February 1, 2026
Dear Sophia,
You were born just before a great snowstorm, in the middle of the coldest month of the year. The temperatures remained unusually low, and sleet added a layer of ice around the snow, and nothing melted for weeks. The city of Alexandria seemed to have just thrown up its hands about snow removal, focusing on the main thoroughfares and leaving residential streets like ours locked in. Your mom was still recovering from the tearing of birth and her abs weren’t functioning, so we just stayed inside, with you, in a three-person slumber party in which you did most of the slumbering.
I was fortunate to be able to work from home. I could get up, later than usual, to make up for the hours lost at 2am and 5am, do some work, make breakfast for your mom, serve it to her in bed on tray, hold you or change you again, and go back to work in my office, which is a spare bedroom.
By May, once we’d moved to Houston to be closer to my law partners, I would be working away from home more. Working with others is, in fact, one of the main reasons for the move: I have worked alone, from home and coffee shops, since 2009, when my Seattle-based startup company responded to the 2008 financial crisis by laying off most of its executive team. I worked alone in Seattle till we moved, alone in Bend, Oregon, after we moved there and split up, alone in New Jersey and New York City, alone in Telluride and Montrose, Colorado, alone in Boulder, alone in San Francisco, alone in Washington, DC. I am now ready for more of what talent experts (an area in which I’d dabbled) called “engagement” at work.
We are trying to figure out how your mom can get better sleep. She has decided, or at least wants to believe, you sleep better in the bed next to her; she sleeps worse.
We need to keep trying to get her to sleep in the bassinet, I say. Maybe swaddle her again. Maybe it’s all that movement that wakes her up.
Except I think she moves so much, your mom says, because she’s got gas and she’s trying to get it out.
So you’re saying her gas fuels her?
She nods.
Still haunted by the question, Would it be irresponsible to have a child so late in life? I do what I do: I write, a concentrated form of thinking. I make meaning. I create memories and legacy.
You awake several times in the night. Gas? Hunger? Or another need to be comforted?
I ask ChatGPT, which says:
At this age, babies spend a large fraction of sleep in “active sleep” (also called REM-like sleep). During active sleep, they can look uncomfortable without actually being awake.
You’ll see or hear: grunting, groaning, squeaks; leg lifting or brief straining; arching slightly; irregular breathing; eyes closed or fluttering briefly; face scrunching, then relaxing; sounds that come and go.
Crucially: no escalating cry, no sustained eye opening, no rooting with head turning.
At three weeks, babies sound like they’re wrestling demons in their sleep. They are not. They are learning how to move food through a new gut, coordinate muscles they’ve never used, exist outside a fluid-filled world.
Adults pass gas silently. Newborns make a press release.
— — —
February 2, 2026
Dear Sophia,
Turns out, you’re a hallucinogen. Your mom was hallucinating last night. When I woke up and saw what was going on, she had somehow managed to pull you out of your bassinet, but she was speaking from a dream, not yet awake.
This tells you how much sleep she’s getting.
Who knew babies’ digestive systems weren’t fully baked, so that they writhed and kicked and suffered with gas and had to have the farts milked out of them manually?
3:15am.
We both start our timers. Hers is for breastfeeding. Mine is for billing.
Love,
Dad
