The Kitchen's Open

I once thought I could understand my daughter's eating schedule. For a while, it was every two hours, then every two and a half, then we tried Enfamil (or "liquid sleep," as my husband calls it), and it became every three or four. Then she clicked over the six-week milestone and it became "whenever the baby damn well wants to eat."

I try to be cool about it. Today baby and I went to visit my friend J. and her son, who is three weeks younger than my little angel. J. runs marathons, so she was eager to start walking again at roughly a month after giving birth to a seven-pounder. I gamely accepted, even though on my best days I couldn't have kept up with her nine months' pregnant. Thank goodness she hasn't been cleared for heavy exercise yet. So we got to the mile-and-a-half mark on the trail and turned around, chatting happily about new-mommy topics, when the little angel decided she was hungry, even though she just ate Liquid Sleep two hours before. She started whimpering, which I tried to disguise by throwing shut the extra canopy on her stroller. The noise grew, could not be contained. Soon she was hitting her Whitney Houston octaves. She. Was. Hungry. Now. Screaming with hunger, in fact. A passerby on a golf cart gave us a sidelong view, obviously convinced I was sticking my baby with pins under the cover of a jogging stroller. J. was understanding, but probably concerned the pins might reach over to her stroller and stick her son, too. Can a baby scream for a mile and a half?

Yes, she can.