Benjamin's Christmas bear from Grammy and Grandpa Wilson is bigger than he is.

It's been a whirlwind Christmas week for the growing Smith family.  It started off slow enough:  I probably spent about 7 hours packing everything and getting the house ready to leave for Christmas in east Texas.  But the fun parts went by too fast:  Christmas eve preparations, cooking and eating wonderful food, opening Benjamin's first Christmas stocking, and singing carols with family in Dallas. After Christmas weekend with JB's family and our little shopping sprees at Half-Price Books and Central Market, we came home and had our family Christmas around the tree, opening gifts and enjoying a cheese course we put together at Central Market. We are sad that we couldn't spend Christmas with both sides of the family this year, but we had fun opening packages from the Wilson side.  

The next morning Ellen and Heidi arrived to visit for a few days--they've both moved away, but I'm so glad that they still have reason to visit Waco.  Once again, the extra hands were helpful for holding Benjamin and keeping him happy.  I enjoyed being able to spend some uninterrupted time in the kitchen making curry and scones and roasting vegetables.  Thanks guys!  Everyone except Benjamin liked the curry, but that's another story.  

Yesterday after nursing Benjamin, I put him in his crib to watch his mobile (which he LOVES right now) and found myself with a few extra minutes to sit in my chair to read.  I read a little bit, but I kept looking up to watch him play.  I enjoyed contemplating how far we'd come with Benjamin and how he's grown in the last few months.  He's 11 weeks, and it seems like all of a sudden I woke up this week to a new baby.  All of the issues we seemed to have early on have melted away (new ones to come, I'm sure), and the baby is happy.  He can spend time on his own flailing his limbs at the mobile in his crib, he eats and sleeps on a fairly predictable schedule, he is filling out nicely, and he has big smiles for me every time I change his diaper. 

After thinking about this it was nice to turn to essays in a collection by Alan Jacobs that my dad got me for Christmas.  In the introduction he talks about how the essay, with its "humble mutability of tone," is the perfect form for capturing how our experiences interrupt and change our thinking.  An essay may start out with specific idea, but in the process of writing, the writer may realize that what she has learned or experienced as she writes is more interesting than the original idea she meant to write about.  

Virginia Woolf captures this effect in A Room of One's Own.  She recalls walking the grounds at Oxbridge, an all male school at the time, thinking about a talk she was to give on "women and fiction."  All at once the ideas start flowing in her mind and her body responds by carrying her faster and faster right off of the path and across the lawn.  When a Fellow at the university stops to scold her for walking across the lawn--which is reserved for Fellows and Scholars--she loses the train of her original thought, but she finds this experience of having her thoughts interrupted for being an outsider an interesting illustration of interruption as a theme relevant to "women and fiction."    

I connected with this as I tried to read and found myself looking over the top of my book to watch my baby play.  I started out thinking I could curl up to read like I used to in grad school, but found my interest divided:  the baby and the book were equally appealing to my attention.  So I let my mind wander back and forth between the two for a while.  And I realized that I am just a different person than I was six months ago when I was working in such a focused and single-minded way on my dissertation. My mind is divided--for now--and my reading habits (and teaching preparations!) will have to adjust to this new reality.  And this makes me very happy.  

And now for those smile pictures I've been promising.  I couldn't resist doing another little series.