Welcome Olivia!
My sister Maritza gave birth on Monday to my first niece, the beautiful Olivia Zoraida Torres, after a whopping 29 minutes in the delivery room. Dani and I went to visit the little bundle of joy yesterday, and took a few pictures.
I held little Olivia for about an hour while she slept peacefully. Even when she woke up to feed, she was as easy on the ears as she is on the eyes; at least until they needed to unbundle her to change her diaper. What a set of lungs on that little girl! Perfect diaphramatic breathing. She’s going to be an opera singer.
It’s interesting that babies love to be wrapped up tightly, since most adults hate it (unless it’s freezing and they’re snuggled in a warm comforter). I guess after 9 months in a confined space, they need to get used to the big, wide world a little at a time.
I’m a little ashamed to admit that I had never held a baby before. They scare the crap out of me. I’m a generally clumsy guy, and I always get scared I will break them or something. I need to get over that, though, and soon, since I will be holding one quite a bit in the near future.
I missed a lot of action at “work”, though, while we were out in the Bronx playing with Olivia. There was a flurry of e-mails from book publishers about The (Artist Formerly Known As The) Painted Man, and I missed all of it until after the business day was long over. Voyager is set to print the UK hardcover in August to go on sale in September ’08, and they sent me all their editorial comments. At the same time, Del Rey, who are planning to release the US version in Spring ’09, sent me their detailed line edits. I’ll be spending the rest of the day today (and probably several more) reconciling the two, in hopes that in the end the only differences between the two manuscripts will be whether “color” has an extra “u” in it, or “realize” is spelled with an “s” instead of a “z”.
Both publishers had a lot of kind words and praise for the book, which was immensely gratifying. When you spend countless overcaffeinated late night hours working on something in a vacuum, it’s very hard to know what people are going to think of it. Even after the book was sold and I was handing in the second draft incorporating my editor’s comments, I was half expecting them to say, “You ruined it. Deal’s off.”
Shows what I know.
Olivia’s absolutely gorgeous! And talk about good timing…between Alexa Sky and Olivia, the rest of your kids will be kept in check.
Not only will you get used to holding a baby, you’ll get so comfortable with the act that by 3 months you’ll be grabbing it by the arms or legs and flipping it around and putting on onesies one-handed and changing diapers with your eyes closed.
We need an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all the new babies in our social circle.
babies are easy. they’re pretty much immobile. it’s when they start motoring around…oh, they’ll make ya sweat.
heh.
you should be scared. very dangerous critters.
Also, don’t feed them after midnight and never — ever — get them wet!