We dropped the baby. She was lolling on one of Sarah’s chairs, and lolled a little too far. She somersaulted onto a cushion and my handbag, took a breath and roared. My heart cracked into tiny pieces.

She howled and howled until I fed her, then she cooed at her extended family for a while, then she drifted off to sleep. At least, I hope it’s sleep and not a coma. I’m still anguished.

The parent’s room at Brookside Mall in suburban Brisbane is bigger than our whole apartment in San Francisco.

Plus, lessons in ornithology:

Dad: That’s an emu feather. Look how there are two shafts growing out of a single root.

R: Awesome. How many birds have that, then?

D: One.

1. stormbringer

Also yesterday at Petit Creme.

Big: See that? That’s Mark’s bike, Stormbringer. It rains every time he rides it.

Mark: Not true. I’ve ridden it twice when it hasn’t rained.

Big: You’ve owned it for four months.

2. arch-ninja

Doyle’s on Watson’s Bay. We sit in the shade of palm trees, wolfing fish and chips and beer, watching yachts bob on the harbour.

R: I think I want her to be an arch-nemesis when she grows up. We’ll give her ninja training, that sorta thing.

Kay: Whose arch-nemesis will she be? Do you have a worthy foe in mind?

R: Nah, I thought she could freelance. God knows I could use a replacement for my arch-nemesis. I figure there’s a lot of people out there in the same situation.

Kelso: Can’t she just be an ordinary nemesis?

Big: She has to start as an ordinary nemesis, and work her way up to arch.

3. fang-snatcher

At home in Bellevue Hill. I am eating a mango. My father-in-law has been to the dentist.

My mother-in-law: So how was the fang-snatcher?

I snerk, and inhale mango juice.

It feels like summer here. Claire’s sitting on my lap and singing to the lorikeets in the flame trees outside the window. The late afternoon light is the colour of Houghton’s White Burgundy.

We’re home.

We had breakfast at Petit Creme this morning with a mighty horde of well-wishers: Paul and Paula from the Moonbase, Squishy’s friend Shannon and the Sarcastic Mister Bennett, Michael and Rachel and Patrick and Uncles Barney and Big. I explained that we’d adopted Claire as a gesture of compassion towards the suffering nation of America. Her parents, I whispered, were Republicans.

My darling Bellboy, the pony on whom I learned to ride, turned thirty last November, and still looks about twelve. He patted me down for carrots and, finding none, turned his back on me and stared moodily out to sea. We had tea under the jacaranda tree with Thussy, and she gave Claire a kangaroo on a spring.

R: What shall we call him? What’s the Austrian for kangaroo?

Thussy: Kangaroo.

Lunch was in Duncan’s tree house overlooking Bungan Beach. Lauren made us chicken sandwiches, and Blossom the rottweiler drooled over Claire. Literally. There were great pools of rottie-saliva collecting on the deck.

I could totally live here. If I had DSL, and twice the bandwidth across the Pacific. And a private jet.

Howard Junker, editor of Zyzzyva, once seriously annoyed me by making fun of my accent. This is, in my opinion, an irregular verb: I speak with graceful fluency; you have a not unpleasant drawl; he or she butchers the language.

That said, the man knows how to beg. Seeking contributions, he writes:

“We don’t want you to vanish into the abyss.”

I scribble my check in hasty dread. Beyond me, oblivion yawns.

Jenny Fong is back from Carnivale in Rio, and told us about rushing sideways through crowds in an elaborate costume of plastic and feathers. Her shoulders were wide as a football player’s. She reached the rest of her samba troupe with seconds to spare.

Kathryn riposted with Mardi Gras in New Orleans. The Extra Action Marching Band Greyhound bus moved off before the sousaphone player had finished strapping instruments to the roofrack. He pounded on the roof and passing cars honked their horns, but the bus was almost on the freeway before the other musicians twigged to what was wrong.

R: I’ve been reading this great biography of Churchill, and when he was my age, he was a senior Cabinet minister. So that proves I suck.

S: Yes, I think it’s completely appropriate for you to compare yourself with Churchill –

Pick up the phone – The Notwist (Neon Golden)
Getriebe – Laub (Filesharing)
A prayer for England – Massive Attack (100th Window)
Sugar free jazz – Soul Coughing (Ruby Vroom)
Duvet – Boa (Twilight)

DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING

CAREFUL NOW!

(from Father Ted)

ANTIDISEST-
ABLISHMENT-
ARIANS OUT!

(all my own work)

Claire was three months old yesterday. She’s the hardest-working baby in San Francisco. Every waking moment is dedicated to achieving developmental goals. When she’s not making up avant-garde choral pieces to test her vocal range, or grinning maniacally at her parents and alloparents in the interests of promoting attachment, she’s riding diligently on an invisible bicycle to build up her muscle mass and gross motor skills. As an ex-Protestant, I regard her work ethic with awe.

The fun, we’re told, is just beginning. Human childbirth hurts because we’re both highly intelligent and bipedal. We have the biggest skulls that can possibly be forced through a narrow, upright pelvis. It’s the old engineering trade-off: smart, mobile and painless – pick any two.

To make sure that women don’t actually die giving birth, our babies are born very early, developmentally speaking. Some biologists think of the first three months as the fourth trimester, and the baby as an extra-gestate fetus. So Claire is now at the stage where, if she were a different species of chimpanzee, she’d be ready to be born.

Jeremy and I compete for Claire’s love.

R: So what’s it to be? A computer? …or a pony?

J: A computerized pony!

C: Goo!

Today reminded me a little of September 11. Same gorgeous weather, bright and cool, same TVs in cafes tuned to the news, same expression of strain and sympathy when you caught someone’s eye. We had lunch at Papa Toby’s and dinner, with Peter, at New Aux Delices. I did a spot of laundry and read Google News for hours at a stretch.

I thought of going to one of the protests but I didn’t want to take Claire, not to riot police and arrests, and I didn’t want to leave her behind either.

I’m reading Trollope’s novel He Knew He Was Right, a disturbingly accurate portrait of a man destroyed by an idee fixe. I see myself in him; a dog worrying a dry bone.

Less than three hours to go until the ultimatum runs out. The Monterey Institue for International Studies discusses likely outcomes. In Baghdad, Salam Pax duct-tapes his windows:

“the * star is good but with particularly big windows I have been using a plus and Xs in each quadrant.”

Somewhere in the desert, Noelle waits for us to send food packages to eke out her Navy rations. No hurry, though. She expects to be there for six to eight months.

Yesterday Claire met her first and second alligators. Also Cal Academy’s very good collection of minerals, various scarabs and a Foucault’s Pendulum. She did not object.

Dinner at Peter’s house. Claire met Doug and Arun’s beautiful African grey parrot, Loki. Spencer told us about a dream he had after placing second in Star Search and watching Shadow of a Vampire: Arsenio Hall turned to him and bared vampire teeth. Claire behaved beautifully all evening and as we left, Doug played her a Brahms lullaby on his lovely Steinway. She squeaked her approval. I had a moment of perfect happiness.

To Claire, who is dangling above him, cooing: “I have you in my eye, sir. I have you in my eye. I control the weather by means of my mental powers.” Pause. “If by weather, you mean Claire. And by mental powers, you mean hands.”

1. Nipples get hickeys.

2. If you hold the baby above your head, she can drip saliva up your nose.

Outside… WUB wub WUB wub.

J: I was trying to work out if that car was playing some interesting electronic music, or if it was just really sick mechanically.

Today we are learning all about J2EE application frameworks.

Claire’s contribution is to sprawl peacefully on my lap, kicking me as I type. Occasionally she makes a noise like a small air raid siren and wakes herself up.

Back at the office. All changed, changed utterly, yet mysteriously exactly the same.

Poor Claire is now a latchkey kid, and has been mournfully playing contentedly with Jeremy and Salome all day.

One of the pleasures of being alive right now, and especially of having a child, is the vast improvement in the design of everyday things since I was a kid. We bought a good tent, oh, four years ago now. It has carbon-fiber poles and I can put it up, single-handed, in about five minutes. A far cry from the orange pointy thing that used to take the four of us half a day to pitch in the back yard.

Kids’ stuff is even better. No more scary safety pins, or even three-way-claws – today’s nappies are secured by purest velcro. Much as I love my nappy service, I have to admit the disposable nappies we use when we go out are even more impressive. They have some kind of super-absorbant gel which, according to an article in one of last year’s New Yorkers, wicks the “insult” away from Claire’s tender behind.

Best of all are the toys. About five people independently gave us different Lamaze toys for newborns. They’re awesome. They’re brightly colored and contrasty and clockwork and crinkly, and obviously based on a sophisticated understanding of child psychology that just didn’t exist when my mother scolded me for burning my doll Goldie’s foot on the gas heater. (I was just trying to keep her warm!)

It’s a scary and depressing world in a lot of ways, but people are still inventing small, useful things that simplify camping and make babies smile. Western civilization not a total waste of time.