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The Boss and Annabel Photo by toyfoto Sometimes making friends is easy. When both parties to something potentially amicable are open and fearless, then striking up a friendship can be a breeze. Other times, the direction of the wind isn't so favorable. The Boss has a propensity for close human interaction that I lack. Maybe that's the difference between 3 and 30. She is now building the relationships that I've been coasting on for decades. My best friends were all made during childhood--as a toddler at parties with the children of my parent's friends, then in elementary school, then high school, then college. Now the legacies of those years are scattered across the country. I keep in touch as best a phone-phobic person like myself can. But when I get together with those tried and true friends (with varying degrees of regularity), it's like old times. Now, when I make an acquaintance, it seems I don't know how to bridge the divide between old times and new. I wan...

Number Two is preparing to join the world on the move. He's not crawling yet; he's not quite sitting on his own. But he's been set in motion. He throws himself from his bouncer like a blond midget kamikaze, then hangs upside-down from his lap belt until I right him again. He repeated the act four times just this morning. Still, I'm not ready to face the idea that my baby has outgrown his first recliner. The Boss was keen to the incongruity the first time she saw her brother pull himself to a full sitting position on that very bouncer. She glanced twice at him, then once at me. "Look, mom," she said, her voice strange in its confusion. "His head is standing." I looked, just like she told me to. And it was so very, very odd to see him like that. He wasn't just there . He wasn't crying. He wasn't sleeping or eating. His eyes weren't everywhere; instead, they were fixed. He was flexing abdominal muscles in expression of his fiercest desir...

This is what our baby would look like if The Partner and I did not produce offspring that refuse to acknowledge my existence in any of their bodily features: For the first time, I'm thankful that our actual children are not our composites. We don't look so hot when merged. Go make your own baby online! It's not as much fun as having sex but it's a lot less painful than childbirth.

The Boss has grabbed on to the same cold I recently acquired. Its main manifestation is a hoarse voice. Yesterday, I asked her how she was doing as I walked her out the door after a day at pre-school. "I'm doing well." The small rasp of her voice was matter-of-fact. I was already chuckling to myself at the grammatical maturity of her statement when she propelled herself to even higher levels of coherence. "The only problem," she told me through the phlegm, "is that I can't speak normally." At times like that I am impressed with her intellect. On other occasions, like when she decides she would rather sleep in a tangle of pee-soaked sheets than inform me she wet the bed, I am less overcome by her mental prowess. Through it all, though, I continue to be amazed by the human being unfolding before me--even when the creases release the odor of hours-old urine. At three, she is her own strange person and her parents' enigma. At three, she is stinki...