The Family *roll

As Emily indicated in her last post, the past few weeks for us have pretty much looked like this (and, for the record, I was not the one that reached for the camera this time):

But the (germ) clouds appear to be lifting. Eleanor has perked back up and more or less returned to her happy ways. One positive side effect of Eleanor’s run of illness is that she learned to put her head on our shoulders. We hadn’t realized that this wasn’t something she had done previously until she did it. And it’s very cute and satisfying:

One of her favorite pasttimes these days is to crawl into the study and look at us through the glass doors. Cuteness ensues:

She is considerably more…um, gentle in her approach to looking through glass than another baby we know.

In other news, I am teaching Monday, Wednesday and Friday. That’s right: I have to work three days a week. Actually, it is rather exhausting since I’m teaching two new classes, Ethics, which is squarely in my area of expertise, and Modern (i.e. 17th/18th C philosophy), which is squarely not. I’m familiar with all the texts I’m teaching, but as anyone who has taught before knows, there’s knowing a text and then there’s knowing a text. I am in the midst of the transition from knowing to knowing (real scholars of the subject then move on to knowing).

Having a baby changes everything. Just ask the dog. Belly used to climb into bed in the morning and sleep until we would rouse her, often well past 10am. These days, Belly makes it out of bed with great alacrity shortly after the on-duty (I mean on-priviledge) parent takes Eleanor downstairs. What has brought about this change? A sudden affection for the baby? A sense of protectiveness? Not quite:

One party to this exchange is sated. The other is amused. Symbiosis at work.