6: July 19-25, 2021

At the start of the week, Naomi turned six weeks old. This feels like a very monumental age. We spent the beginning of the week at my parents house in Ferndale, where she is very doted on. On Thursday, we drove to Nordhouse Dunes Wilderness Area on the shore of Lake Michigan for three nights of tent camping. It was beautiful and restoring - and exhausting, as Naomi's desire to sleep in the tent declined steadily from one night to the next. One night she had a poop in her diaper that snuck out and coated the back of her nightie, and while we were changing her in the dim light of a headlamp she peed all over the floor of the tent while a daddy long-legs stalked silently past. During the day we sat in the white pine-hemlock-fern-moss forest or down on the white sands beach. We dipped Naomi's toes in the lake. I nursed her sitting on my sleeping mat in the tent; on the bench of the picnic table under a big hemlock; sitting on a blanket on the beach. She spends a lot of time awake and alert now, loves sucking on her hand, and is beginning to drool quite profusely and impressively. I read her the book "Look Look" with its black and white images and she's really into it.

"Between the tears and the cooing and his crazy drunken-old-man smiles, it's almost unbearable. There's so much joy and pain and love and wonder in my chest and behind my eyes..." - Anne Lamott, on her two-month-old baby

• Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close, by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman (3.5) 
• Really enjoyed. It's a memoir/personal history of the two authors' friendship as well as a somewhat scholarly exploration of long-term friendship (especially between women, although not explicitly so) that gives big platonic friendships the respect they're due.
• Snow, by John Banville (2)
• Sort of a literary detective novel. Banville has won a Man Booker, but I didn't like it too much. He does the sexist man writing thing where he was always describing female's characters in ways that were unnecessarily sexualized or unnecessarily critical, but never doing that for male characters. The book was pretty grim. But it did hold my interest. Some of the writing I liked.  
• Champagne Baby: How One Parisian Learned to Love Wine - and Life - the American Way, by Laure Dugas (3)
• Stupid title notwithstanding, this was actually kind of fun. It's kind of a travel memoir and kind of a beginner's introduction to understanding and loving wine. I learned a lot of things and kind of want to become a wine connoisseur now.  
• Operating Instructions: A Journal of my Son's First Year, by Anne Lamott (3.5)
• Really really loved this book, especially so because I have, famously, a tiny baby of my own. Lamott is very funny and very wise even though she is a religious person. 

Favorites of the week: