Naps are impossible the last two days. There are more important things to do, like talk. Everything must be discussed in detail. His dissertations are on subjects ranging from faces to toys, from loneliness to overcrowding. When he is not emphatically babbling in his own little language, he is gnawing hell out of his fists.

The other night, he put himself to sleep in his crib for the first time. I laid him there awake and he managed to wriggle out of his wrappings and gnaw himself to dreaming. It was a big moment.

There are new words every day.