So.

Got to visit my parents this weekend, and in the process, got to visit my nephew Nicholas. He's a cute little peanut of a kid- still working on the whole 'oh, so THAT'S the direction toes are supposed to bend in' concept, and he's at that stage of baby development where the eyelids have three settings:

- Closed
- Mostly closed
- Open so far that he appears to have retracted his eyelids entirely into his skull

Reddens up very easily, especially in the feet and hands. Fuzzy hair at the moment, but I'm told it's likely to fall out quite soon as Hair That You Are Born With often does so. Burps loudly, for a baby less than ten days old. Neck still floppy, of course. Pretty well behaved for a kid his age. I got to hold him for a while.

You know that thing about how a woman in her thirties will hold a baby, or meet a baby, or be confronted with a baby, and suddenly realize she wants one of her own? The whole biological clock, reproductive instinct thing?

It's bupkis.

He's a good kid for his age, my nephew, and he's cute enough and all, but holding him- whether or not he was crying, whether or not he was sleeping- didn't do anything for me in the 'eeee! want!' category. Maybe it's because he's still got Newborn Baby Peculiar Looks or something. Maybe he's too small to 'register' as a proper baby- I mean, he's smaller than the Skwish Pillow I bought last month, though he's growing fast. I dunno. I didn't particularly want to keep him and I didn't particularly want one of my own. I didn't mind holding him, though I was a little worried about holding up his head.

Maybe it'll change when he's old enough to read stories to and get some kind of response. We'll see. I doubt it, though. I've never been big on the idea of a kid of my own, and I've known that for some time. I think I was in late high school or early college when I realized that my frustration with being pinned down to the house by my responsibilities to an untrained puppy probably meant I wasn't going to be especially happy about the whole 'baby' thing. I'm about at the stage where I could probably deal with training a puppy. At most.

Ah, well. That is why I am his aunt and not his mother. I shall buy him toys that squeak and go 'ding' and drive his parents crazy and that will be good.

Cor, knowing you guys makes this one hard.

Ten Things I've Done That You Probably Haven't:

1. Walked among the ashes of 9/11 while the fires were still burning. (I sincerely hope you haven't.)
2. LASIK. Without Valium or other sedatives.
3. Been one of 750,000 people at Garth Brooks' free concert in Central Park
4. Been one of a similarly enormous crowd when the Dalai Lama was the one in Central Park instead
5. Rollerbladed through the Holland Tunnel
6. Jumped up and down on a glass panel that was the only thing separating me from a 113-storey drop to the streets of TorontoTried to contact somebody whose graffiti in the CN tower was written entirely in Chinese, except for their ICQ user ID
7. Had something I'd written presented as the introduction to the Fellowship Festival 2005
8. Opened and operated a hurricane shelter for close to a hundred people as a Category 4 storm bore down on our location
9. Caused the Singaporean manager of a Chinese restaurant to stare at me and say "You ate that without knowing what it was?", although I share this distinction with mountainspeak as she was with me at the time
10. Put my hand in the waters of the Yukon RiverGone naked in Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, twice

ETA: Almost forgot. Accidentally removed a piece of meteorite from a major museum. In the words of Ross Geller: "Rachel, that's millions of years old. People are looking for that."