Hey, thanks

Thanks for all the good wishes. You guys make me so happy. Let me say again how much I appreciated the insights and advice in response to my earlier angsting about the job interview. That encouragement made me so, so much more confident than I would have been otherwise. So... I'm really in your debt.

Today's my first day on the job. My predecessor is going to show me the proverbial ropes. And then I sit down with my boss to hammer out the details of the maternity leave. (Which should maybe be called the maternity start, in my case.)

Confession of a procrastinator (and bad mommy): On Tuesday, I never went to bed. Which is to say that I stayed up all night finishing the writing sample, which had to go out yesterday. I haven't been physically capable of a true all-nighter since the middle of graduate school, and that's been just fine, as I'm not proud of having to pull them. But insomnia comes easily these days, so I just sat and wrote and wrote until the paper was finished at 6 a.m. (It was an adapted version of a recent conference paper, so it's not like I was starting from scratch.) Luckily, I had Adam to proofread my work in the morning. After dozing from 6-8 a.m., I got up, fiddled with the writing until noon, and sent it off.

The minute I hit "send," total fatigue set in, and I was mentally impaired for the rest of the day. But also unable to sleep. (And, no, I hadn't drunk any coffee or caffeine.) Adam and I made the loooong drive to Babies R Us, which is a bizarre place to be when you're coming down from an adrenaline rush, let me tell you. Picked up a car seat, crib mattress, breast pump, and diaper-changing pad, so now we're pretty much all set. And then—baby-centric day that it was—we had to go to our final childbirth class, which was allegedly dedicated to "infant care," but which instead focused on all the ways that we could count on our lives (and careers, and bodies, and general quality of life) to SUCK once the kid is here. Seems to me that this is the class they should have offered to us before we ever had sex. Exhaustion can make everything seem either funny or especially dire. By the time the instructor told us that nursing mothers should expect our brains to go to mush for at least eight weeks, I was tipping toward the latter, and it was all I could do not to burst into tears. (Somebody please confirm for me that the whole "milk brain"/oxytocin thing is a vicious, vile lie.) Fortunately, we spent the last 30 minutes of class learning to hold and swaddle little rubber dolls. And the sight of Adam awkwardly cuddling his squidgy little infant made the whole evening okay again.

As did the prospect of sleep.