Introduction

Elsie,

You're 9 1/2 weeks old.  It's 3:18 a.m., and I should be sleeping (because you're finally, finally sleeping) or trying to work on a paper for school, but I've given myself the worst case of stress-induced insomnia, and I'm trying to write myself down from the edge.  (Also, I know you'll wake up soon, and you'll want to eat, and if I'm asleep I'll be angry because you've woken me.)

I won't go into it at great length here, because (for reasons I'll explain), this blog is devoted to a different purpose, but you're not a great sleeper, and it's driving me, your dad, Norma all a little crazy.

But that's not the purpose of this blog.  I've been keeping memorials of you in various places since you were born: in a makeshift baby book, in a log I kept for a few weeks tracking your every diaper and nap, in a more traditional journal, in a series of photo albums on the computer.  But as is my wont, I keep feeling like each of these is not sufficiently tracking your progress - that somehow, in the age of electronic media and the internet, there should be a better way to remember every single moment of your little life up to this point - that I shouldn't need to live in fear that the computer will crash, or I'll lose my phone, and all the beautiful photos of you that we have from Day 1 will have vanished.  Or that the house will be destroyed in a fire, and all my musings on the struggles of these last 9 1/2 weeks will be destroyed.

So here's my last hedge against disaster - at least, assuming things like Blogger have some kind of endurance and I won't find myself, 10 years hence, desperately trying to export all this content to some other medium.

It's been a tough six hours, but I love you, little bug.  I love you to distraction.