you said what?

Just this past week, Hobbes has not only become social, he has become super-social. The smile was just the crack in the dam between our grown-up attempts at communication and his blank, alien misfit thousand-mile stare. He has begun cooing and making small, inquiring sounds which he seems to enjoy hearing us attempt to mimicry back at him. Our attempts are not only pitiful, they are apparently hilarious. I have been on the receiving end of not a few toothless, happy grins at my feeble assays at baby talk; I suspect I'm mangling something along the lines of a "Your mutha'" joke, and Hobbes is having a joyous time at my expense.

I might as well get used to be laughed at by the younger generation. It's all downhill from here anyway.

There is one week left of my maternity leave -- I return to the office on December 15th full-time, though only for a week since on the 20th we leave for Seattle until the 31st -- and I confess that I'm not looking forward to returning to the grind as much as I thought I would. When I originally requested my maternity leave, I was basing the time I'd request on my past experiences of vacations. Mostly, I find ways of working on my vacations, because I am (1) slightly stupid; and (2) obsessive about work. The proper phrase is "workaholic," and while I do enjoy the time away from the office, I'm usually wild to get back into it as soon as the vacation period starts winding down. There was nothing in my experience to suggest that maternity leave would be anything different. I figured that a couple of weeks into it, I would already be dying to get back to work.

"Your priorities will change," my boss told me kindly, if a little apprehensively.

"Hah," I said. "Right. There'll be a--" I waved a hand in vague, vague, vague speculation. "Thing."

"Baby."

"Right."

It seemed to worry my boss that I needed reminding.

In any event, it turns out that he was right, which shouldn't be a surprise and yet is, because I am Japanese and of course as a Japanese person I do not get attached to people, because people can be left behind in places like battlefields and grocery stores and Iowa, whereas ideals and governments go on and on like brie shoved in the bookshelf to age, ripen, and eventually melt. I blame the American half of me, which has somehow melted the Japanese half's cold, briny heart and attached it with electrodes to the pulse of this small, dotty infant who cannot even hold up his own head because it is too big for his stubby little neck.

The ways of biology are mysterious.

There was a point to all this.

I forget.