0–6 mos.

In the middle of January, my dad came to stay with us for two weeks. During a Skype conversation last fall, when it appeared both my parents had had too much to drink, my mother gaily volunteered to send my dad to California, and my father gaily agreed.

I started off Sunday morning cupping my hand so my son could vomit into it.

A few minutes later, back in fine spirits, he gazed at his father in the kitchen whisking batter for crepes.

"It's a high-whisk activity," SJ confided to him. "I like whisk-y business."

I was having a perfectly good day, chasing down some bitch who stole my husband's debit card information and depleted our joint account buying Chinese food, Hawaiian food, and pizza and making a payment to MetroPCS …

These are the last days of my maternity leave. The weather has turned cold, so in the predawn we turn on the heat, which makes a satisfying boom and then slowly seeps up through the floor vents and smells like a different toxin in each room.

Since I had a baby, I've started a lot of lists. I LIKE LISTS. But I don't finish many because baby.

SOMETHING MY HUSBAND SAID RECENTLY THAT MAYBE HE SHOULDN'T HAVE:

"I feel great! I got twelve hours of sleep last night!"

Even though my parents were just in San Francisco to meet the baby/Barnacle, I recently took the baby/Barnacle to Evanston, Illinois, to stay with them for 10 days.

It's been quite the transition to motherhood or, as I like to call it, Mom Eats Last. Some days it feels like SJ and I are killing it: We get enough sleep, we eat, we shower, the house gets cleaned, the bills get paid, and we leave the house and return to it, all without killing the baby.

I've settled on a word for how having a baby makes me feel: peeled.

So this is what I've been up to: giving birth, better known as simultaneously vomiting into a bag and gushing blood and amniotic fluid out of your vagina onto a hospital bed as you lie on your side butt-naked in front of your husband and a roomful of strangers.