Entry 12:

Dear Martha,

Today I got a glimpse of my future and it's a ... multiethnic utopia. Instead of going to the zoo, I spent the afternoon at the neighborhood park, where I witnessed an Indian woman taking care of Filipino twins, a white woman watching an Asian girl, a Chinese woman tending to an African-American boy, and everyone playing with each other. The only people left out of the fun were the white mothers watching their own kids, who sat alone on distant benches. There's a lesson in here somewhere. ...

Two of the boys played war, or basically hide and seek with water guns. It's interesting to see that the fantasy of the military lives on in young American boys, even if the actual army is soft-selling itself in language cribbed from a spa brochure. I refer, of course, to the New York Times story about the army's new ad campaign, "An Army of One," designed to dispel the idea that soldiers are "faceless, nameless cogs." I realize we're in the age of the lifestyle army, but this seems one step too far. "Be All That You Can Be" always struck me as perfect for the times, individualistic but appealing to a universal ideal. This new watered-down version is more like "I'm OK, You're OK--We Like You Just the Way You Are." Whatever happened to the good old days of "Drop and give me 50?"

Are you ever conscious of treating Eli like a boy? Now that Christina Hoff Summers has made us aware of our girlcentric culture, you should probably start the toy guns early lest he wind up, well, an interior designer. My favorite gender experiment story: A friend of a friend shielded her daughter from all girlish toys: no Barbies, no strollers, no Singing Suzy. Instead she bought her all boy toys: trucks, trains, fire engines. Then one day she came into her daughter's room and found her swaddling and cooing to her Tonka truck.

Before I answer the questions, Shocker of the Day: Abandon Socks! How could they? After all those little boys and girls wrote him such nice letters. If nothing else, doesn't Hillary recognize the New York Post headline danger: "ONE MISSING SOCKS" with a picture of a forlorn, scraggly cat scratching its way through a garbage dump, followed by "DEAD SOX" with a picture of a euthanized cat.

Now for the questions:

1. All the time. She is mesmerized by the mobile. I get tempted. Should I turn myself in?
2. Yes. It's cold in our house, warm in the bed.
3. Yes. Yesterday I caught David writing dozens of thank you notes using her back as the hard surface.
4. I chew on pens. I pick up the baby.
5. Definitely not fresh, and usually not stained.
6. I avoid that clipper. Seems impossible. I use a nail file.
7. I change them every day because I like to. It's a girl thing.

8. We have dropped all manner of crumb on her head when she's in the Baby Bjorn on our laps. But I have yet to scald her.

Will you still let us baby-sit?

H

</?xml:namespace>