I Hope You Know: This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record

When you fire a kiln, mostly, when you fire with gas or wood, you try to keep a log as the firing progresses. Firings can take a long time and it's easy to lose sight of forest for the trees. Logging the firing helps you notice things like "Oh, I've been stuck at the same temperature for three hours. Perhaps I should do something." Primarily, this happens because all potters are stinky hippies with short-term memory banks ravaged by. . . oh, I'd rather not say.

When Max was born, for the first few weeks of his life, nearly every detail of his life was logged. This helped tons for feedings and eventually helped us notice his sleep patterns, which--we think--was one of the reasons we got him sleeping through the night so early in his life. Also, it's fun to go back and peruse the data: "Awww, remember that poop at 4am on March 15th? That was a big one, that Ides of March poop."

We didn't log much with Miles 'cause we were tired and lazy and old hands at this parenting biz. Recently, though, he's been waking up at funny, early times and Katie's been logging these just to see if there's a pattern in there. We haven't solved anything yet. However, Katie has decided that fifteen years from now, she's going to shake Miles awake to celebrate the anniversaries of these little wake up calls. "I'm gonna get him up and force him to make me cookies," she says. I hope she's not kidding about the cookies.