I’ve never been that interested in babies, but now I find them (or at least this one) utterly fascinating. Byron is an adorable, alert (when awake) baby who can melt a grown man by grabbing his nose. He loves nothing better than sleeping with mommy, except maybe his hedgehog pacifier. Most people remark on his full head of hair, which looks frosted at the tips. Objectively speaking, I’m pretty sure he’s the smartest, cutest baby in the history of babies.

Gang they will, and agley you’ll find them.

My wife went into labor Friday night about two minutes to midnight. Twenty hours later, Byron was born via C-section. So much for labor books and classes and special exercises. Byron was, like MacDuff… well, you know or you don’t. It wasn’t what we planned. All I could do was put on the paper scrubs and “watch” from behind a screen. It was scary but Mom is fine and although baby was blue at first, he is now doing fine also and is coming home tomorrow.

It wasn’t we had planned, but I have it on good authority that nothing to do with parenting is what you had planned.

He’s such a great little baby, though. Just look at him…

Like another Scot, George MacDonald, said: “My heart, with gladness filled, Wept and laughed and prayed!”

And like Byron’s namesake poet said (thanks to whoever said this on Facebook): “Life’s enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim.”

Now you probably know I love otters. In fact, I think they are the awesomest animal there is, and have evidence to support it. From Emmett to Tarka, I have championed the riverdog since I was a child. But now I even have a favorite otter, and that is the hairy-nosed otter of Borneo. It’s an otter! It has a hairy nose! It lives in Borneo! And it’s not extinct! My heart is full. I want to be a Jane Goodall like figure in my next life, living among the mustachioed mustelids of Malaysia, and be accepted into their ranks as an equal. You can offer me, as a test, a cat-sized elephant who spouts ginger ale from its trunk, speaks perfect Jeevesian English, and plays scrabble, and I would still pick the hairy-nosed otter of Borneo.

Either that or an ocelot.

Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars by Daniel Pinkwater

The Midnight Fox by Betsy Byars

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien

Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White

Watership Down by Richard Adams

I was happy how quickly the titles came to me and I stand by every one. I usually say “ask me again in a week and I’ll say something else,” but five is the perfect number. I have a hard time with favorite or top three, but top five is perfect. These are the books that made me want to write kids books. The ones I wanted to start all over again and read again when I finished them. The ones I did re-read several times each.

So name two more current books, somebody said. I named two that really shaped my idea of what I wanted to do when I wrote my first books.

Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli

Holes by Louis Sachar

One of my friends was buying all of the Wayside School books. I wish I could take credit but she knew she was going to buy them all before she got there.

I’ll go ahead and say Mutts, because even though I think it’s more “cute” than “funny,” Patrick McDonnell is a big advocate for animal rights and I admire him for that.

He did a series on farm animals a while back, and I remember this one coming up when I was researching the life of farm pigs for my now untitled work in progress. The final draft of that book is unlikely to include the whole story of Cassie the sow’s brutal treatment and eventual rescue/adoption by her new keeper… it was too beside the point… but suffice to say that gestation crates are not humane. Temple Grandin (whom I think I blogged about before, or meant to — she is an amazing person) said that gestation crates are like “living in an airline seat.” Anyway, here’s that strip.

It’s one I remember when I am grousing about something outside my control. I can turn my mood around by saying “you stupid darkness!” out loud, then laughing at myself. This one and, in fact, the entire Peanuts series are online, for free, at http://comics.com/peanuts. It’s one of the most amazing but little-known Internet resources there is.

The tap tap game is a theoretical enterprise where you tap on Mom’s tummy and the fetus, getting through its fetal slumbers that this is a call-and-response thing, and having mastered gross motor control, counting, and other skills, will tap back. Tap tap? Tap tap, Mom! Here I am! Can’t wait to meet you! We’ve spoken to moms halfway through their pregnancy who swear this is a ritual. They tap out a little rhythm, the baby taps back.

We stressed ourselves out over it. Our baby’s movements were random and not necessarily responsive to our own. Sure, we could get superstitious — wait for anything and call it a success. But I’m an evidence-based thinker and couldn’t honestly decide there was any pattern to our taps and the baby’s movements.

I tried to google it and couldn’t come up with anything. Google “tap tap,” and you will get noise but no signal. Was this a feasible expectation? I wondered.

We finally asked the doctor and she just gave us a squinty look, then shook her head. No, the baby doesn’t tap back. The baby doesn’t really know its arm is attached to its body yet. It’s just floating around in amniotic goo.  In fact, the baby won’t be able to play the tap tap game after it’s born. It takes a while for the baby to give arbitrary responses to arbitrary stimuli.

Not willing to surrender to such negative thinking, we resumed the tap tap game until we compelled our astounding and better-than-yours child to tap back. We took the Anne Sullivan route, teaching the baby Morse code so we could communicate.

H-E-L-L-O we tapped.

H-I he tapped back. I-L-U-V-U

We didn’t want to coddle him, because bad habits settle in. We made him repeat it until he tapped out.

I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U.

We tapped out some stories, “reading aloud,” so he could gave a good basis in literature. He bored quickly with Harry Potter, so we’ve moved on to Wallace Stegner. He loves Wallace Stegner. M-O-R-E-M-O-R-E he’ll tap out as we reach the end of a chapter and tell him it is time to sleep.

He’s also writing poetry. One of his stanzas is going to be published in the Paris Review next month.

But no place has so utterly confounded me, intimidated, horrified, amazed, sickened, depressed, inspired, exhausted and shown me–with every passing hour–how wrong I was about everything I might have thought only an hour previous.

He doesn’t explain what so utterly confounded him within an hour of landing, nor what he expected. Oh, well. We know what happened in Liberia, and he sums it up, then goes to the market to suck snails out of shells and so forth. He has fufu and soup with a friend he met at a scrabble club. Those scenes were fun to watch. He travels up to Nimba County, and they show fleeting footage of a pool I once swam in. He goes deep into the jungle for a ritual with a tribe he doesn’t name (or names so passingly I didn’t catch it). He doesn’t bother to show any marks of civilization, although I’m guessing he stayed in the comparatively luxurious Mamba Point hotel while in Monrovia, which even has a sushi restaurant. That’s very close to where Linus lives in Mamba Point, though it didn’t exist in in 1982. You would never guess from watching the show that anybody eats anything other than wildly unrecognizable things. But exotic cuisine is what the show is about, and I expected it. But he goes a little bit further.

He says on the blog:

There’s a church on nearly every corner–but underneath it all, traditional “masked societies” still rule the hearts and minds and behaviors of many…

A theme he expounds upon in the show, saying something about ritualistic cannibalism, suggesting that “Some people try to minimize it, but ask anybody who’s lived here for over fifteen years!” Bourdain was there for what, ten days? And now he’s an expert on Liberia’s cannibalistic practices? Admittedly confounded upon arrival, expecting something completely different from the war-ravaged, recovering, West African nation that he found (again, he didn’t explain this part very well), by the time he’s been led around by some generous guides for a few days, eaten fufu with his hands, and visited a couple of sites, he is prepared to speak to what really happens in those remote villages when the cameras are away.

But he’s wearing kid gloves in the broadcast. In a Slate article he goes a bit further to show how disgusted he was by Liberia.

[A]lthough I find certain tribal practices personally deeply repellant, I’d always felt uncomfortable with the idea of these “enlightened humanitarians” going to Africa and lecturing people who don’t have clean water and have been living with these systems for centuries about how to behave. And yet I gotta tell you, Liberia made me ask myself: Are some things just wrong? Genital mutilation would be one. Some of the practices of some of the traditional tribal elders—witch doctors, basically—are another. I really wonder whether there are absolutes in some cases.

Where does the genital mutilation come from? Was Bourdain invited to witness one after the fufu in Monrovia or the tribal dance in northern Nimba County? He doesn’t explain. Though perfectly willing to slight people who go to Africa for longer than a week or two, including those who want to truly make a difference instead of just sampling the food and shooting some exotic footage. I know this is the Africa that Americans want to see. Blood diamonds, genital mutilations, armies of giant ants that eat villages…. you know. Africa.

But to be honest, Bourdain’s dramatic introduction and glancing commentary are going down about as well as that snail that gave him food poisoning. I enjoyed the show overall but could have done without the sensationalism and self-righteousness.

1. A publication party is a fun way to celebrate your accomplishment. It’s like a birthday party at a bookstore. Your friends will come. It’s awesome. I’m stunned to hear people say they don’t plan any kind of publication party. I think you owe it to yourself and your book.

Of course I’m not the sort to let my birthday go quietly by, either.

2.  Independent bookstores are the best. As a reader, I knew it was the right thing to do — like eating local food or whatever. But now it’s personal. Because they are locally owned, they care more about local authors. I’ve also found that the proprietors to be passionate readers who love to talk about books.

3. Aspiring authors are used to the post office because they’ve been mailing manuscripts around, and that doesn”t change. Now I’m always there to mail galleys, finished books, bookmarks, signed bookplates, and thank you cards. Now this is probably the soundest advice I’ve ever given on this blog. Seal up the sides of the envelope with strapping tape! That’s very important. I’ve had many books go squirting out the sides. The recipient gets an empty, torn envelope. It’s very sad.

4. Every book is a big deal to me, but is just one more fish in a big aquarium. I didn’t realize how many published children’s book authors there really were, even in the Twin Cities. Now I know that there’s not only a lot of competition, there’s a lot of talent. I mean even besides two recent Newbery winners who live in or near Minneapolis, there are many other terrific writers for every age level. That is scary at first, but they are a supportive and friendly bunch.

5. The most unexpected benefit of getting published is getting connected to a lot of great people: booksellers, authors, readers, librarians, and other people who love children’s books.

6. Kids you don’t know really will read your book and love it. It will be in libraries and last a while, even if the book doesn’t stay on the shelf in bookstores. Every day has the magical possibility of receiving an email or letter from a child to whom your book made a difference. Obviously that’s why most of us do what we do, but it’s easy to forget when you feel stressed about all the other stuff.