Miss Claire has been At Home To Visitors for the last few days. It’s been great. Karen, Robert, Gayu, Tina, Steve, Parker and Salome have all stopped by to pay their respects. We never had this much entertainment when it was just us.

Quote of the week goes to Gayu. We were discussing booking Claire into pre-school, and how we really should have done it before she was born.

G: It’s the same in India. To get me into school, they had to send our watchman to stand in line overnight.

We all smile.

G: What?

Robert: Child of privilege.

G: Why?

Robert: Some of us didn’t have watchmen to stand in line for us.

G (wounded): It was a company watchman.

In homage to this and to the Jane Austen miniserieses that I have been devouring of late, J & I have renamed the rooms of our microscopic apartment. Up here’s the Library and the Master Chamber. Then you head through the Picture Gallery to the South Wing, with its Drawing Room and Banqueting Hall. (This is much funnier if you’ve actually tried to squeeze yourself into our house.)

Damn, I thought I was doing a reasonable job of keeping Yatima up to date, but the days just fly past. Claire has put on another pound and now weighs in at 8lb 3oz, putting her out of the featherweight class and well into the middleweight baby divisions. The more she packs on, the less like Gollum she looks and the more striking her resemblence to Churchill becomes. “We will fight them on the beaches.”

Party tricks: having mastered pooing-while-eating and stretching-while-yawning, she attempted an advanced manoeuver for Robert and Gayatri this evening: projectile-pooing-while-sneezing-during-a-nappy-change. My jeans were despoiled! The crowd roared!

Our very amiable pediatrician thinks Claire is very smart. I have two hypotheses here: either this means that Claire is very smart, or that our pediatrician can judge his audience to a nicety. Actually I just came up with a third hypothesis. You should always praise a smart girl for her looks and a pretty girl for her brains, so maybe he thinks Claire is beautiful.

How I dote. What a sap! What happened to me?

Mum’s learning.

M: Ooh – there’s another thrift store – Out Of The Closet.

R: Heh. Yeah. It’s an AIDS charity.

M: I don’t care what it’s a charity for.

R: I just think it’s a funny name. You know, for an AIDS charity.

M (sagely): It’s probably intentional.

I too am learning how to communicate with my daughter.

R: Do you want me to feed you, change you or burp you?

C: Aah!

J: You might want to stay away from multiple choice questions for now.

I wake up with a start, and shake Jeremy. “What’s the date?”

He blinks.

“What month is it? What month is it?”

“It’s January,” he says.

“Oh, God,” I say, dissolving into tears. “Oh God oh God oh God.”

I’d dreamed that I’d lost my short-term memory. It was November, and I’d missed the first year of Claire’s life. Worse, I realized as Jeremy wearily explained things in my dream, the condition was incurable. I was going to forget again, and he was going to have to explain again, and again and again and again.

R: My stitches itch like buggery.

J: Buggery doesn’t itch.

R: It would if we tried it now.

I made it outside! Dolores Park has never been so beautiful. Fresh air! Trees! Wow! I also saw a Jack Russell humping a terrier, from the wrong end. I was on the phone to Tina at the time.

R: He’s humping its head! Oh, I suppose they’re having oral sex.

T: What can you expect in San Francisco?

R: Even the dogs are perverts.

Later Mum was reading one of the gay papers.

M: Look at this woman! What an extraordinary dress she’s wearing!

Pause.

M: Oh, she’s a drag queen.

R: Yes, Mum.

M: I’m just an innocent English girl abroad.

R: You’re in San Francisco.

Two jokes we’ve had running. The first, from Ayun Halliday’s book The Big Rumpus, was an obstetrician describing the best possible patient – a woman with very little English, who just labored and gave birth – and the worst – “a white girl, with a birth plan and a CD of Pachelbel’s Canon.” The second was me watching the sun rise after Claire was born, feeling like the white wizard in The Two Towers: “Gandalf. Yes. That’s what they used to call me.”

Today memes converged.

R: I was Rachel the Grey. Now I’m Rachel the White.

J: Rachel the White Girl With Birth Plan and Pachelbel’s Canon.

More interesting than a really good book. Deliciouser than food. Scrummier than an entire meadow full of ponies.

Salome: What happened to you? You sap.

We have lots of parent friends who gave us uniformly excellent advice and warned us about the many potential pitfalls. I think I’d braced myself, because I didn’t ever really imagine so much simple pleasure: Claire’s first sunbath; how when she’s sleeping on top of me, if I sigh, she’ll sigh too; her addictive scent; the way food tastes even better now than it did when I was nine months pregnant and continually hungry; the fact that even though I’m sleep-deprived, I can sleep more deeply than I have in months because I’m not pregnant any more; the expression on Jeremy’s face when he looks at his daughter.

It’s been a spectacularly happy last few days.

Yatima is the Swahili word for orphan, and it seems amazing to me that anyone could leave this poor urchin to our tender mercies. But there she was in our hospital room, and no one has come to claim her yet.

Today’s big achievement: Claire’s first trip to Atlas. No poo bagels.

About ten minutes after I wrote that last entry, Jeremy and I headed off for a very late breakfast at Atlas.

“They’ll be out of blueberry bagels,” I said gloomily.

“Yes,” said Jeremy. “They’ll have nothing left but poo bagels.”

I laughed so hard, my water broke. We never made it to Atlas. Claire was born fifteen hours later, at 3.42am on Christmas Day. We’re home now, and she’s curled up in her sling as I type.

Still no baby. One study found that the average length of pregnancy in first-time, healthy white mothers is 41 weeks and one day, which would be Friday. So no reason for alarm.

Non-stress test and amniotic fluid levels today, both of which confirmed that Claire’s perfectly healthy and happy right where she is, with no intention of moving just now, cheers, thanks. The amniotic fluid test involves an ultrasound, so we got another look at her, including a lengthy inspection of her face. She has huge eyes, high cheekbones and my upturned nose, except that on her it’s so squashed it looks like a snout. To my mother’s great chagrin, I’ve taken to calling her Piglet.

She’s very active, and she mugged shamelessly for the camera, yawning and blinking and twirling her hands. As with the 20-week ultrasound, the nurse fell in love with her: “What a cute baby! She’s made my day, she has.” I bet they say that to all mothers of adorably snouted fetuses.

No baby yet. Yatima regrets any inconvenience.

In other, possibly actionable news, a friend who shall remain nameless is consulting for a company whose name may or may not include the term Best Practice. My friend extracted the marketing guy’s budget from a Word document, threw it into a spreadsheet and pointed out that 60% of his spend was deployed in areas that did not generate leads – this in spite of the fact that his sole goal is lead generation.

“What an interesting approach!” exclaimed the marketing guy. “I would never have thought of using a spreadsheet.”

For the second time, I’ve got a rejection along the lines of “We would have loved to publish your wonderful story, but unfortunately we just went broke.” This second one involved a personal phone call to let me know just how great the story was. (Great, apparently.)

Probably sounds like I’m protesting too much, but I do find this hysterically funny. Lo, I can bankrupt venerable literary journals with the power of my mighty jinx! Tremble before me!

Postscript: I called Ronnie at Writer’s Relief to let her know that I am serially ruining magazines. She said: “We’ll add it to your cover letter, it’ll go down a treat!”

Driving back from Mum’s B&B after I picked her up this morning, I was pulled over by a police car. He’d noticed I haven’t put the registration stickers on yet: embarrassing, since J’s been trying to get me to do it for weeks. Anyway, we escaped unscathed.

“Lucky,” said Mum. “Last time I was pulled over, it cost me $140.”

“You were speeding.”

“Well, this Porsche pulled up next to me at the lights. And he was, you know, revving his engine.”

“So you dragged him off.”

“I did. And the police car was hiding just over the crest of the hill, which I thought was a mean trick.”

“The guy in the Porsche must have seen you being ticketed. I bet he laughed.”

“I bet he did,” says Mum ruefully.

“Well, I hope you’ve learned your lesson, young lady.”

She makes a face. “At least I beat him out of the lights.”

Staring at my belly, I suddenly start laughing hysterically.

J: What?

R: They really will let just anyone have one, won’t they?

J: You got the license, didn’t you? I thought you got the license?

Kissinger, Cardinal Law and (I missed this on Wednesday) George Mitchell.

Please, could Poindexter be next?

Kissinger said he’d be perfectly happy to disclose the names of the evil regimes his consulting firm has helped maintain in rapacious and bloodthirsty power, but he’s afraid it wouldn’t stop there, and that he would be pressured to stop maintaining evil regimes in rapacious and bloodthirsty power at all! So he stepped down.

I have to admit, there was a kind of lunatic hilarity to it all. I figured that since the Bush administration had already come this far, we’d wake up one morning soon to discover that they were actually televising child sacrifices on the steps of the Capitol, and we’d all just sort of shrug and do that “How the hell am I going to explain this to my daughter in sixteen years’ time?” grin that we all do now…

Jeremy apparently entirely recovered, cat sleeping peacefully, ceiling patched and painted.

No sign of Claire yet, except in dreams. Emily dreamed about the Moonbase celebrating her arrival with gooey chocolate cherry cake. Salome dreamed of her at six or seven months, waving a frantic hello. They both report that she’s very beautiful, and I don’t suspect them of flattery one bit.

Well, on the bright side, the leaky kitchen ceiling has been patched, hopefully just in time for the weekend’s forecast rain.

Unfortunately Jeremy has eaten something that has greatly disagreed with him. Oh, and the cat has hairballs again.

Me? Fine, fine.

Intent on proving that she is an indispensible source of cute tricks and anecdotes, not to be replaced by any mere human child, Bebe just jumped from the new chests of drawers to the top edge of the bedroom door.

I tell you, you haven’t lived until you’ve seen your cat teetering on the top of a swinging door.