Confusing Tides

People continue to be impressed with your size. That’s a nice way of saying you continue to be a big, big baby. We don’t have your latest official weight & height, but you’re now wearing 6-9 month old clothes and people are shocked and awed when they find out you're just 11 weeks old. It seems that every 4 weeks you gain 3 months of normal baby growth. We’ll end up sewing all the clothes you’ve already outgrown into colorful quilt patterns to make sure they don’t go to waste.

We made a run to Cape Cod this weekend. Your dad was feeling the squeeze of winter (albeit a mild one) in cramped quarters in New York and he needed badly to flee to wide open spaces. I was having trouble breathing in NYC, so away we went to the Cape. Unfortunately, a restful getaway was not in the cards. We left Thursday night and stayed with grandma birds only to have her oil burner backfire, which brought the local police and fire department to her door at 3am. Having been ordered out of the house, I swept you away into the car to keep you warm while the Wareham firemen and police officers mostly just played with Bella. Men in uniforms appear to love bulldogs and so Bella long ago came to love men in uniforms. She shakes her little fanny and the uniformed men just melt.

From that point on you began fussing abnormally and it soon became clear that you were feeling under the weather. Being on the Cape is usually an antidote to city life, but with you being sick we found ourselves scrambling to find a doctor, to find medicine, to find some means to ease your discomfort (and our own). Generally, you don’t fuss except a little in the evenings, so to have you constantly crying was disturbing. We were on edge, helpless to relieve your obvious unease. It ended up being no winter picnic.

Over the weekend, 7 dolphins beached themselves in Wellfleet. This was the 12th incident of dolphins and/or whales coming ashore on the Cape this winter. They’re saying the dolphins are becoming “confused in the tides.” Becoming confused in the tide, and heading to the beach for consolation is certainly something I can relate to these days.