Yesterday afternoon I held a week-and-a-half-old baby for a long while, marveling at his tiny fingers and feet, and the way his hair lay in flat wisps across his scalp. I held him tentatively at first, then with more certainty, and watched his body twitch the way newborns do when they are fast asleep. I held him, and I held my breath, too, worried about what I would feel.

Earlier in the afternoon, Scott had called on the way home from a tennis match. He proposed a quick visit to my sister-in-law's later that afternoon to see the new baby.

Even though all the evil super mega stores and malls everywhere decide each year to decorate for Christmas the day after Halloween, we pride ourselves on managing to hold out until a day or two after Thanksgiving. When I was growing up, we never decorated for Christmas until about a week or so before Christmas Eve. Every year as a child, I thought I would spontaneously combust on the spot from sheer impatience. I have always loved Christmas and decorating the house for the holidays.

I thought I could muster up a column of sorts for today, but a day spent happily cooking, then eating, then mediating hyped-up arguments between the kids, then more eating, left me feeling both content and depleted of brain cells. Thanksgiving lunch turned out perfectly--the Tofurky Roll was just as good as I remember it from last year, even if the whole meal was delayed because I forgot to make the gravy.

I haven't written anything about this, for fear of jinxing things, but for weeks now T. has been going to sleep by herself in her bed! She is still waking up every few nights to come running into bed with us, but I am no longer lying down with her until she sleeps, disengaging myself from the choke hold she has on my neck--even in sleep--and tiptoeing out of her room. I have those mixed feelings about this, although I thought I would feel more teary and nostalgic about this new milestone.

Yesterday afternoon I ate lunch with L. and then stood on the blacktop watching the kids race around the play structure, all of them engaged in various chaotic forms of organized play. As I watched them I realized that not only is it hard to see your own kids grow up, but it's also actually kind of hard to watch other people's kids grow up.

Earlier this week, we went to our first parent-teacher conference of the year for T. I love preschool parent-teacher conferences, don't you? They are always relaxing, and at T.'s school the teachers pull out their special padded regular chairs, so you don't have to fold your body into a chair made for people about three feet tall. You sit there, in the sunny and cheerful classroom, and hear (usually) nothing but good things: cute anecdotes about how your child is learning her letters, or mastering the art of scissor cutting, or learning to share.

Looking back on yesterday's preschool Halloween party, I think it's fitting that my last preschool Halloween party for my kids ever (sniff!) would be not unlike the first one ever, when L. was three. I didn't make those whoopie pies that year, but I did make sandwiches and cut them into pumpkin shapes with the same orange pumpkin cookie cutter I used this year. The year L. was three, I raced home after teaching my one and only class that day (I was still a part-time adjunct instructor back then) and I had a few hours in the morning to get things ready.

Remember how my T. likes to pitter-patter into our room at night and climb into bed with us? Well, for the past three nights she hasn't done this. She's stayed in her own room, curled into her pink sheets, her favorite stuffed dog, Lucky, clutched in her arms. I know this seems like a strange milestone to most of you, who probably have had kids sleeping through the night since they were tiny babies. But for us, this is big. We're a flexible (creative? lax? attachment-parenting?) sleeping family and, aside from the one painful night T.

One of the hardest things I've found about being a parent is trying to explain to my kids about the horrors and frightening deep mysteries of life--things like evil in the world and unspeakable tragedies, like 9/11, and even the routine but still frightening reality of mortality. No one likes to be the one to pass on to their child these legacies, to shatter the magical illusion that life is beautiful and innocent like a fairy world or cartoon land. Or that it's a storybook-come-to-life, days like multicolored pages that stretch on and on and on.

When I was back home this past weekend, the college town where my parents live was filled with returning and brand-new college students. It was strange, and made me feel significantly older, to walk through the neighborhood I used to roam so confidently when I was a college student, and to have to weave my way past the throngs of eager college freshmen with their iPods and hip clothes and too tight T-shirts.