Easy baby

It is such a joy to have a predictable baby who sleeps 10 hours a night, waking up just once or twice to feed and then go right back to sleep. If 2026 was filled with challenges, those challenges would have been much worse had Baby Girl Yan been colicky, overly fussy, or the worst, not letting us sleep. Getting a full night's sleep has been the key to letting me lead a relatively normal life. Yes I carry her around a lot, I have a lot less free time, I'm always "on call," but I have to count my blessings where I have them, and that other reality of having a difficult baby would have been so difficult, and I feel for the families who do have those difficult babies and wish things get better for them. Speaking of counting blessings, I changed my Costco routine this week to go on Monday night, and bumped into our fertility doctor (who performed IVF). I guess I have a good skill for faces, out of a warehouse full of faces I still picked out the doctor who helped us even have baby girl, and also who was very approachable and made the difficult process a little easier. I normally would have just let it go and made excuses why not to approach her, but knowing that the doctor was moving away forever out of state and this would probably be the last time we saw each other, I stopped and introduced myself (I'm sure she gets stopped by patients all the time and can't remember everyone, whereas she's very memorable to us because she's our doctor), thanked her for her help, and showed her pictures of the baby, a miracle baby. It was only like a minute or 2, but this interaction made my day, where normal days for me are just sitting at home watching the baby and reading emails and documents, spending time alone, finally interacting with a real person was a treat, much less someone I actually wanted to talk to, a chance encounter where both parties know we won't be seeing each other again, but it's important to create that memory and create that bookmark in the story of our lives. I'm really glad I took a chance at talking and not shying away like I normally do. I feel like as the 21st century rolls along that's going to be a skill that gets rusty and that people actually will value as something from a past generation that we wish we did more of: interacting in person. On the flip side of that hugely positive interaction, I also had a bad taste in my mouth after giving money to a squeegee boy on the way to Costco. I didn't want to give money, I didn't need my window cleaned, but I just ended up stuck at an intersection on the left hand side closest to the guy and he just started squeegeeing without me asking. Usually these dudes get upset if I don't give them anything, so I reluctantly got out my wallet and reached for a dollar while rolling down the window. The single dollar bill I had was rolled up along with some twenties, and the squeegee guy had the audacity to look into my car and ask for the $20 bill, pleading like "please please that'll make my whole night." I just laughed and drove away, but shortly afterwards I reflected that it was a dangerous situation: what if he had reached in and grabbed the wallet and taken off with it? Or worse, had a weapon and robbed me of the money? Just the way the guy asked made me think he'd asked many times before for extra cash just for five seconds of scrubbing someone's window and made me realized I'd given money to the wrong person. I don't want to help people like that. So yes, I'm all for more personal interactions, but not when it involves me handing money away or possibly exposing my wallet to someone who desperately needs money. It also makes me wonder about the nature of humans, how on one spectrum we have the fertility doctor who helps people bring more lives into this world, versus the desperate man trying any way he can just to get more money. What are human beings really?