Babywell in Berkeley

 I should be sleeping, but I'm up late lesson planning for the week and my head is spinning. I love watching baby while he's sleeping, he looks so calm, and wise. Sometimes he even does a little smile like he's dreaming. Sometimes he furrows his little brows like he is deep in thought.  Sometimes he pouts his little mouth. I never knew how much there was to know about babies and sleep until after we had a newborn in our arms and he was both always sleeping and somehow never sleeping at the same time. At around 2 months, in a casual middle of the night complaining to a parent friend with a child slightly older than Cal she told me that babies had wake windows and should be put down when we notice sleepy cues.  She sent me a little chart from instagram and I tried it.  Baby started rubbing his eyes, and his eyebrows turned red.  I put him down and like magic, he fell asleep.   After that, I read about sleep hygiene, and wake windows, and eat/play/sleep, ...

 And suddenly, baby is 6 months! Every day I am with my students who are 6 years old, and I thought about how 6 is just twelve of these half  years. I guess there will not be a point when it becomes less striking how incredibly fast babies change and grow.  I think about how not that long ago, as an adult, my sister was just a second grader and how here I am, wearing the same pair of sweatpants from high school and my sister is not barely an adult but halfway through with her 20s.  My other younger sister, approaching 30 really soon. It also made me realize that I am the same age as my dad when he moved his whole family to the US for a new life. I get it now more than I did before.  36 is not old, but it's not young. There's a chapter in Ramona the Pest, which I read every year, where the kindergarteners' teacher who's so young she probably hadn't been teaching very long, was sick and there was a substitute teacher.  The sub was older, like a mom.  Whe...