Josie is four weeks old today. I had a crazy dream last night that we had to put her back in the womb for some bizarre medical reason. Seems I have to worry about the bean in my sleep as well.

In the tradition of the indigenous tribal peoples of North American, a child must be given their tribal name at week four. When Josie gets upset, her face turns a beet red (her whole body for that matter), so we've tentatively dubbed her 'glows red in the face'. A few other names in the running:

gets milk from the boob
wakes parents at four
poops much in the pants

We hold the sacred naming ritual at midnight tonight. We offer a sacrifice to the great spirit as we burn a dirty diaper while chanting, "No, I think it's your turn to change her."

You may have noticed the introduction of tags here at bitterpill.org. I spent a few hours this weekend moving over to a new weblog tool. I know that many will exclaim, "Why have you discarded that crappy piece of software that you piecemealed together and have basically abandoned for the past two years?" Why indeed. Yet, with so many mature software packages out there to allow easy blogging, and me with so little resources (read: no desire) to add any new functionality to the old system, it seemed logical to move on...to let the old system go. It's me blogging software, not you. We've grown apart, and we just don't seem to communicate anymore. Not to mention the sexy little blog software that works at the dry cleaner down the street. She understands me.

With the new wares we get tagging...ain't it a peach. I've been tagging old posts when the mood hits me, and someday soon, or maybe never, I'll have tagged up the whole pill. In light of this new tagging functionality, I hacked up a little add-on code to display all tags in a format I like to describe as a "Tag Smog" (disclaimer, graphing idea stole shamelessly [maybe a bit of shame] from jason).

Warning: This post contains gratuitous baby swooning and poop.

Josephine is three weeks old today. I held her last night, her butt on my chest and my hands under her arms, while I spun slowly around the room. I named this hold the "Requiem for a Dream", but that was a bit morbid. Jason dubbed it "The Aronofsky". I had just changed her. As I rolled around the room I made up a little song:

someone pooped her pants
it didn't smell too bad
when momma saw what had occurred
she yelled downstairs for dad.

I leaned my head back and let out a long raspberry at the end of the verse. She smiled. She hadn't really smiled or laughed yet. She had, up to this point, managed to produce goofy contortions of the mouth and face, but only expressions that would briefly resemble a smile. I tooted again, and this time she smiled, and then laughed. I tooted. She laughed again. My heart swelled three sizes.

When that video ended I half expected the Land of the Lost intro...or at least a "Hey Kool-Aid" commercial...

Photo by Adriana

Uth on fire island, June 2006

...first week

Born 11:40 AM - 7lbs, 7oz, 19 inches

more bean...