I’ve been slowly reducing the size of my book collection. There’s a big used bookstore in Knoxville called McKay’s that I’ve patronized for years (along with the rest of literate Knoxville). When I first moved here and was getting into ebay, I spent some time buying up cheap batches of sci fi and mystery novels there and reselling them for a decent profit at McKay’s. Naturally, I always opted to get store credit instead of cash because you get a much higher return that way. Until this weekend, I had five sets of bookshelves in my office. For a long time, they’ve had books crammed in every spot and then stacked up sideways in front of the shelved books and in some cases stacked on the floor and in other spots of the house (there’s usually a stack of four or five books on my nightstand). Several times in the last few months, we’ve taken big boxes of books down to McKay’s to resell, just to help get rid of some of the clutter. We’re considering selling our house, and as part of an effort to do even more cleanup, I stayed up very late Sunday night cleaning up the office. In the process, I eliminated two bookshelves and produced the stack of books pictured here, some of which I’m having a really hard time getting rid of. It just bothers me to get rid of Yeats’s collected poems, for example, though I haven’t picked that book up more than five times in the last seven years. The same goes for a book of Hardy’s poems (and several novels) and the book of Restoration and Augustan poets and of that Chekhov I’ve been meaning to read for years. And then the books of Renaissance theater history and literary criticism I cling to with a special urgency even though I’ve cracked none of them since college.

But it’s time to pare down. I’m finally admitting to myself that I’m not the literary consumer that I used to be and have always wanted to be. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m keeping the books that are the most important to me (DFW, Gaddis, Pynchon are going nowhere; nor is Melville; nor are my old, old volumes of Longfellow and Jonson and Byron). But I am finally sloughing off the books that I’ve held onto for years almost out of a sense of (not necessarily premeditated) pretension or self-importance (”If I have all these books on my shelves, people will think I’m well-read and smart”). As hard as it is to get rid of some of these, it feels good to eliminate some of the clutter from my life.

It’s confirmed — Knoxville’s second Flock meetup will take place at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday (tomorrow) at the Barne’s and Noble on Kingston Pike (yes, we do know about books here in the south). We’ll gather in the cafe area. We’re a small group so far (but bigger than last time), and anybody in the area is welcome to stop by. I’ve got some nifty buttons to give out and, FedEx willing, I’ll have one or two tee-shirts that people can fight over. Other than that, we’ll just talk Flock. I hope to have a chance to give an overview of things to come and to answer any questions I’m able to about where we are with the software. Admittedly, since I’m on the web end of things now rather than the client side, my knowledge on that front is more limited than in the past. In any case, it should be a good event. Naturally, unless it’s a real snoozer, I’ll report on how it went. Consider this an invitation to other community members to hold meetups and to do status reports afterward. You’ll have to check this with Community Ambassador Will Pate, but I gather we’re getting much closer now to being ready for spread-like campaigns, and meetups seem to me like as good a way as any to participate.

Back in March, I more or less presided over a small Flock meetup in Knoxville. We’ve come a long way since March, and given the recent releases, I thought it might be a good time to hold another meetup event, this time with hopefully a slightly broader reach. Including myself, I can count on four participants this time and may be able to garner a fifth. If I break six, I’ll be pretty happy; Knoxville isn’t exactly browseropolis, you know. If you happen to be in the Knoxville area and are interested in meeting some other Flock users or just want to find out more, please let me know by email (daryl at flock dot com), and I’ll fill you in on the details as I firm up plans. Tentatively, I’m looking at finding a book store or coffee shop with wifi on Wednesday or Thursday evening next week.

There’s no set agenda, but I imagine we’ll talk some about where the browser’s been, where it’s come, and where it’s going. I fully anticipate the airing of some beefs with the browser, and I hope we’ve also given reason for some kudos to be awarded as well.

As of my last update, we had stopped allowing Lennie to nurse. We’ve actually managed to keep it up, and Lennie has had no boobie in almost a week. Initially, she asked for it some, but now she rarely asks, only occasionally suggesting that she be allowed to “cuddle mommy.” As for bedtime, I seem to rule the roost now. Lennie still has boobie associations with lying down or sitting in the rocking chair with Mleeka, and so I’ve developed a track record for getting Lennie to sleep and helping her get back to sleep when she wakes up at night. Unfortunately, the most effective method for getting her to sleep at this point is to lie down in front of the TV with her and let it entrance her into sleep. It’s a step, though. I hope to move toward lying down without TV (maybe with music) and then eventually lying down in bed and finally just putting her in bed when it’s bedtime.

By and large, Lennie seems to be sleeping more restfully now (and Mleeka usually gets a full night with no interruptions). It’s pretty common for us to get her down by 10:00 or so and for her to sleep alone until 5:00 or 6:00. When she wakes up, I’ve had pretty good success so far lying down and snuggling her back to sleep for two or three more hours and going back to bed myself (or getting up to go to the gym), though this morning, she woke up and I brought her up into bed with us. In any case, 2/3 of us are sleeping better now (my sleep has suffered a bit, but I guess it’s my turn), and I think we can say that we’ve officially weaned.

I like getting feedback on my posts from time to time, but the cost of getting it is getting pretty high. Some days, I get a dozen or more “moderate this comment” emails, and it’s more than I’m willing to deal with in order to get the occasional interesting or validating comment. So I’m closing comments on all posts. Until further notice, if you’d like to respond to something, just email me with a non-spammy subject line.

If you’re even the least bit squeamish about reading about breastfeeding, you should skip this entry (though it’s not graphic at all).

In the first three weeks of Lennie’s life, there were two or three nights during which she didn’t have access to Mleeka to nurse. Since then, not a single night has gone by that Lennie hasn’t nursed at some point during the night. I suspect a lot of people think we’re weird for allowing Lennie to nurse for so long (she is over two years old now, after all), but Mleeka read up on it, and there are lots of benefits to nursing longer. The American Pediatrics Society (or some such group that baby doctors tend to belong to) recommends nursing for at least a year, and some other primates nurse their offspring until they’re the human equivalent of 7 or 8 years old. There have been times when Lennie’s been sick and not eating during which nursing has probably saved her trips to the hospital to be hydrated, and of course, it has also provided comfort.

In recent months, Mleeka’s milk supply has begun to dwindle, and the result is that Lennie, when she comes to bed after we put her down on her own for a few hours, spends the rest of the night hopping from side to side to try to get milk. It’s been very frustrating for Mleeka, who hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in 2-plus years. So a few weeks ago, we decided to start trying to discourage nursing in an effort to slowly wean. We started with distraction at non-sleep times. She’d ask for milk (or to cuddle Mama, one of her stock phrases for it), and we’d just divert her. She handled it pretty well, sometimes whining a little, but generally dealing with it much better than we had anticipated. We still let her nurse at naptime and bedtime. Last week, we started discouraging nursing at naptime, and that too she’s dealt with better than expected. She’s learned to snuggle (we have to use that word now because cuddle has other connotations) with Mleeka in front of the TV to get to sleep. It’s not ideal, but it’s another step in the right direction. We hadn’t been 100% on-task about avoiding naptime nursing, but she’s had very little of that in the last week. Yesterday, Mleeka wound up driving Lennie around to get her asleep at naptime, and when I came out of the office after she got back, I saw that she had actually removed the whole car seat from the car with Lennie in it (a feat of strength and flexibility not to be sneezed at) and brought her into the house that way to avoid the probability of waking her up by removing her from the seat itself.

This week, Lennie’s been very fussy, and we noticed an escalation of tooth erosion on the back of one of her front teeth. She grinds her teeth, and a depression had been forming in one of them, but it began to look much worse. We took her to the dentist (trying to play it up and make it fun by talking about how the dentist was going to count her teeth, a prospect she was amused by), and it turns out that in spite of some things Mleeka had read to the contrary about nursing’s effect on baby teeth, all-night nursing has played a role in eroding those teeth. We’re getting on the schedule now to get crowns on them to prevent further erosion and pain. We’re also ramping up the no-nursing campaign.

Which brings me back around to the title and the first paragraph of this post. Last night, after having dinner over at Dave and Karen’s, we drove around a bit in hopes of getting Lennie to sleep in the car. She hadn’t nursed since Mleeka turned over at 5:30 yesterday morning and Lennie woke up and declined to go back to sleep. She did fall asleep in the car on the way home, but she woke up as I was putting her in bed. She was really angry and threw a little fit. I’ve learned that when she’s doing that, I sometimes have to just let her have a fit for a few minutes, making sure she knows that I’m available and eager to comfort her when she’s ready. Trying to force my comfort on her just makes her angrier. So after a couple of minutes, I got her to come hug me, and then we stretched out on the floor in front of the TV on our backs with her using my arm as a pillow. We lay like that for an hour-and-a-half until she was good and asleep. An hour or so later, she woke up crying, but I hopped out of bed and was able to pat her back to sleep. When I got up at 6:00 this morning to go to the gym, she was, astonishingly, still asleep in the living room.

It was her first full night’s sleep since the very beginning without boobie and without significant intervention on our part.

This won’t be the birthday anthem to my daughter that I really want it to be. It’d take a few hours of hard thought followed by a few hours of drafting followed by a few hours of editing to get anywhere close, and I just don’t have that kind of consecutive time right now. So here’s a quick, humble little ditty instead.

Let’s start with a brief retrospective. When I wrote the big birthday message last year, Lennie was just starting to communicate with intention (as opposed to simple labeling) by instructing me in simple terms (”there”) to take her to one spot or another in the room. Now she communicates rather more extensively by saying things like “Lennie no want brush teeth with green tooth brush” or “chocolate milk is so delicious.” She has probably dozens of repeated sentences now and clearly knows enough of a grammar to compose understandable new sentences, often surprising us with her ingenuity. I guess she must have been walking a year ago. Now she runs, slides, jumps, turns somersaults; this evening, I tried to entice her into her bedroom for a diaper change, and one or the other of us suggested hopping, and sure enough, she followed me hopping through the house to get a clean diaper. A year ago, we were in the habit of calling her “Lou.” It felt right at the time, but we’ve moved on to Lennie now. We’ll no doubt oscillate between the two in the coming years.

The thing Mleeka and I consistently and frequently find ourselves thinking about Lennie is how astoundingly happy we are that we got her. And not that we got a baby, but that we got the very baby we got. She’s so bright (I mean in terms of personality in addition to intellect) and special, and there’s never in recent months been a single day during which we haven’t been delighted by some phrase she’s come up with or some impish thing she’s done or face she’s made. At every stage in her life to date, we’ve thought back to how far she’s come, and it always seems impossible that she’s progressed so far, that she’s managed to become so much more special than she had been the last time we checked. And yet she has. More and more, I find that I enjoy her not as my offspring, and not because I’m in some way bound to, but because she’s this objectively wonderful little person all by herself.