A few years ago I read something on a knitting blog where the author talked about watching her own hands. If you’re a pretty experienced knitter, the motions are all totally automatic. Even if you’re looking at your knitting, you’re probably not really noticing every single one of those movements, unless you really force yourself to watch. And when you do, it’s amazing.

Slip the needle through the stitch, wrap the yarn, pull it through, slip it off, shuffle the next stitch a little further up the needle while tightening the stitch you just knit. Each stitch requires a dozen tiny little hand motions that happen almost simultaneously without any conscious thought at all. The most mundane row of knitting, something I do without even glancing down, is actually a wonder of mind-hand coordination.

All sorts of things are like this. Try, really try, sometime to notice all the things you do automatically when you get on your bike, or type, or take a shower.

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You would think that Ezra’s intense adorability would be so all-consuming that I would never get anything else done. And you’d be right if by “anything else” you meant “cleaning the house” or “managing our household finances.”

There are certainly days when I look up and it’s 6 pm and I’m pretty sure I’ve been sitting on the kitchen floor all day repeating “babababaBA” over and over and over again while folding laundry, checking Facebook, and picking tiny bits of unswept garbage off my baby’s face. There are days when I yearn for him to take a nap, but then spend his nap doing nothing but, well, folding laundry and checking Facebook.

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We’ve finally established something of a bedtime routine, and I’ve been figuring out what I’d like our regular lullaby to be. Jim Ellwanger generously sent us a whole mix of bedtime songs, which I’m excited to learn. In the meantime, I’ve been looking for a good repetitive expandable song, a la the mockingbird song.

This week I think I hit on a winner. I’ve been singing him snippets of lots of songs from our favorite (only) children’s album, Elizabeth Mitchell’s You Are My Little Bird, but hadn’t been totally sold on any one of them as a good lullaby. Then a few nights ago, I was singing the classic Korean baby song Zousan from the album:

Elephant, elephant, you have a very long nose.
Yes my mama has a long nose, too.
Elephant, elephant, tell me who do you love.
Oh you know it’s my mama that I love.

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Every New Year’s Day for the last five, Sandy and I have thrown open our overflowing cabinets of games and invited people over to play, hang out, and eat pizzas. I don’t know how we decided on pizza as the new traditional food of New Year’s Day (why not Hoppin’ John?), but we made pizza the first year and it just stuck.

This year the pizza operation hit a new stride. Over the course of three hours, I put ten different (tragically unphotographed) pies out for the crowd, and every single slice was eaten. The process felt smooth and organized, and unlike some years when I’ve felt somewhat beleaguered and frantic during the pizza-making hours, this year it felt really comfortable and fun. I was even able to go feed Ezra and know that the pizzas would keep coming.

Here are some tips, mostly for myself for next year, but perhaps some of you have been thinking, “I would like to make ten pizzas in one day.” I’m here to help. (OK, I know nobody else wants to make ten pizzas in one day. But this advice is good even for just two or three!)

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