yesterday’s taping along with Emma’s parents.

The viewing was great until the show moved from Em & Lo interviewing guests on the soundstage to a pre-recorded segment about tantric sex featuring two intrepid sex reporters (not Em & Lo). The segment itself was very good, but it was seriously not-safe-for-work, and even more seriously not-safe-for-viewing-with-your-parents-in-law.

Just at the point when we found ourselves viewing a very Full Monty (you would not believe what they can show on TV in England) I gave a few loud, distracting coughs and asked the Taylors, “So… how about that cricket?” Malcolm pounced on the opportunity to give me the far less sordid details of England’s latest match with New Zealand.

Fortunately for all of us, the Taylors were more than good-spirited about the whole thing. And then Emma came by to say hello a few minutes later. We snapped a few photos of her in her glamorous TV get-up while she held little Evie, the only one in the room who hadn’t just learned all about this tantric business Sting’s been blabbing about for years.

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.)

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.

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.”