Snapshot:

I am in a house of sleepers. Jes is exhausted from working six days in an air conditioning free glass studio. She asked me to take Elliot away at around seven a.m. (he was all sing and babble) and she disappeared into slumber. E and I played in the basement for a few hours and then ran some errands. Nine times out of ten he falls asleep as soon as his car seat clicks into the waiting base. He slept through Walgreens, the car wash, and is still in his car seat on the living room floor - crashed out. I was thinking about what it must be like to be E today. He can't crawl yet but he can roll over and roll around.

Pause: E woke up and we did the bottle ritual.

He'll be eight months old this week. For six months he was mostly on breast milk, but now it's mostly Enfamil. We had this bottle warmer that we used until the plastics scare and now we run tap water - apparently the harmful chemical leaches from the plastic when you heat things in the plastic. Our friend Kate's mother is a biochemist and she was horrified when they began to make food containers and glasses out of plastic. She has long avoided wares of Tupper. I suppose we could have switched to glass, but at some level almost everything in our lives is toxic. Perhaps we're just in denial, or pround of our increasingly fire retardant chemistry (David Duncan - National Geo/PBS).

As for real food, sometimes we give E half a banana in the morning. Often he gets avocado, peas, acorn squash, steamed carrots, or some new veggie for dinner. He had his first unsweetened applesauce last night. I suppose it's ironic that we won't use the store bought Gerber because of preservatives, but we're still using the plastic bottles for his formula. A prime non-religious syncretism if I ever saw one.

We tried to use the Seventh Generation diapers, but given E's propensity for what we call outfit-enders, Huggies have a better shot at wardrobe control than their more environmentally friendly counterparts.

Ah well - mom's up now so I am off - 1 p.m. - that's a good sleep in!