Baby Season by the Numbers
Here on the 8th floor of CPMC, we are unwrapping Christmas presents from 2022. It’s a bumper crop they say — 54 of us tonight — evidently enjoying the 9 month hangover from New Year’s, or in our case, just long holiday nights at home.
Charlotte arrived Friday night, 6.3lbs, with a big set of lungs and her mothers perfect upturned nose. A ski jump, suitably made on the slopes of Sun Valley, using things we presumably had on hand!
“I just want to get this parasite, that’s 50% you, out of me” Kelsey declared on our way to the hospital.
She’s joined by her older sisters Arabie (13), and India (9), who keep time on holding her. Gabe Rosen and Karen Loane taking their roles of godparents very seriously (but we did find out about the stop at McDonald’s after the airport run).
The 50–60 newborns in our CPMC cohort, in a new $2b building with 500 private rooms attended by almost as many physicians, offers an alternative view to the so-called decline of San Francisco.
Kelsey and Charlotte are healthy and strong. Hard to deny that birth is the most quintessential of all human experiences. Naming a child, watching it take consciousness, is a homelab for seeing how life moves from the formless to form — and back again. The gaze shared between nursing baby and mom a kind of non-duality that has no number.
