It’s a Girl

In fourth grade, I was friends with a girl named Mishna Wolff. She went on to become a fashion model, stand-up comic, screenwriter, and now memoirist. Her book about growing up in Seattle centers on a loving but depressing portrait of her dad, who wasn’t exactly adept at fulfilling such basic parenting functions as making sure his kids got enough to eat.

Frankly, I don’t understand parents who are too self-involved to remember to feed their kids. Even less do I get those body-image-obsessed moms who damage their unborn children by developing pregnancy anorexia, or pregorexia. (Yes, it’s really called that.)

What I do understand, though, are the parents who unintentionally hurt their children through some combination of fatigue and frustration. This can range from the banal (thoughtless comments made in front of perspicacious toddlers) to the tragic (parents forgetting their kids in their cars). Parenting is a 24/7 job, after all, and you can’t give 100 percent all the time.

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In all the years we’ve been dropping in on the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, we’d never noticed that one of the vendors was Delphina’s Bakery. Not until I drove past the original Delphina’s Bakery in northeast Portland a few weeks ago, in fact, was I aware that there was some other Delphine name action going on in P-town.

So last Saturday, at the market, just for the name, we bought a loaf of Delphina’s Bakery olive ciabatta. Maybe when D. is older we can take her to the actual bakery and she can try out her cutes on them in exchange for a carrot-cake cupcake. And maybe when she’s really older, she’ll look like the hubba-hubba gal on the bakery logo.

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At her two-month checkup, Delphine weighed 12 pounds, 10 ounces. The doctor said that 12 pounds is considered a magic number in pediatric circles, because at 12 pounds (or three months of age) a baby is considered big enough (or old enough) to sleep through the night.

Yeah, right. Good luck with that one, doc.

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