Hello world!
Guess what. We’re moving. Well, technically, we’ve moved. To here.
You found us though, so you already know that.
Welcome.
Read MoreFor the Books
I don’t usually write letters to the baby, but lately I’ve been wanting to talk to 18 year old Gideon (the one who I am going to have a hard time letting go of, but of whom I will be so incredibly proud). I thought I might tell him something like this….
This is your seventh month of life and I think you are becoming the kind of person I want to be around all the time. Before November you were all baby – stationary and cute, loving but easily tired to tears, fickle in all the ways that babies can be. Then one day all of those rocking motions came together and suddenly you were on the go. You haven’t looked back since and you are no longer just a baby. You are Gideon, explorer, conqueror, the strong warrior we hoped for, proudly crawling under things and into tiny spaces where you frequently get wedged.
A lot of other babies learn how to sit first and I am not surprised that you still don’t really sit. Instead you lean on your side, ala biblical characters reclining at a table, or you try to stay up while sitting back on your knees, just in case you need to make a beeline for a light socket or a speaker wire. You’re eyes are always scanning for the next adventure and even when your big baby head makes your fall backwards and smack your noggin on the floor, just watching the dogs run or the door stopper boing-ing can stop your pain.
I’m on guard now all the time, trying to insure that you don’t get huge bruises or a concussion – mostly for fear of having to explain what happened to a pediatrician or worse, the emergency room doc where I’m sure I’ll be turned in to CPS for negligence over not allowing you to get shots or an antibiotic. Speaking of which, I was watching some show on Discovery while you were napping and they had this crazy mom on who was using the tv as a babysitter. It was some sort of intervention that didn’t work, but at the end of the show she gets together in this coffee group with other moms and dads and one of the moms asks them all about their doctors because she doesn’t want to take her kid to an antibiotic pushing person who isn’t able to say “it’s a cold. Go home.” The tv mom was all “oh, just trust what the doctors say and don’t worry about the outcome. They are smarter than us. They went to med school. They know. We should just listen and obey.” It made me feel even more sad for her poor television zapped children. But it also explained a lot. This woman is just the kind of person who thinks that universal health care is a good thing. She’s the kind of woman who thinks that the government should provide things for us and tell us what to do because they know. They went to Washington. They must be smarter than us. We should just listen and obey and pay some more taxes and sit back while the federal government bans people from really succeeding financially by redistributing wealth over a certain amount. This is the kind of person that you will be encountering when you are being educated outside of our home because these, unfortunately, are the kind of people who are the product of our humanistic, post-post-modern world. I am sorry that there are so many of them, baby. I just hope you don’t become one of them when you are in college. So, don’t hit your head too hard or Mama might get hauled off somewhere for not obeying the CDC.
Anyway, seven month old Gideon is a blast. You just started a funny new laugh that sounds like one that I do sometimes – like air being pushed out of your nose while you smile. You don’t have any teeth yet, so that smile is all gums and incredibly delicious.
Tonight you found the little mole that is on your left knee and tried to pick it off your leg. When that didn’t work you just tried to eat your entire knee. It didn’t work very well, though I’m sure you were less successful because this was all going on in the bathtub which was very slick and added a higher degree of difficulty for that kind of contortionism.
I don’t know what you’ll discover tomorrow, but I’m looking forward to the sun rising just as much as you are. 
Reprinted from The New York Times
[In honor of our not very crippling snow storm over which there was entirely too much hype (sorry Oklahoma, you bore the full brunt of this thing) we bring you an essay by one of our favs. We heart him. You might too.]
Snow Daze
By DEMETRI MARTIN
Published: January 1, 2006
Not too long ago it snowed in New York City. Here’s what I remember.
Morning. I wake up early, throw on some layers. I head out to get supplies for sledding. First stop: Union Square. I go into a store and manage to grab the last sled in stock – strong start. It’s a round tube. This is good. (Tube = ideal for jumping, because of padding.) Next stop: Toys “R” Us. I cross the square, leaving tracks. The snow in the city is white, for now. My face is cold. The city is quiet. I feel great.
Cellphone to ear, I make two calls. I get two voice mailboxes. I leave two messages: “Hey. It’s Demetri. We’re going sledding. Central Park. Call me, and I’ll give you the details.” Toys “R” Us is already out of sleds. (Probably swiped by some kids. Typical. They don’t have jobs, which gives them the advantage here.) The store still has pool floats, though. Perfect. I buy the last two Millennium Falcon pool floats and throw them into my backpack.
Back to the subway, heading north to snow country, a k a Central Park. First order of business: configure hat and headphones to provide the optimum combination of warmth and acoustics. This takes some time, because I have those headphones that go directly into the ears. And often, putting them on with a hat means stabbing myself in the ears. A little finessing. . .done.
On the train, I get down to business and start to inflate the tube. This is the same as starting to almost faint. I stop and give a nod to some nearby passengers (in order to take my vibe down from “crazy” to “just excited about sledding”). Inflation resumes.
Out of the train and into Central Park. More fresh snow. More phone calls. I make about a dozen, actually. And I get a dozen voice-mail greetings. Losers.
I walk deeper into the park and find a hill near 79th Street. It’s already crowded with families. Families and me. At first, my inner child sledder takes over. I scurry up the hill, wait in line and then cut in front of a couple of kids who seem to lack the passion I have for going next. But then, after a few runs and failed attempts at small talk, I realize something: I am a creep. (Note: Most parents don’t take kindly to lone, bearded sledsmen who try to talk shop with their kids – especially on the Upper West Side.) I decide it’s time to move on. Losers.
At 72nd Street, on the East Side, I find a pretty good hill. It’s wide. I do a few runs. Still no calls back. My friends are lame. I never realized how much better sledding is with human interaction. In that sense it’s like the opposite of using a bathroom. After learning my lesson at hill No. 1, I steer away from conversations. No chatter, just pure hill riding. (Note: This is even creepier than before – now I’m the antisocial grown-up solo-sledder guy.) Whatever. Time to move again.
Heading back west, I get two calls back. On the phone I emphasize that I have Millennium Falcon pool floats. Two friends are on their way up. Excellent.
Five minutes later, I come to the Bethesda Fountain, where I find a crowd of people watching one man ride his large tube down the stairs. He is the star of this makeshift slope – at least until now. When I arrive, he looks up at me and my tube and says simply, “This is awesome.” I agree. We both run to the top of the stairs.
A flat landing in the middle of stairs provides a jump of sorts. The possibilities excite me. He goes first and almost gets air. Now I go. And I most definitely get air. When I get to the bottom: applause. These people are clapping. They get me. My new best friend and I grab our tubes for another run. At the top of the hill a kid says to me, “You got air.” I say, “I know.” (Subtext: “No, you can’t try my pool float.”) This time I decide that I need a running start. I make the people behind me move to create a clearing. I also decide to go headfirst.
The crowd parts. Music: check. Goggles: check. Attitude: check, check. I dive onto the stairs. Immediately, I realize that I’ve made a grave miscalculation. In an instant I am airborne. But this kind of air doesn’t feel good. My legs rotate upward. My face downward. The tube deserts me. Uh, oh.
In the various experiences of my life up to then, I had never actually landed on my face. It wasn’t even on my radar of things to watch out for. I remember hearing a cracking noise and the music in my ears suddenly stopping. It was as if I knocked over a D.J. booth with my face – if the booth were made of ice. A moment later I was prostrate on the stairs. My hat was somewhere near the Great Lawn. My goggles were cracked. A lady retrieved my headphones. Also broken. Two people helped me to my feet. One thing life has taught me is that when strangers help you, something is definitely wrong. One man said, “You should be careful.” I wasn’t sure if I had broken my face or what. I walked away, still reeling, numb and kind of scared.
When my friends finally arrived, I told them about my near-seriously-hurt experience. The red marks on the right side of my face corroborated my story. I gave them the spaceships and just sat for a while, happy that my neck managed not to break and psyched that I got air. Man, I love snow days.
Demetri Martin is a writer and a comedian.
Read MoreIn Pictures
Note Quite Moses
The Face of Sickness circa two weeks ago.
I look terrible. He still looks pretty cute.
The ugly face of feeding a baby food he does not want to eat. 
Severe cuteness with banana lips.
LOL Baby: Is can crawl cans U
Right Here in Middle America
There’s not a lot to say about things like this.
We are all safe here. We don’t think we know anyone who was terrorized by this incredibly selfish, completely narcissistic imbecile. It’s such a tragic, fatal wound to society that people care more about making their own name known than the good of other humans. It’s why people drink and drive. It’s why people leave their spouses and children to find themselves. It’s why American Idol is such a phenomenon. It’s why people cut each other off in traffic.
It’s nothing new, I know. There’s nothing new under the sun. It’s just that this part of the earth seemed like it was sheltered from such a direct ray of light. You can pay lip service to knowing that’s not true, but when the cell towers are jammed because everyone is trying to get a hold of each other and make sure they are okay, it’s a wholly different kind of knowledge.
So hug your kids and kiss your baby and ask that the Lord won’t wait much longer.
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