Hello, am I in There? Anywhere?

It's still early, but I'm coming to terms that there's not a shred of me in Gideon. He looks exactly like Chris, is built exactly like him (tall and lanky) and is already showing definite signs of his personality. The most I could come up with is "maybe he has my nail beds." I'm not even sure about that. Not saying this is a bad thing. There are clearly a lot of benefits to not being like me. I'm just, well, surprised. I thought my DNA was tougher than that. Now all I have to look forward to is when his teeth come in -- maybe he'll have my overbite and need braces like I did.

The two of them also have this spooky bond. In the wee hours when he wakes up (every 2-3 hours), I can spend up to an hour and half with him and as soon as I walk out of the nursery it's all screams and brimstone. Chris will walk in, place his hands on him for a few seconds and instantly he's asleep -- for hours, as if Chris used the Vulcan sleep hold. I'm not kidding. What am I doing during that 90 minute stretch that's just not enough? I'm changing him, feeding him, holding him and reading poetry to him. Poetry defintely has the power to put him to sleep, it's just having mixed results keeping him asleep once I put him in the crib.

That's another thing they have in common. As soon as someone starts reading poetry they fall asleep.

OK, that's not really true. Chris only fell asleep at one reading and now that I think about it that was a fiction reading, but it was embarassing nonetheless because we were smack up in the front row and oh the mean glares Jamaica Kincaid sent our way while she read about a little yellow dress.

Like a lot of you, I have this towering pile of books/journals that I add to much faster than I get around reading. Last night Gideon and I finished Jeff Clark's The Little Door Slides Back. He stayed awake and listened to a good part of that. That only took two late night sessions to finish. On Saturday we read the latest issue of Carve which has some great poems by T-Rob that Gid missed out on because they were at the end of the journal and he was already asleep. Tonight we'll start Kirsten Kaschock's Unfathoms. Actually this is the most poetry I've been reading since I got pregnant. I was so tired then that aside from reading submissions and online journals during the day, I maybe read one book every week or so. I'm still tired now, but no longer have the option of sleeping when I want.

So if Gideon wants the poetry to stop, he's just going to have to fall asleep faster.