Late night reading

Emmett is a sleepy baby much of the day, but there is something about the 10-11pm feeding that wakes him right up. Andrea and I have gotten into a little pattern where she feeds then I hang out to wide-awake Emmett for an hour or two until he is ready to sleep, we go to bed, then Andrea gets up with him to feed when he wakes again. Emmett's and my awake time has been filled with reading quite a bit, and I am learning that there are some things that are much easier to read out loud than others. I have read him a few articles from the newspaper, mainly concerning deciding the Democratic nominee for president (Emmett feels like this has taken up most of his life and he is ready to be settled on a candidate), and these have worked out OK. He and I have recently finished the first book in the "Series of Unfortunate Events" collection. We chose this book as the Magnetic Fields were the last concert Emmett heard but didn't see due to complete obstruction by uterine wall and Lemony Snickett appeared as special guest in the form of Daniel Handler. This was very easy to read out loud (one might even say designed to be so), so although we didn't love the book we might give the later books a try.

One miserable failure was the Jon Anderson's biography of Che. Much of this was my fault as I was 550 pages in when I started with Emmett: the motorcycle trip through S. America had taken place, Cuba had been overthrown, and the Bay of Pigs and missile crisis had already taken place, so Emmett did not really get what really drove Che's desire to spread revolution throughout both S. America and the Congo. The other thing was that it really was not easy to read out loud with the names of places, people and events that did not roll off the tongue as easily as "Count Olaf," "Justice Strauss," or "Violet Baudelaire" from Lemony Snicket. We tried as best we could, though, but Che's story went back to the library this weekend after three renewals and a few overdue days unfinished. There is some kind of lesson in this, but I can't seem to put it into words.